Eric Savitz is clueless

There's a news item from today that isn't strictly baseball or politics related, but I'm going to write about it anyway because it's interesting and I have pretty broad editorial freedom.

There's a company called Microvision (ticker: MVIS) which makes, or rather is planning to make, little projectors that go into cell phones, allowing them to work like little projection TVs. Cool? Possibly, but that's neither here nor there.

What's interesting is that today someone wrote a post at finance blog aggregator SeekingAlpha which argued that (and I haven't done any fact checking here) Microvision is going to get crushed by a much bigger company (Texas Instruments) which is working on a similar product and is closer than Microvision to having it ready for mass production. Apparently a lot of people found it convincing, because the stock was down almost 12 percent today.

Despite the fact that the author, a Mr. Liam Mulcahy, disclosed at the end of the post that he worked for a hedge fund that is short (i.e. betting against) Microvision, the in-house tech blogger at Barron's, Eric Savitz, decided it was worth having a little hissyfit over.

"[Mulcahy's assertions] may well be true, but the fuzzy ID for Mulcahy - and the willingness of Seeking Alpha to post material of unclear origin - makes me a little queasy."

Anybody with an even passing familiarity with Seeking Alpha knows that the vast majority of the content there is "material of unclear origin." They'll publish just about anybody, and nobody complains until someone makes a short case convincing enough to send the stock down 12 percent.

I have no idea whether the guy is right or wrong, but this is a prime example of the business media's incredible bias against short sellers. If some guy writes something hyping the bejesus out of some crummy stock, no one cares. And if he's convincing enough to move the stock, nobody at Barron's gets all huffy about the author's murky origins. But short sellers are presumed to be so nefarious and all powerful that some shmoe at a hedge fund will probably get investigated by the SEC for market manipulation because he wrote something negative on a website... even though he disclosed his position!

What should make Eric Savitz queasy is that this no-name is providing market-moving analysis for free while Savitz gets paid by the country's most hallowed financial magazine to write blog posts that consist of mostly, and I'm not kidding here: "What's up with [Tech Stock X]? It's down a lot today and I don't see any news!"

When Savitz does track down this evildoer, maybe he can get some research tips.