Lenny Dykstra a Stock Fraud?

Just like many of you, I was pretty shocked to first hear about Lenny Dykstra’s financial prowess in the baseball afterlife. Amongst some of his boasts, he was writing columns for Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com (usually giving advice on trading stock options), and being featured on HBO in which he said he had bought Wayne Gretzky’s house. Not too shabby. There’s no denying the guy has something good going, but just how much of it is coming from the man himself who proclaims he doesn’t like to read too much because he’s not too smart and it hurts his eyes? Turns out there might be someone pulling the strings of the Dykstra puppet behind the scenes. The following info was released by Forbes and came out in a suit by Doubledown (the people who were publishing Dykstra’s magazine that fell apart):

“At Dykstra’s insistence, Doubledown began negotiations to pay Richard Suttmeier, a stock analyst, to provide Dykstra with research assistance for the Dykstra Report and who, upon information and belief learned subsequently, provided Dykstra lists of recommended stocks daily.”

Who is Richard Suttmeier? A market strategist for financial Web site RightSide Advisors and formerly a contributor to RealMoney.com, a subscription Web site owned by TheStreet.com.
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FORBES compared Dykstra’s buy recommendations as they appeared on TheStreet.com from Apr. 1 through May 1 with those in Suttmeier’s weekly Sector Report during the same month and before. Among Dykstra’s 17 buys, 11 had appeared days earlier in Suttmeier’s newsletter.

Let’s see, if I mimicked some of the picks I found in the top holdings of an excellent mutual fund, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a great financial genius for discovering stocks, but there is still something to be said about it, especially considering how many people out there are giving bad advice. Moreover, Dykstra was a ballplayer — he had to learn about stocks from someone. Looks like he’s sifted through all the available info and found something that works, even if it means picking off someone else’s lift. I give Nails a pass on this one because what he’s doing is obviously working.