Is Overstock Better Or Worse After Key Resignation (OSTK)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:OSTK) has just announced that Jason Lindsey has resigned from the board of directors of Overstock.com and has resigned as the company’s president and chief operating officer effective December 31, 2007.

Chairman & CEO Patrick Byrne: "Jason co-founded the company and helped build it before retiring the first time.  When I screwed it up a couple years ago, he came out of retirement and has played a decisive role getting it back on track… He’s done a superb job. Now that it is back in a solid trailing twelve month cash-flow-positive position, he wishes to return to our previous arrangement…. he will still oversee special projects in a part-time capacity."

The good news is that Patrick Byrne recognizes the mistakes of the past.  The bad news is that Jason Lindsey was thought of as "the adult supervision" by many on Wall Street.  A value manager at the recent VALUE INVESTING CONGRESS noted how much he had accomplished there when offering her viewpoint on Overstock.com.  Patrick Byrne had also recently noted how margins had been down on discounts.

OSTK closed down almost 3% at $15.10 today in a very weak market, and the 52-week trading range is $14.05 to $39.39.  There have been very few prints after the close.  The print we saw in after-hours was higher, although this is indicated lower after the news.

Jon C. Ogg
January 2, 2008

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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.

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