RE: Martha Stewart and her Merrill Lynch Broker

From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 21:25:03 MDT

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    Olga Bourlin wrote:

    >> Stewart is facing criminal charges and looking at possible prison
    >> time for doing what any intelligent person might have done under the
    >> same circumstances (excluding her alleged obstruction of justice
    >> after the fact, which I don't condone).
    >
    > Au contraire, what Martha did was NOT intelligent.

    How can you say it is not intelligent to sell a stock when you have good
    reason to believe it is going to drop in price? If you had 4,000 shares of a
    biotech stock like ImClone, and you had good reason to believe the FDA was
    about to reject its flagship anti-cancer drug, then wouldn't you do
    everything possible to get out of the stock?

    You can say it is never intelligent to break the law, but the law itself is
    what is in dispute here.

    > Too early to tell what the judgment will be, but from what I
    > understand there is NO RECORD of Martha's instructions to her broker
    > about the stop loss PRIOR to the day in question

    Yes, order entry should be completely computerized now at Merrill. It was
    half-way computerized when I left the firm more than ten years ago. Even
    before computerization the stop-loss order would have been on record with
    the firm's office at the NYSE.

    A legitimate stop-loss order would be on the record somewhere -- not just in
    the broker's handwritten notes -- but I'm not disputing the unethical nature
    of the cover-up. I'm disputing the wisdom of the law that says she had
    something to cover up.

    > The burden of proof will be on Martha to prove that this transaction
    > was similar to her other stock transactions,

    The burden of proof is never on the accused.

    -gts



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