Sam Antar, formerly the CFO of Crazy Eddie, known in the New York area for over-the-top commercials that scared the hell out of kids (well, me at least), knows his way around a questionable balance sheet. For 15 years, he was the executive chef of book-cooking, ultimately taking a guilty plea to conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges. He stayed out of the clink by taking the stand on the government's side at a 1993 trial, ultimately sending his cousin, Eddie Antar to prison for seven years or so.

Crooks make the best cops, so to speak, and Antar is putting his skills to work. He's out hunting for accounting fraud and sending his analyses off to the SEC. On his blog, the former CFO laid out what he called a "bulletproof case" against Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) – a company that the SEC had been investigating since 2006. The inquiry has been reopened.

Following fourth quarter earnings that sent shares of Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) soaring, Stifel Nicolaus downgraded the stock from "hold" to "sell."

According to Briefing.com "The firm says not appropriately reflected in Friday's share price move, was the fact that the quarter benefited from a $1.8 mln gain in partner gross profit dollars relating to payments from partners who were under-billed earlier in the year and a $3.7 mln one-time benefit from a bonus reversal in the quarter as the company decided not to distribute profit sharing and senior executives were not paid bonuses."

Quarterly earnings calls are a great opportunity for investors to hear directly from the companies they've invested in and to get clarity from management when they answer questions posed by analysts. I listen to hundreds of calls every quarter, and I'm constantly surprised (and sometimes confused!) by the responses offered by management. This is the first in a series of occasional posts on some memorable quarterly earnings call moments.

Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK). Chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne never ceases to . . . amaze me. While I sometimes come away from their quarterly call more perplexed than ever, Byrne's responses to questions certainly stand out. Here are some of the more memorable comments from their latest quarterly call, held on October 24, 2008.

While commenting on accounting errors that resulted in a financial restatement, Patrick Byrne explained it this way:

"We had been managing to a yardstick that turned out to have a bit of rubber in it at the end of the quarter."

Well, that certainly clarifies things!

Moving on to a conversation on EBITDA and Cap Ex, we hear that OSTK is:

". . . like the proverbial boa constrictor digesting a baby hippo. We ate the baby hippo about three years ago -- actually right now -- and it's moved its way through the boa constrictor."

Even as the company continues to lose money hand over fist and face continued accounting woes, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) has taken the time to put together a YouTube video full of clips featuring its chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne going on various cable shows and ranting and raving about the "systemic risk" posed by naked short selling. Back in 2005, he said that "Continued abusive short-selling practices pose strong potential for a systemic Wall Street meltdown that will undermine our capital system and our economic strength."

Now, with the market in the toilet, Byrne is going around doing the "I told you so" victory lap.

Newsflash: the current mess has nothing to do with naked short selling. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, the trouble at subprime lenders and large financial institutions was predicted by short sellers. The fact that naked short selling is now in the spotlight is indicative of what I've been writing for a long time: bad companies that are losing money rapidly blame short sellers. Now that once great companies are now bad companies, they blame short sellers too!

And what did Patrick Byrne have to say about sloppy lending practices and cheap credit back at the height of the bubble? In July of 2006 he referred to subprime toilet bowl Novastar Financial as an "awesome firm."

Hey, Patrick, stick to what you do best: unrealistic and unfounded predictions of profitability and accounting scandals.

Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne is no stranger to bizarre paranoia and conspiratorial lunacy, but he actually appears to have topped himself in a YouTube interview with market pundit Don Harrold: "Everybody should go out and get sort of a two or three month supply of food and water for when there's a huge dislocation... There's nothing wrong with putting a thousand dollars worth of camping food in your basement."

Wow. And then he somehow links the whole stockpiling food thing to writing to politicians to complain about naked short selling. He then talked about Iran's plans for attacking the the east coast with nuclear weapons. Just so you don't think I'm making it up, watch the video below. He closed by saying that "Jim Cramer's a crook."

Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK)'s stock tumbled more than 41% on Friday after the company reported its second quarter earnings. But investors looking for an indication of how things are going at the Utah company got a pretty eye-opening look on the company's conference call.

Chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne's answers to questions -- and his repeated pleas to CFO David Chidester for help and Chidester's corrections to Byrne's numbers -- demonstrate a CEO who simply isn't on top of the operations of his company as he devotes countless hours to lashing out at critics and spouting conspiracy theories.

