Bar: You raise an interesting point. I believe the maximum one can deduct on stock market losses is $3,000/year, no matter how much was lost.
That is a puny sum beside the monumental losses in Wave. An older, good friend of mine lost $60,000 in Wave and he knows he will die before he can reap the full tax loss benefit at $3K/yr.
We read sad posts of confessed losses of up to $600K and more. At $3K/year write off, that shareholder would need 200 years to be able to write it all off.
If a Wave shareholder was to have diversified,[rare!] any big gains in other stocks can be discounted against the losses in Wave. Not sure if there is a limit. Perhaps Player knows.
The saddest part is these shareholders who believed most fervently, were the ones most grievously affected financially by all the lying the leaders did about imminent success--or any success at all--it remained elusive to the end because it was all based on BS.
We have seen some of the comments from those stunned in disbelief Wave was going bankrupt, just when they thought they were on their way to unfettered wealth.
Thinking they were going to be able to retire at any moment, kept them happy on the long downhill ride with Wave over many years. The reality has hit them hard--they will work until they die, and even then, will probably die in debt.
And what about the leaders who continually promised such bright returns, making up out of whole cloth a myth of unlimited wealth--touting imaginary connections, telling the followers good things were coming soon and don't even bother listening to the lying critics who constantly were trying to bring down the stock.
What happened to those leaders? Why, mysteriously, they have gone dark and have zero interest in finding out how one family and two sets of executives hollowed out a company over two decades, taking with them nearly half a billion dollars with their invaluable help in giving their followers exactly the wrong advice every single time.
They told them how to vote for every single management proposal that favored the executives, not the shareholders. They guaranteed there would be no reverse split--we had three of them. Wave couldn't go bankrupt, because "it had no debt!" [how did that work out?]
They held SKS out as a genius--a man so illiterate, he could neither write, nor speak a coherent sentence--embarrassing both the company and himself every time he held a quarterly conference call, sent a tweet or made a post.
They applauded every single empty PR as proof positive Wave was on its way--and it was--to the bottom.
They minimized the rampant nepotism as inconsequential, when it was draining precious resources from the company straining to stay solvent. They excused sickening greed grabs like "Founders Shares" and many other grabs by the Wave executives who were reaping huge unearned 'performance' bonuses, even as Wave was foundering.
And when SKS hired a string of phony bought-and-paid-for 'analysts' who repeated SKS's constant lies of big things happening soon--why these leaders cheered those lies as though they were legitimate and the expectations realistic.
And when the reference case with the pizza chain was exposed as a fraud by a Wavoid posing as an independent evaluator of Wave's products, even the leaders knew it was a fraud and removed evidence from the boards of that.
Every single bad thing that happened to Wave along the way--and there were hundreds of bad things--were either excused, rationalized away, deemed irrelevant, ignored, or simply lied about.
Take the Safend purchase for example. Wave did not do its Due Diligence and missed the $4M owed the Israeli Govt. if Safend made money. Embarrassingly, Wave had to cancel a quarterly CC minutes before it was to begin, to restate the financials. And the auditor caught the fact Steven Sprague was being paid $70K more than his salary entitled him to.
What was the reaction from the leaders? They wanted the critics to prove it was an auditor who caught the $70K overpayment, not SKS who 'voluntarily' returned the $70K after the error was caught.
Quite the record isn't it? And now I learn the leader of the infamous Loop Group, of which I once was a member, has defined his working career on LinkedIn as:
Investor
Wave Systems Corp.
1995 – 2016 (21 years)
I wonder how his record of investing compares with most investors in Wave Systems, especially those who followed his many "tips".
Blue
