Obviously you can't own an NBA team and gamble on basketball, but betting on the stock market is encouraged.
Mark Cuban admits he blew it with a massive purchase of some 150,000 shares of Facebook following its IPO launch last month. Now the Mavericks owner has already given up on the social media giant.
Cuban told CNBC he lost big with his failed crystal ball. "My thesis was wrong," Cuban explained during the interview (via Daily Mail). "I thought we’d get a quick bounce just with some excitement about the stock. I was wrong, and when you’re wrong you don’t wait, you just get out. I took a beating and left."
In other words, the Mavericks owner took a financial bath. Cuban purchased close to $5 million worth of Facebook stock between $33 and $31.97 per share. As of this morning, the social network stock was sitting down 18 percent since its launch at $31.26.
Cuban believes the Facebook stock flop is a direct result of too many shares being available. The social network has 421 million shares, while Linkedin for example had just 8.4 million shares when it hit the market last year. "If Facebook did the same, the stock would be at about $200 right now," Cuban declared.
All things considered, the nice thing about being a billionaire is that if you lose $200,000 on bad Facebook stock, you're not too broken up about it, at least not if you're Mark Cuban.
"It was gambling money, to be honest with you," he told CNBC. "Any time you try to time the market, you get what you deserve. Sometimes you’re right. Sometimes you’re wrong. This time I was wrong."
Watch Cuban explain his stock market woes on CNBC.
-- Follow Ben Maller on Twitter @BenMaller.