Take a look at these examples from the conference call -- quotes taken from the Seeking Alpha transcript:

Matt Schimler – Merrill Lynch: Also, what percentage then of your direct business is reselling returns?
Patrick Byrne: Got to be about a quarter of it. Isn't it Dave?
David Chidester: I don't think it's quite that high.
Byrne: What is our direct business showing up on a GAAP basis, David, as a percentage of sales?
Chidester: It's about 21%.

That's right: the chairman and CEO of a publicly-traded internet retailer doesn't know what percentage of its sales come from the direct business. Can you imagine Steve Jobs' having to ask the CFO what percentage of sales come from the iPod?

Given that Byrne is obviously not to up on the company's fundamentals, you have to wonder about whether his predictions of profitability can be trusted.

Shares of Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) are down nearly 30% after the company reported second quarter earnings. Revenue rose 27 percent to $188.8 but the company reported yet another big money-losing quarter, with $6.5 million, or 28 cents per share, flying out the door.

One way to evaluate the candor of management is to look at the company's statements in its press release announcing news -- if the company says all kinds of wonderful things about how great everything, but the stock still goes down 30%, it means that you're dealing with people who put lipstick on a pig. Here are some examples of the self-congratulatory tone of the earnings release. "For the first time in its history your business has generated four consecutive quarters of positive EBITDA and TTM operating cash flows. . . Our financial condition is sound despite a weak economy."

There's no mention of what went wrong in the press release, but obviously most people were hugely disappointed with the quarter. One problem for Overstock is that the company's sales and marketing expense ballooned 79% to $14.2 million.

You'll be happy to know that chairman and CEO Patrick Byrne continues to spout nutty conspiracy theories and post on message boards, arguing with anyone who dares criticize him.

In a recent interview with The Register, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne told (his side of) the story of Force Protection (NASDAQ: FRPT), a maker of armored vehicles for the military. To hear Byrne tell it, this is company that is keeping our troops safe but that, because of naked short selling, has been unable to raise the capital necessary to fill orders.

Force Protection was down more than 20% yesterday after the company again delayed the filing of its 10-K, citing the "scope of the work to be performed to complete its analysis and to identify the material weaknesses in the Company's internal control over financial reporting, including the need to restate its financial statements." Darn those naked short sellers! Why did they mess up the company's internal controls? Oh wait. They didn't. And in the middle of this mess, the CEO resigned earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Overstock.com, the crown princess of the naked short selling victims, announced that it actually lost four cents more in 2007 than previously reported as a result of changes in its revenue recognition based on "accounting comments from the staff of the SEC."

According to an 8-K recently filed with the SEC, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne will be taking home what looks like a pretty small pay package: A bonus of $0 for his work in 2007, and a salary of $0 for 2008. He will receive a restricted stock grant of 15,000 shares, but that's pretty reasonable.

But at a cost of nothing, Patrick Byrne is still a very, very expensive CEO for the company's shareholders. His postings on message boards and stalking of the company's critics may be creating very serious liabilities for the company, and he and Overstock are currently the subject of an SEC investigation.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that, operationally, Overstock.com has been nothing short of an abject failure. The company has lost enormous sums of money since its inception. The company's sales growth has stopped, and as Sam Antar has written on his blog, Byrne has established a track record of failing to deliver on his projections.

So Byrne might seem like a bargain at $0 per year, but it's a bargain in the same way that buying lead-tainted toys for 50% off is. Your children's safety and the well-being of a public company are too important to cut corners. In the past couple months, Overstock has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in market value.

The cost of having Patrick Byrne as your CEO isn't $0 after all.

As Tracy Coenen discussed earlier, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK), co-founder, president and chief operating officer Jason Lindsey resigned and left the company's board of directors.

Lindsey had already retired once but came back, in CEO Patrick Byrne's own words, "when I screwed it up a couple years ago". Byrne added that "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. While Jason won't be as involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, he will still oversee special projects in a part-time capacity."

After Byrne's pat on the back and attaboys, the stock hit a new multi-year low in this morning's trading.

There are a few things to keep in mind here. As Gary Weiss wrote on his blog,

Lindsey says he is leaving because he is "ready to take a less active role in order to spend time on some outside ventures." Baloney. Note that he is leaving as director -- a position that surely requires no major heavy lifting in a board as supine as this one.

Sam Antar is also suspicious of the resignation that comes in the midst of an SEC investigation: "Was the SEC investigation of Overstock.com an undisclosed factor in Jason C. Lindsey's resignation?" Antar also discusses accounting questions surrounding Overstock.com, and comments from Mr. Lindsey on conference calls that raise questions about his involvement.

