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Dividend Announcement Invalid, in my opinion.
Here's my take on it.
I think the confusion here comes from unintentionally taking things out of context.
Lawyers often write things in very confusing language. (The more confusing, the more chance for additional billable hours down the road!)
They often write stuff that must be taken in its entirety, which is not always easy because a "whereas" from page 4 might apply to something on page 7.
-In this case, the law is talking about how to give notice for three different possible actions:
1) dividends or distributions
2) splits or reverse splits
3) rights or other subscription offerings
Let's shorten those to dividends, splits, and offerings.
The law is not saying that all three are the same or are treated the same. A dividend is not an offering. A split is not an offering.
Some of the paragraphs do not apply to all three actions, others do. And other paragraphs specifically delineate that things are different for 1, 2, or 3.
Consider a different example that might help explain.
If I say, "the following law applies to these actions:"
1) walking
2) running
3) sleeping
And then the law goes on to say, "the above actions must be done while wearing shoes, or in the case of sleeping, while lying on a bed."
That sentence is a somewhat confusing way of saying that you must wear shoes while doing 1 and 2, but must be lying on a bed while doing 3. It does not mean that walking must be done while lying on a bed, or that you must wear shoes to bed. Nor does it mean that you will be following the law if you sleep on the ground while wearing shoes. It's saying that the rules are totally different for number 3.
-That's sort of how this record date law is written. If you re-read the entire law from start to finish in that light, I think it will make sense.
The part of the paragraph you're focusing on singles out offerings as being handled differently from dividends and splits. "10 days prior to the record date" is what applies to dividends and splits; the exception applies only to offerings. That part does not apply to Grifco because Grifco is doing a dividend, not an offering.
Read it all in context and take particular note of this paragraph:
"iv. Date of payment or distribution or, in the case of a stock or reverse split or rights or other subscription offering, the date of delivery"
That paragraph clearly applies to all three actions and is not optional for any of the actions. "Date of payment or distribution" applies to action 1 (dividends), "date of delivery" applies to 2 and 3 (splits and offerings).
http://www.law.uc.edu/CCL/34ActRls/rule10b-17.html
-The bottom line, as I read it, is that if you're doing a dividend or distribution, you must announce the payment date 10 days before the record date.
Grifco has never announced a payment date . . . . . and the record date has long passed.
-And on a separate note, since this would probably be considered a 25% or greater dividend or distribution by the NASD, the rule is that the ex-div date is the day after the payment date. But since at this time there is no payment date, then there probably is no ex-div date, regardless of what the company says. Because again, the NASD determines ex-div dates. Company press releases do not.
A dividend announcement without a payment date is not a dividend announcement.
It's basically . . . nothing.
It's a press release that makes it seem like something has occurred, but in reality nothing has.
It does, however, stir up a lot of excitement and make the price go up for a short period of time.
Resources: The Land Grabs Continue.
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/060515/0129197.html
Was The Dividend Announcement Valid?
My guess would be no. Why? A payment date was never given (might also be called the distribution date or delivery date). This is one of the requirements of a dividend announcement. (The record date is not the same as the payment date.)
It's kind of like if I say I'll buy your house for $1 million, but don't say on what date I'll deliver the money. Is that a contract at all? There's no meeting of the minds as to when it's going to take place. Maybe I meant 50 years from now.
Also, the company is making it sound like the record date is the ex-dividend date. It is not.
A company never determines the ex-div date. The NASD always determines the ex-div date. They have clear rules. The record date is never the ex-div date.
My guess is the company knows all of this full well, but will later claim to have been confused. More delay time will then be needed to "straighten things out."
OT - 10bag
No, no, not meant in any way to be a personal attack at you or anyone else, except the original splicer. No charges were made against you, so you cannot be guilty as charged. Apologies if it seemed otherwise.
I'm sure I've copied and pasted things that weren't correct too.
But it just serves as a good example as to why we should always try to verify things at the source to be sure of what was said. I'm always a little leery whenever I see a story where someone is summarizing what someone else supposedly said. If a splicer says so-and-so allegedly said such-and-such in Forbes, then why didn't the splicer provide a link to the original source document?
Sort of like when someone says, "Every scientist agrees . . ." Oh really? What's your source for that? Often times it's just somebody pushing their own agenda, usually to make money.
Anyway, enough said. Back to stock talk.
OT - Buffett Article Misleading and Misquotes
This is nothing against 10bag or anyone else who may have ever copied and pasted the Buffett article, as I've seen it numerous places recently. But I do object to the originator of this spliced article, whoever that was. We should always be after the truth. Somebody spliced a few things and changed a few words which drastically altered what Buffett said. They make it sounds like Buffett would be investing in tiny, pink sheet companies.
