Sharesleuth
Available inEnglish
URLsharesleuth.com
Launched2006[1]
Current statusActive

Sharesleuth is an investigative reporting website, created to investigate and report on instances of alleged securities fraud and corporate malfeasance.[2][3] It was founded in July 2006 by American businessman Mark Cuban and business reporter Chris Carey, formerly of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.[1]

History

Sharesleuth founder Mark Cuban

In early 2006, Carey approached Cuban with the idea of launching an investigative organization focusing on corporate fraud.[1] Cuban was receptive to the idea, and offered to finance the venture.[1] Within its first year, Sharesleuth articles on the publicly traded companies Xethanol and UTEK were followed by drops of over 35% in the stock price of each company.[1] Sharesleuth has since reported on many other companies, including Kandi Technologies[4] and Highland Mint, a firm that manufactured the coins used in the Super Bowl pre-game coin toss.[5]

As a means of funding the site, Cuban typically shorts the stocks of the article subjects prior to publication,[6] a practice which has drawn controversy.[7][8][1] He has stated that the site has published articles on "literally anything that I have shorted".[9]

In October 2008, Cuban and Carey started a companion website, BailoutSleuth, for the purpose of tracking Troubled Asset Relief Program funds and bank activity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and resulting bank bailouts.[2] Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Gary Cohn of The Baltimore Sun and Russell Carollo of the Dayton Daily News were hired in 2009–2010, the latter to handle Freedom of Information Act requests.[2] Unlike the for-profit Sharesleuth, BailoutSleuth was conceived as a nonprofit service.[2] The site is no longer online.

In mid-2010 Cuban and Carey created another nonprofit website, JunketSleuth.com, to provide access to government travel spending records.[2][10] As with Sharesleuth, Cuban provided the funding and Carey served as the investigative reporter.[10] The site has since closed.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Gray, Patricia B. (September 25, 2007). "Owner Mark Cuban Trades Stocks on Sharesleuth's Findings Before They're Published". Wired. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Brownback, Abby (2010). "Tracking the Junkets". American Journalism Review. No. June/July 2010. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  3. Sager, Mike (November 17, 2008). "Mark Cuban: What I've Learned". Esquire. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  4. Konrad, Tom (May 31, 2013). "Kandi Technologies: Weighing The Evidence". Forbes. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  5. Hannan, Caleb (February 2, 2016). "The Super Bowl Coin Toss Has a Dark Secret". Bloomberg News. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  6. Shaban, Hamza (February 5, 2014). "What Has Become of Business Journalism?". The New Yorker. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  7. Fox, Justin (May 2014). "A New Golden Age for Media?". The Atlantic. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  8. Salmon, Felix (April 25, 2012). "When is a scoop non-public information?". Reuters. Archived from the original on April 27, 2012. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  9. "CNBC Transcript: Mark Cuban Speaks with CNBC'S Scott Wapner Today". CNBC. August 13, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2018.
  10. 1 2 Bomey, Nathan (October 23, 2011). "Ann Arbor journalist launches government travel tracking website funded by Mark Cuban". The Ann Arbor News. Retrieved November 20, 2018.

Further reading

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