One thing's for sure: The market's reaction to Lindsey leaving doesn't suggest that traders buy Byrne's "everything is hunky dory" assertion that Lindsey left because he has restored the company to such great condition he is no longer needed in a full-time role.

As Gary Weiss discussed on his blog, Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne issued a press release last night to complain that his company was back on the REG SHO list, a list of stocks experiencing failures to deliver often indicative of naked short selling. Overstock had disappeared from the list for 6 days after 669 consecutive days on the list.

Byrne added that "Here we are on the eve of the third anniversary of Regulation SHO (January 3) and hundreds of companies continue to be manipulated -- right under the SEC's watchful eye."

Here's where it gets interesting. According to a countersuit against Overstock filed by Copper River:

When asked about the December 2003 short squeeze, Byrne replied, "when opportunities come along where we can knee the shorts in the groin, that's always good for fun and amusement."

What did Byrne mean by that? If Patrick Byrne engaged in perpetrating an artificial short squeeze to "knee the shorts in the groin", that would be manipulation!

Good news for Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) customers: The company ranked number 1 in the Online Customer Respect Study issued by the Customer Respect Group for the fourth quarter of 2007.

In a press release announcing the accomplishment, CEO Patrick Byrne said, "Our No. 1 ranking is more validation of our overwhelming focus on treating our customers respectfully and honorably. We want to offer the best deals on the web while being the easiest and safest site to use."

It's great that Overstock's customers are being treated well, but how about the company's investors? Overstock has an accumulated deficit of over $238 million -- so the company's service to its investors has been subpar at best.

But that's all OK, because Overstock has a "overwhelming focus on treating our customers respectfully and honorably." Profits be darned!

On Friday December 7th, Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne appeared on CNBC and said that the company was "having a pretty nice Christmas." But he also said that fourth quarter (Q4) GAAP net income would be between -1% and +1% of revenue due to aggressive sales promotions.

The chart at right shows how the stock has responded since that day, losing more than 25% of its value. One shudders to think what would have happened if Overstock had had a "pretty bad" Christmas.

But rather than accept responsibility for his company's inability to deliver any kind of fundamental strength to shareholders, Patrick Byrne has played the diversion card: In a rambling press release put out on Thursday morning, he complained that the company has been on the SEC's REG SHO list for 666 consecutive trading days: "Apparently, the SEC is not serious about enforcing the close out provisions of Regulation SHO or stopping 'market manipulation that is clearly violative of the federal securities laws.'"

Maybe Overstock is being manipulated by short-sellers. But instead of whining about it, Byrne should shut them up the way that good companies to: Deliver on the fundamentals. A "pretty nice Christmas" that might be break-even and sends the stock tumbling doesn't count.

Nobody likes a whiner, and Byrne's track-record of under-performance and incessant complaining gives investors little reason to be optimistic -- unless of course they're short the stock.

Monday was another ho-hum day on Wall Street. A bank announced another $10 billion in subprime writedowns, people continued to speculate about what the Fed will do, and Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne made a fool of himself.

Byrne appeared on CNBC's Closing Bell on Friday to talk about his company's holiday season. Byrne said that the company was "having a pretty nice Christmas", and that gross bookings are up about 10% so far over the prior year quarter.

However Byrne also warned that gross margins would fall due to aggressive discounting, with Q4 income of +/- 1% of sales and EBITDA of between $5 and $10 million.

In case you haven't been paying attention, Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne said on a television interview that "you might as well burn" kids who don't graduate from high school.

While I thought the reaction to his comments was overblown (A poorly worded but passionate defense of his support of school vouchers), the NAACP called on him to apologize. Of course, Byrne being Byrne, he refused.

The part that offends me is that Byrne put out a press release using the money of Overstock shareholders to defend his stupidity (the release was disseminated on Market Wire):

"Recently, video-taped comments I made in a school voucher debate setting were edited and posted online. Subsequently, some journalists erroneously claimed that I dismissed these statements as having been taken out of context. This assertion is false. In fact, my claim is far stronger: the clip is a lie, because it inverted what I actually said, which is far worse than simply being 'taken out of context'.

Not content to apologize for his comment about burning kids, Byrne is now burning Overstock's money to defend himself. Why is Byrne using shareholders' money to defend comments he made in a personal political crusade that has nothing to do with the company?

The saga continues...