Buffett made no mention of the pink sheets or what size market cap he's talking about in the Business Week piece. Here is the entirety of his quote regarding small companies in the BW piece:
------
"If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I'd be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that."
"The universe I can't play in [i.e., small companies] has become more attractive than the universe I can play in [that of large companies]. I have to look for elephants. It may be that the elephants are not as attractive as the mosquitoes. But that is the universe I must live in."
http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_27/b3636006.htm
-------
"Small companies" is all he says. No mention of what size market cap he means by that ($2B may be small to him), or pink sheets or bb stocks.
All of that stuff comes from a Morningstar article:
http://morningstar.scotiabank.com/globalhome/industry/news.asp?articleid=MStarUS31390_2005-04-13_08-...
I don't know if Buffett dabbles in the pink sheets as the morningstar author stated, but if he does, it's probably to buy larger foreign companies that don't want to pay big US listing fees and go through the hassle of US accounting rules in addition to the ones in their own country. (I think guys like Nestle, Toyota, etc, were once on the pinks and may still be.) Otherwise the article would contradict itself. It would essentially be saying Buffett can't invest in smaller companies because of his size, yet he's buying smaller companies on the pink sheets.
An example of how one word can have a huge change. Whoever spliced together this internet piece changed the word "my" to "his." Namely, the morningstar author references another piece on the pink sheets by another morningstar author,
"as my colleague Curt Morrison pointed out in a recent article"
but the internet spliced bulletin board article makes it sounds like Morrison is a colleague of Buffett's:
-------
(talking about Buffett)
"His message to small investors is direct:
If you want to achieve "truly market-crushing returns": Concentrate your research on the universe of small-capitalization stocks. As his colleague Curt Morrison pointed out in a recent article, illiquid stocks have outperformed liquid stocks by 2.1% annually over the past 40 years. That is one hugely compounding advantage to have that can accelerate turning thousands into Millions. These results, of course, make perfect sense. For various reasons, large investors cannot invest in small, illiquid stocks, and with fewer smart people looking at a stock, there is a greater chance of (discounted) mispricings. He continued: "In my experience, the smallest and most illiquid stocks tend to trade on the pink sheets". It may surprise you, then, that Warren Buffett has been known to shop in the pink sheets.
---------
So what we have here is a complete twisting of something Buffett never said in the first place. It was Morningstar guys who made mention of the pink sheet stuff and then somebody twisted those words even further to make it sound like Buffett and his colleague are talking about tiny pink sheet stocks.
This really looks like it was spliced together by someone with an agenda.
I'm not making a statement for or against the validity of microcap pink sheet stocks. I obviously happen to believe in microcaps. I'm simply pointing out that Buffett didn't say that stuff and I hate to see someone's good name used to further another person's agenda.
CKEI is not profitable and the poster is a spammer
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045151/000114420406005546/v035473_10qsb.htm
I like the deal. Adds a lot of additional upside if things get up to that price level. That's obviously where Randy thinks things are going. But the biggest thing about Randy is he doesn't dilute. He doesn't hype so he can sell out and then buy back in the next PP, simply churning the shareholders as so many of these guys do. He tries to find a mine.
Puplava alone should keep it from cratering in all but the worst of markets. They continue to prove up stuff.
OT - Interactive Brokers Question
To any of you who have opened an account with Interactive Brokers, did I hear at one point that they will not let you buy Canadian warrants? Any limitations there, or am I just remembering things incorrectly? Seems like I remember something about IB and warrants. Any comments appreciated.
Matt, request: auto-save feature for writing posts
I have no idea how tough it is to implement, but it sure would be nice if there were an auto-save feature like in gmail, where every minute the text you are typing automatically gets saved under "Drafts."
On ihub, if my machine crashes, or ihub crashes, or power goes out, or ihub loses the post, etc., the post would be saved for me and I wouldn't have to spend 20 minutes typing it all again.
On several occasions I've typed a long post only to have it all get wiped out. I never have to worry about that in gmail with the autosave feature.
On ihub, once the post actually makes it on the board, the saved "draft" of the post could be automatically deleted by ihub.
Sexton, for what it's worth, here's my two cents. I use firefox sometimes, but they way they use rss really doesn't give you the full depth of how valuable rss can be to you.
You might give bloglines a try. Disregard the name. RSS kind of developed amongst blog writers and that's why it's called Bloglines. But you can use it on anything that has a feed. You can set it so that only new items show up. That's one of the main benefits of RSS in the first place -- you don't have to go around checking everyplace for new content, you simply get notified whenever there is new content. Saves you all the hassle of checking everything and having to read the headlines and say, "have I already read this story?" If no new content, you don't waste time checking.
