Overstock Over The Top (OSTK)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 19, 8:26AM EDT

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Overstock.com (NASDAQ:OSTK) is seeing a stock surge in its pre-market trading. The controversial online discount retailer posted a narrower than expected loss of $4.7 million on a 3% rise in revenues to $161.9 million. The loss per share was -$0.20 EPS. First Call had consensus estimates of -$0.39 EPS on revenues of $155.1 million.

On an operating cash flow basis, Overstock posted a $5.9 million positive cash flow, and that is critical since that was a Q3 number rather than just a Q4 holiday quarter. On an EBITDA basis, the company posted a positive $4.1 million.

The big upside on revenues compared to estimates combined with lower sales marketing costs (down 49%) appear to have paid off. The stock is trading up over 14% to $34.00, well above the $13.40 lows of the last year and just under the $35.96 52-week high. At the end of September, the NASDAQ short interest in Overstock was listed as 4.611 million shares, about 15.5 days to cover.

Jon C. Ogg
October 19, 2007

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.