Breaking: "Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car, Ending Decadelong Effort"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/apple-cancels-work-on-electric-car-shifts-team-to-generative-ai?srnd=homepage-americas

Breaking news right now. "Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car, Ending Decadelong Effort"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/apple-cancels-work-on-electric-car-shifts-team-to-generative-ai

Just checked EV share prices and they're all close to all-time lows. I know there's been talk lately of several of them shutting down. Rivian, Lucid and Fisker. Most notably Ford has slashed its EV spending. I don't own any of them.

Rare earth prices were plummeting as of a few days ago. I'm talking about RE not Lithium.

Were they able to get all the embezzled money back? That's really rare. Usually it's driven by sex, drugs or gambling. These stories are interesting.

I've noticed that no one seems to talk about that. Yes, most rare earth prices are in freefall. Do some research.

Fact: rare earth prices plummet along with EV outlook.

Times have changed. Pennyland is about dead (and IHUB is about dead). Does any broker outside the third-world allow buying troubled junk like Arrayit? None of my brokers would allow it the last I checked.

Funny. Perhaps from a Flemish grade schooler trying too hard

Could anyone compose such illiterate tripe with a straight face? "As this story unfolds, the potential for a more sustainable and technologically advanced future becomes increasingly tangible."

I'm mostly sticking around for the next SEC filing. Please Deloitte, hurry up.

"NB is down nearly 80% from its 52 week high" while most other stocks are soaring. Lately even small caps are doing better. All I see here are a handful of octogenarians trying to convince themselves that they haven't fallen for yet another penny scam.

Worse, NB is committing pennyland's worst shortcoming. It's a damn boring stock with few prospects. and no ability to attract new "players"

Are you married? Do you have kids, grandkids etc.? I'm trying to estimate your potential estate tax liability. Heck, I do a ton of work giving away my money and I'm not close to age 90 (or your silly Top 1% goal). That's what the real wealthy do. In the US, estate tax is usually one tax it's easy and legal to avoid with a bit of planning.

Losing money in penny stocks may be of some benefit, but it's not the preferred way to trim taxes. Check with a tax professional

In your "professional" career did you give all smaller and medium firms a Going Concern qualification?

Walter:. "In my professional career I put a qualification for lack of internal control in all my reports for small to medium companies."

You should THUNK about the plummeting stock price and also confine yourself to posts that are TOS-legal. Will post more later but I don't want to wake up this fairly moribund board.

Easy to see why you only have three_followers since 2011. Don't you ever offer anything of value? Three is remarkably few followers.

LOL. That's one thing in favor of an unprofitable, cash-poor operation: It's hard for an employee to steal from it. When the power company turns off the lights, even the dumbest, laziest boss starts paying attention.

Below is the relevant quoted portion. Any investment -- startup or not --, holding MY money must damn well have proper controls from Day One.

"Based on that evaluation, the CEO and the CFO have concluded that, as of the end of the period covered by this Quarterly Report, our disclosure controls and procedures were not effective due to the material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting described below."

Checked LWLG.. It's down 14% YTD and down 26% for the year. To be clear, I don't own NB, LWLG or anything like those penny stocks.

Jesus. NB is off 25% year-to-date and 75% for the past year. That's according to Finviz. That collapse is remarkable for a period where just about everything has done well.

Thanks, LCP. "Deloitte has a lengthy and scathing assessment of NB’s lack of internal controls."

So far I've only skimmed a few of the filings.

What the heck is the average age of NB investors? Like I've said, old age is killing off Pennyland.

I'm not in Illinois, but I went to college there. Did you know that handsome Charles Percy of Bell & Howell died in 2011, mostly forgotten. He was senile for years.

Pritzker is good. At least he's an Illinois governor who's not taking bribes like most in the past. He's wealthy and went to Duke and Northwestern. These are all smart people, especially Stevenson. Too bad Pritzker's so heavy.

In my grade school I gave a speech in favor of Stevenson. Most of my classmates (or their parents) liked Eisenhower. I got to give the Democratic speech mostly by default.

Remember this? Adlai Stevenson: Oct 25 1962. Everyone heard this amazing speech. All of it.

A time when you could actually get smarter by listening to some politicians. In Illinois, Adlai Stevenson for instance and Charles Percy. I'm starting to tear up.

To more genteel times.

As Everett Dirksen would have said long ago, "$30 million here and $30 million there and pretty soon you're talking about real money!"

CFO "Sue" Sachdeva, also lost her husband, a surgeon with a huge income. They're divorced. She also had several kids. Koss Corp, the employer, barely survived.

That's one of my favorite crime stories. I mention it every few years.

"Medical offices are always getting looted" Doctors take lots of long vacations, often out of the country. There was one large medical office in our city with about 12 doctors. Their "office manager" made off with more that a $ million over a few years. I guess each of the dozen docs thought someone else was watching the boring details. The practice was nearly forced into bankruptcy, uncommon for a thriving medical office.

The culprit office manager owned two Mercedes that he'd drive to work. He did end up getting prosecuted, but many are just let go.

Still the most amazing embezzlerment was by the CFO of Koss Corp. She stole everything not bolted down. An idiot CEO made it easy

"Sachdeva out of prison after serving six years for stealing $34 million from Koss Corp."

