Here's the comment i posted to that Scott Eden article on CCME and Glen:
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Scott, the biggest problem for many of us who invested in CCME is that we, including Glen Bradford, we're lured into the "trap" even further by the baseless and plainly false nature of so many of the shortsellers' allegations. A few dozen of these allegations were rebutted by 1) analyst Ping Luo of Global Hunter in what looked like exceptional due diligence on her part to confirm cash and extensive ad contracts and relations with bus operators; 2) shareholder and fluent Mandarin speaker WCTBills who was posting d.d. blogs before and after the concerted blog attack that started right at the time of Chinese New Years by Andrew Left, Carson Block, et al.; WCTBills exposed many lies, willfull distortions of data at Chinese websites, etc.; and by 3) other native Mandarin speakers who found other serious deceits and nonsense being perpetrated by shorts.
Had the shorts (beginning with the obsessive posters on message boards last summer) given us anything substantial at any time, many of us would not have amassed such significant positions in CCME.
What's really evident and quite disturbing here is that obviously "the fix was in," there was some insider knowledged that Deloitte was NOT going to sign off on the 10-K filing for 2010, and hedge funds began to create huge short positions via legal shorting, illegal naked shorting, and heavy put-buying. The bashers and known "hit men" bloggers (Left, Block, Hempton, Boyd et al.) all piled on but had almost nothing accurate to say about the co.
For instance, just on your explicitly mentioned point about CCME having "outsized margins," the actual fact is that their margins were slightly LOWER than the margins which FMCN has in their LCD advertising segment.
Any impartial, objective investor, looking at all the charges and counter-charges, had to realize that the shorts seemed quite truth-challenged with their many lies and omissions of truth and they simply appeared to be guilty of stock manipulation for their own shortseller gains.
Yet they somehow knew from some hedge-fund friend that Deloitte was never going to approve results and then these shorts threw up a storm of charges, hoping that something would stick. When none of it did, we longs felt even more confident in our long positions.
Let's see how that forensic audit by PwC and any 10-K filing turns out before any of us presume to have the last word on this co. or its stock.
Just saying...
