Marcus Lemonis Purchases Shares Of Overstock – Insider Weekends

Key Insights:

• Marcus Lemonis, of CNBC’s small business turnaround show The Profit, recently joined the board of online retailer Overstock.com (OSTK) as a Director and purchased shares
• Overstock has had a rather fascinating history, former CEO Patrick Byrne was well known for his fights against naked short sellers in the the 2000s, and resigned from his position in 2019, following the news of his affair with a Russian agent
• Overstock has gone down many different paths in the past, such as launching its own cryptocurrency tZERO in late 2017 – leading to famous short-seller Marc Cohodes actually taking a long position in the stock

We’ve once again entered the quiet period, where insider purchases slow as quarterly results are released over the next few weeks. This often means that the top five insider purchases of the week are companies like Asana Inc. (ASAN) – which Chairman and CEO Dustin Moskovitz continues to buy via an established 10b5-1 trading plan or smaller companies that are not particularly interesting. We decided to look past the list of top five insider purchases and sales for this week and focus on a company that popped up in our daily Event Driven Monitor – Overstock.com (OSTK).

Investors familiar with Overstock.com may remember it as the “little company that could”- but was never quite able to reach the level of other online retailers like Amazon (AMZN) or Ebay (EBAY). The company’s former CEO, Patrick M. Byrne was well known for his long legal fights against naked short sellers of the stock – leading to his father, Jack Bryne (former CEO of GEICO) to step down from his position as Chairman of Overstock’s board.

Patrick Byrne is a fascinating character himself. In the 2000s he rallied against an unnamed Wall Street figure he dubbed the “Sith Lord” who he believed was trying to take down his company. Furthermore, following the advice of Warren Buffet (who Mr. Byrnes referred to as his “Omaha Rabbi”), he resigned from his position as Overstock’s CEO in August 2019. He also revealed his affair with Russian agent Maria Butina (who was then arrested and served time in prison for conspiracy before being deported back to Russia). This New York Times article does an excellent job of detailing the whole situation surrounding Mr. Byrnes and his resignation.

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