Business & Tech

'Shark Tank's' Mark Cuban Trades Tweets With Local Stock Pro

Brandon Zimmerman of Lower Macungie has his tweets followed by billionare 'Shark Tank' star Mark Cuban.

By Tom De Martini

Brandon Zimmerman of Lower Macungie is just your normal stock options day trader, toiling in relative anonymity in front of a computer, bombarded by a barrage of numbers, charts and graphs that illustrate market swings.

That is until he became a Twitter pal with billionaire investor Mark Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks and star of ABC's hit series 'Shark Tank.'

It was a chance online meeting for Zimmerman, a married 28-year-old father of two boys, who blogs on the financial websitewww.floatingpath.com.

Zimmerman, who day trades on his own for a living, is not a fan of high-frequency computer trading, a phenomenon that he says controls between 50 and 75 percent of all stock market volume.

"I wrote a weekly article about high-frequency trading of stocks and how it happens in milli-seconds," Zimmerman said. "Every week, I write a brief sermon on what's gone wrong. A lot of times (high-frequency trading) cascades into huge errors."

Zimmerman noted that Cuban was on television talking about how he wished high-frequency computer trading of stocks would slow down and that, maybe, it should be abolished.

That gave Zimmerman a quick idea.

"I tweeted a link to an article I wrote and he re-tweeted it," Zimmerman said. "Then, he became one of my Twitter followers. He sent me a private message, sort of keep it up and good job.

"He's a smart guy. He does understand that the main idea of the stock market is to raise money for companies and about the instability that high-frequency trading causes. The markets want to trade IPO's (initial public offerings) and high-frequency trading has caused a huge drop in that," Zimmerman said. 

Cuban is one of five "sharks" on ABC's hit series "Shark Tank," where hopeful entrepreneurs pitch their products to the panel in hopes of securing an investment in their companies. Zimmerman said he has watched the show.

"It's a good show," he said. "I don't think that he's as arrogant and stand-offish as he's portrayed. He just seems like a normal guy, not that far removed."

According to Forbes.com, the 54-year-old Cuban's estimated net worth was $2.4 billion as of March, 2013.


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