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World’s Largest Plasma TV: Priceless…For everything else, there’s Sharesleuth.com
By Mark Faulk
August 11, 2006


Some days you just can’t buy a break. What started out as a great week for Mark Cuban suddenly turned decidedly south on Friday, or maybe we should say that it turned north. North as in the first company that his own personal journalistic whore, Christopher Carey, profiled this past Monday on Sharesleuth.com.While shares of Xethanol (XNL-AMEX) have been falling steadily since shortly after Cuban began shorting the company on May 10, and the drop accelerated when his “journalistic newsletter” (winkwink) trashed the company this past Monday, the stock rallied on Friday, gaining over 10% for the day. At one point during the day, it traded as high $6.25 and was up over 22% on extremely high volume, before sellers and/or market makers managed to pull it back down to $5.63 on a few small trades at the end of the day.


Then, today it was reported that Cuban has so far been unsuccessful in efforts to be the first person in America to buy the world’s largest plasma TV. One astute observer compared Cuban to the spoiled Veruca Salt character in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: “I want an oompa-loompa now, daddy.”


Cuban has courted controversy as an outspoken, irrational billionaire ever since he and his partner Todd Wagner sold Broadcast.com, to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. He subsequently bought the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, was the brainchild behind a failed TV reality show called “The Benefactor” (for the 99.9% of Americans who don’t remember that little gem, it was basically a rip-off of The Apprentice, and lasted all of eight weeks), and once tried to start a hedge fund that would have bet on sporting events.


More recently, he was fined $200,000 by the NBA for screaming at referees and NBA commissioner David Stern after losing a playoff game two months ago “F*ck you! F*ck you! Your league is rigged!” Later on his blog, Cuban professed his love for cursing, when he said, in response to people who he said took offense at his cursing, “F*ck em.”


Trading stock before he releases negative reports on the company, trying to buy giant TVs before they go on sale, violating NBA regulations and using profanity to complain about losing a game…this is a person who clearly doesn’t feel that the rules that the rest of society have to abide by apply to him.


Read the rest of this commentary at:
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/Investing101/1063.html


This article is also posted on Mark Faulk’s blog at The Sanity Check, along with an excellent comment section, at:
http://www.thesanitycheck.com/Blogs/MarkFaulksBlog/tabid