Everyone seems to assume that there is some completely linear, tried and true way to achieve success. What I know from my lifetime of watching and observing and doing various kinds of businesses is that you can only plan so much - the rest is adaptation to conditions that you cannot control.
We have NO IDEA what various battles are being fought on all sorts of fronts in order to get this transformational product out the door and achieve profitability. Or what new threats may be on the horizon, from known or unknown entities, that may be driving actions that the Street decides, in its very short-term wisdom, to find unpalatable. This is not a hamburger business!
I have gone back and looked at some old message boards for stocks that are behemoths now, back when the price was small and the outlook very uncertain. Stocks like Apple, Netflix, Priceline, Gilead Sciences... ALL of them were chock full of worry-warts, bashers, and the visionaries who knew to hold long. There were all the same worries about cash flow, dilution, quarterly earnings, whether the CEO was doing the right thing or not, crazy, stupid, etc. Iomega languished unloved for many years before they hit on the Zip Drive and the stock went bonkers for several years.
Bottom line: does the company have something that can blossom into something big? do they have sufficient patent protection for their products? do they have a sense of branding? All the other concerns will pale in comparison to the big picture, and it can take years to achieve. Who will give a rat's ass in 2016 that PLUG went again to the equity markets back in 2014 to secure financing for their expansion?
Maybe PLUG has diluted more frequently than one would like over a period of years, but that is likely to be the result of trying to deal with the unpredictable.
I wish I could just disconnect myself from watching all of this ticker porn and wake up like Rip Van Winkle in a decade and THEN look at my portfolio...
