The Stocktwits community has been following Martin for a while. Mostly through his antics at $KBIO.
To get fully caught up on his background the last few years, here is the Google Search and please go do some reading.
I don’t follow biotech stocks so I admit I knew nothing about his alleged fraud at Retrophin ($RTRX) now under intense FBI scrutiny.
On Stocktwits, he is mostly famous for pulling off an incredible short squeeze with $KBIO.
When these penny stock squeezes happen, our team gets buried in spam, knucklehead promotional banter, and a lot of serious discussion about what the hell is really happening with the stock. The $KBIO stream was all of that.
On Twitter, YouTube and ‘business’ television, Martin was king. He could not get enough of himself. Bloomberg TV loved him too.
On November 24th, I started sharing links from others how the FBI was likely getting involved.
On November 27th, after he had publicly declared he was locking up his shares so they could not be shorted and the stock shot to $35, a stock that had already in the last month moved from $1 to $40, back to $20…I said that $KBIO was likely done.
$KBIO done. Really. Wish I had simple synthetic way next week to pile on. Many surely have
— Howard Lindzon (@howardlindzon) Nov. 27 at 07:39 AM
As you can see, the stock is now down to $11 and halted. If the halt was lifted, the stock would likely be at $1-$5…possibly zero.
The $KBIO game is over for now.
This Friday, America got to see his face on the cover of The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The FBI had picked him up on fraud charges of $7 million. He’s out on $5 million bail (money he made from his alleged fraud) and tweeting.
Perfect.
My question is how did this putz and his relatively small fraud (this is Wall Street remember), make the cover of our national newspapers?
The BBC calls him the most hated man in America.
Here is how…
Martin got himself into a political crossfire with the loophole he found in Obamacare. A ‘real’ banker would have laid low with his cronies and parlayed that loophole into many billions. If Martin had worked at Goldman Sachs, next year we would be investing in the ‘Obamacare Drug Loophole ETF'(guaranteed cashflow to replace the guaranteed cashflow of energy MLP’s…BTW this is the highest sarcasm level EVER on this blog).
Maybe we should be thanking Martin for finding this loophole and sitting in prison for the bankers and Pharma CEO’s that would have pillaged us down the road.
Hopefully the loophole Martin found is quickly closed by someone in power.
Martin really is a putz.