"Sujata "Sue" Sachdeva, the Mequon woman who stole $34 million from Koss Corp., is being released from prison Friday, just six years after she began serving an 11-year sentence

Sachdeva, 53, used the millions she stole to finance a lavish lifestyle that included limousine rides, fancy vacations and shopping sprees, during which she purchased expensive shoes, designer clothes, antiques and jewelry — much of which was never unpacked or worn.

Her thievery lasted a decade, and Michael Koss, the chief executive officer at the company founded by his father, was chastised by corporate governance officials for failing to spot Sachdeva's thefts."

"Koss declined comment this week about Sachdeva's impending release."

https://www.jsonline.com/story/money/business/2017/04/06/sachdeva-out-prison-after-serving-six-years-stealing-34-million-koss-corp/100129710/

Much as we follow stock scams, I always followed employee embezzlements that made our newspaper. a very few were ingenious. Medical offices are always getting looted by insiders. Part time bookkeepers often.

funny story: We had one (and just one) customer who often overpaid us. A large medical office. I wondered about their idiot accounts payable clerk and I looked into it.

Turned out the AP clerk was the doctors wife!

I never paid to have my business audited. I was the only employee (among quite a few) authorized to sign checks and I usually opened all mail, especially bank and credit card statements. We had company credit cards, always stored in MY wallet. I often answered the phone at our main office and I rarely took vacations. We were almost embezzlement proof.


BTW, traditional red flags, when the bookkeeper never takes vacations and never gets sick. .

Heck, almost no one insults Buffett, but Ponder did. Does he realized BRK employs about 390,000, people, and Buffett and Munger were paid just $100,000 a year each. What a bargain for investors like me.

"At any rate, it’s a beautiful chart." Especially when you consider BRK has about $160 billion in CASH and T-securities. Bullet proof balance sheet.

I figured there was some point I was missing so i read it 3 or 4 times. Like many CEOs I always paid myself last.

If we had no money to pay me in a slow season, I simply held my paycheck until our bookkeeper told me it would clear.

You might show the below spectacular BRK chart to Ponder. BRK is a Stock of the Year even with its "greedy" 93 year old CEO.

??? "privately owned companies often have CEOs owners taking no salary." I always took a market rate salary from the corp I owned. How would you compensate me for working ~40 years for the same company and often 6 days a week. Wife and kids liked to eat! Sometimes I took a year end bonus. Very typical for a closely held corp.

This NioCorp auditor development upped my interest in NIO's financials. I just love reading filings. Hope they're not delayed too much because of the change. Offhand, getting "fired" by BDO isn't something to be proud of. Deloitte is quite an upgrade if they go ahead and do a full audit and express a clean opinion. But Deloitte may know little about NioCorp at this early point.

----
"CENTENNIAL, Colo. (December 7, 2023) – NioCorp Developments Ltd. (“NioCorp” or the “Company“) (Nasdaq: NB; TSX: NB) is pleased to announce the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP (“Deloitte”) as the company’s new independent registered public accounting firm, effective immediately. Deloitte replaces BDO USA, P.C., WHICH ELECTED NOT TO STAND FOR RE-ELECTION at the Company’s 2023 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders as the company’s independent auditor."

https://www.accesswire.com/814217/niocorp-appoints-deloitte-touche-llp-as-its-independent-auditor

Jeesh, not even a pickleball misdemeanor this weekend. A broadly soaring stock market can be damn boring.

There's even a CNBC hit TV show devoted to bad investing. America Greed has had top ratings since around 2007. It's sure made life tougher on Ponzi scammers.

I complexly agree with your thoughts. BRK can still outperform most investments if we go into a deep bear market. Those jumbo caps still have a place. and BRK can seek out offbeat investments like those Japanese trading houses which are pretty damn big. . . .

SEC: "Outcomes of Investing in OTC Stocks"

"This paper analyzes three aspects of over-the-counter (OTC) stocks: (1) the recent trends in the OTC stock market structure and size; (2) the documented properties of OTC stocks; and (3) the differences in returns based on investor and stock characteristics. Approximately 10,000 OTC stocks were quoted at the end of 2013 through 2015, generating a total trading volume of over $200 billion per year. Dollar volume has grown substantially since 2012 and is now concentrated in the segment of the OTC market with no requirements of registration or reporting to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A synthesis of recent academic literature reveals troubling properties of OTC stocks. "

"Academic studies find that OTC stocks tend to be highly illiquid; are frequent targets of alleged market manipulation; generate negative and volatile investment returns on average; and rarely grow into a large company or transition to listing on a stock exchange. Moreover, these properties tend to worsen when the OTC company has fewer disclosure-related eligibility requirements."

"Analysis of 1.8 million trades by over 200,000 individual investors confirms that the typical OTC investment return is severely negative. Investor outcomes worsen for OTC stocks that experience a promotional campaign or have weaker disclosure-related eligibility requirements. Demographic analysis reveals that older, retired, low-income, and less educated investors experience significantly poorer outcomes in OTC stock markets. Given that retail investors are the predominant owners of OTC stocks, and the documented trend towards less transparent OTC companies, the results of this study have important implications for investor protection."

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2889360

Have you read the terrible things the SEC has said about OTC stocks? i.e. OTC Stocks are junk with poor investing outcomes.

That SEC research is somewhat old but surely still accurate.

https://www.sec.gov/files/White_OutcomesOTCinvesting.pdf

Thanks GFP, hadn't read the letter yet.

"the company hadn't made a sizable acquisition since its 2015 purchase of Precision Castparts for $37 billion."

And, the last I heard BRK believed it had overpaid for it.