Vringo Spikes After Mark Cuban Raises Stake

Shares of Vringo

spiked higher in early trading Friday after Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, raised his stake in the company. An SEC filing showed that Cuban increased his stake to 1.13 million shares from 1.03 million shares. Vringo has been a controversial stock since around March of last year. James Altucher wrote a piece for TechCrunch called

in which he argued that the patents owned by Vringo could conceivably be used to extort billions from Google. Since then, Vringo shares have more than doubled, rallying over 113% in the last year alone. Vringo would, by most people, be considered a “patent troll,” as the value of the company is based more on its potential success suing over its patent portfolio rather than its business activities. Cuban has been a vocal critic of patent trolls, alleging that the current patent system is anticompetitive and limits economic growth. Still, Cuban took a 7.4% stake in Vringo last April. Rather than as a sign of support for Vringo's activities, the position was thought to represent a hedge against the practice of patent trolling. Now that Cuban is raising his stake, perhaps there is more to the story. Shares of Vringo traded near $3.20 on Friday.