Deep Capture

> No, the Apple example is excellent. I forget what the name of the blog is but there's an investor who investigates firms for fraud, shorts their stock, then publishes his finding. It's not illegal in the slightest and is a public service. Err... If you're thinking about the handful of self-proclaimed "activist investors" who frequently end up massively short after "investigating" the stocks they abandon, please spend some time reading http://www.deepcapture.com. You'll find their names in rather dubious company -- including Madoff, incidentally -- and associated with mountains of illegal activity.

Given Patrick Byrne's history[1] with stocks, markets, regulators, etc. I am not surprised to see him involved in this kind of project. [1] http://www.deepcapture.com/

There's some very entertaining stuff at http://www.deepcapture.com/. A good place to start is http://www.deepcapture.com/the-story-of-deep-capture-by-mark-mitchell/ or http://www.deepcapture.com/category/1-the-players/ edit: changed starting suggestions because the website is confusingly laid out and some links don't seem to work.

I started reading Patrick Byrne's adventures in Naked Short Selling in the beginning but have since trailed off (this is like 10 years ago mind you). Perhaps his infamous "Miscreants Ball" diatribe kicked everything off which has been ridiculed since day one but begins to be prescient as more and more news of NSS surfaces. He now funds/participates in http://www.deepcapture.com/ which is fun reading from time to time. It's been quite a ride; I must give him kudos for his stamina but having read his speech from Pan-Mass http://www.pmc.org/articles.asp?ArticleID=110 regarding his life, one can't help but root for the guy.

Is your point that Bitcoin is an anarchist currency for buying drugs, and nothing else? That it can't possibly have value outside of online payments? "BTC" is just the unit of account powering the blockchain. You can use a blockchain to make almost any form of digitized information into a public good. Case in point: https://www.blockscan.com/asset The blockchain is the ultimate distributed database. No other distributed database works without a third party controlling and administering it. This is critically important for all kinds of financial markets, because otherwise the entity in control of the DB is able to manipulate outcomes, hide data, and play games with insider information, and yes this is really happening: http://deepcapture.com And why does a purely online-only, digital content provider need your home address to send you a video file, anyway? What about a server host? Gaming platform? The credit card paradigm is obsolete for a huge amount of premium digital content. This isn't to say the US dollar is obsolete, because you can represent dollars, or euros, or gold, whatever, as auxiliary currency units on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, although you'd still need to own BTC to send it around, for many this is BTC's primary form of inherent value. Finally, it's impossible for many people in developing nations to engage in online commerce at all, because their banking system is utter crap. Billions of people the world over are underserved by the banking system, or…

The CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, has been crusading against Naked Short Selling for most of the past decade, and with good reason. Among other socially undesirable uses, it is used by the mob to make fortunes by destroying small public companies. Everything you could possibly want to know about it here: http://www.deepcapture.com/ Regular short selling is fine, and provides information, liquidity, a mechanism to enable Put options, and a much-needed reality check to sometimes irrationally exuberant markets. The difference is that with regular short selling, the stocks you're borrowing to sell and then buy back later (hopefully at a lower price than you sold them) actually exist, and haven't also been simultaneously loaned to other short sellers. Naked Short Selling is where some nefarious market participants exploit flaws in the DTCC to short sell many times more shares than are available for loan. This creates enormous, artificial downward pressure on the stock price of the company being naked shorted, which can destroy the company and turn its stock into penny stocks, while providing immense profits for the naked short sellers. It should be illegal everywhere.

The Overstock CEO has this to comment: http://www.deepcapture.com/joe-floren-screws-the-pooch/ (tl;dr: Ha-Ha!).

Maria Bartiromo is the only other one I know. When Cramer was running a hedge fund he used to call in tips to her: http://www.deepcapture.com/jim-cramer-is-a-complicated-man/

She did NOT say her statements were not meant to be believed. That is this journalist's own sensational interpretation of the legal filing. That is all. Very important to distinguish headlines from literal quotes. You'll notice in the article that Powell is never directly quoted. DVS systems were proven to be highly erroneous in Antirim County, Michigan, where machines were observed to have a 68% error rate: https://www.deepcapture.com/2020/12/antrim-county-computer-forensic-re… Besides this fact, DVS systems are socially hackable, and highly vulnerable via the system's adjudication process that gives precinct IT admins and volunteers broad, unilateral powers over determining the intent of huge batches of votes (without bipartisan observers) with an overly simplistic drag and drop mechanism. Nevermind that their FTP server also used SolarWinds. DVS deserves every bit of criticism levied by Powell and more. Voting machines should all be banned. Especially closed source, corporate controlled voting machines. And DVS should go bankrupt.

Naked shorting is practically legal, and basically unenforced. The seller only has to claim that there was "good faith reason to believe" that shares could be reasonably acquired within the settlement period (3 days). See Goldman Sach's infamous "Easy to Borrow List"[0]. Coordinated naked shorting attacks are real and legal. Flood the market with false shares and tiny lots of low-asks. Rapidly drop the price down to capture the easy stop-losses that retail investors might set. It is fool-proof because you know those shares can be obtained at a certain price (hedge-funds and market-makers can see the stop-losses). As soon as you acquire the stop-loss shares, pull off the selling pressure and use the shares just obtained to fulfill the short-contract. There is no borrowing. [0]https://www.deepcapture.com/2015/07/goldman-sachs-internal-memo-yester…

Reminds me of Gary Weiss (a fairly prominent financial journalist / blogger) getting exposed for running sock puppet accounts on Wikipedia a few years ago. There was a ton of 'drama' in the Wiki sense of the word, with numerous bannings, several rounds at the ArbCom, corrupted admins, and then eventually Wales got involved. Jimmy Wales at the time: The evidence that Weiss has sockpuppeted all over the Internet is pretty compelling, and even the mainstream press has commented over his refusal to directly address it. Is Mantan one of those socks? We have no proof either way, but I think the evidence tends to suggest it. [...] But the issue is real. My concern is that if Mantanmoreland is really Gary Weiss, then it is only a matter of time until this is proven…either by Bagley or someone else…and we will find that we have been manipulated in a pretty sad way. [1] - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/06/wikipedia_and_overstock/?page=… [2] - http://antisocialmedia.net/the-final-word-on-gary-weiss-and-wikipedia/ [3] - http://www.deepcapture.com/wikipedias-jimbo-wales-unimpressed-by-gary-…