They also have keyboard shortcuts so you can zip through stuff really quickly.
SFNL - Littlejohn, not quite sure what you mean. I thought I explained my line of reasoning pretty clearly in my two posts:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=9695183
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=9712090
If something I wrote was unclear to you, I'd be happy to try and explain it further, but I thought those posts were pretty clear.
RGMI - "working on contracts with an estimated gross value in excess of $30 million." The phrase "gross value" seems a little peculiar. Could just be a typo. But the word gross seems unnecessary. During the tech bubble, a lot of websites that sold things like airline tickets were claiming "gross revenues" on the entire amount of the ticket sold, rather than just the amount they received as commissions which were the only real, true revenues. They referred to those as "net revenues".
I wonder if there is a "net value" to the contracts, or if it's just someone's goofy wording.
ISSG - Yeah, the related party stuff is what kept me from buying this. Related party transactions always spook me. Been burned too many times by them.
One is supposed to be negotiating the best deal possible for the company. Pretty tough to do that when negotiating with one's self. The better the deal gets for the company, the worse it is for yourself.
What post is that?
And by the way, there's no need for you to tell me to do anything. You're free to act however you like. But it's not appropriate to tell others what to do.
Not so. The price will simply go down as the number of sellers increases and/or the number of buyers decreases.
And keep in mind that the company basically had a free ride for the first year because of the supposed imminent financials. There was no reason for a long-term investor to sell. Just the contrary. The story only sounded better and better, and once financials came then the company would receive its true valuation from the market. All the more reason to buy. If they believe the story, most people will never sell. They'll hold it to zero. In that case, it's still the promoters doing the majority of selling, and the price simply goes down because there are less and less buyers competing on the bid.
No, it can't go on forever. But if it's a scam, it's already gone on for a year.
Think of the economics of a scam as being sort of like an oil well. In year one it produces about as much as it's going to, and after that it goes into decline until it eventually stops producing.
As time goes buy, even if the shares go to 5 cents it's still good money for all the shares you can sell.
The point is that there's a lot of money to be made in running a pink sheet scam.
The Total Take?
If Grifco is a scam, do some quick back-of-the-envelope math and one can see that there's plenty money in this sort of thing.
Grifco's average volume according to yahoo is over 500k shares a day. Let's be conservative and use only Grifco's lowest share price of around .20 per share. Let's assume that 300K of those shares are scammers selling worthless shares to the public and the other 200K in volume is old shareholders selling because they're getting tired of the story.
300,000 X .20 =$60,000 per day, times roughly 250 trading days for a grand total of $15 million per year.
Then consider that the average price has been far above .20 (probably closer to .40) and it's already been going on for over a year.
And now they're starting again with another company.
If you're just printing up shares, all you really need is volume because your cost of the shares is zero. Share price isn't really that important. You can build a nice little illegitimate fortune, 20 cents at a time. Or even 10 cents at a time. Or 5 cents at a time. Who cares?
PR's about acquisitions, new product announcements, mergers, spinoffs, alleged revenue, etc. create buying excitement and thus, volume.
And because it's just a little pink sheet penny stock, nobody will think there's any money in it.
Dr. Bill,
You mentioned:
"there are two issues, one being that the SEC won't go after anyone that didn't file something omissive, or commissive in their 10 filings."
As far as I know, that's incorrect. The SEC can, does (occasionally), and should (more often) go after people who are committing fraud in connection with the purchase and sale of securities. I don't know of any limitations like you're suggesting. Do you have a link you could provide?
Here's one of a recent case where they went after people:
http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr19085.htm
I'm guessing there are many others over the years.
And my understanding (which I'm almost certain of) is the safe harbor / forward-looking statement does not protect someone if they are committing fraud. The SEC can go after fraudsters, regardless of any disclaimer. False and misleading statements are not allowed under any circumstances. The safe harbor thing is generally to protect legitimate executives who are giving legitimate forecasts.
Let's say my company owns 8 oil wells and I tell everyone we expect earnings to be .20 per share. But then a couple wells have equipment breakdown, some others get vandalized and the rest go into an unexpected steep decline. Earnings only come in at .01
In a case like that, unless I was really negligent and did something to cause the problems, the safe harbor protects me. And should. Business is risky; unexpected things occur.
But now a different example. If I claim 8 oil wells and forecast .20 per share, and it turns out I never owned any oil wells in the first place, then safe harbor doesn't protect me in the least. Nor should it. It was total fraud. The same would be true if I owned the 8 wells but they've only pumped 2 barrels a day for the last 5 years and I knew there's no way that could result in .20 earnings.
The SEC would have every right to sue me for fraud. There's a big difference between an honest attempt to forecast . . . . and fraud.
And on the fraud issue I still don't understand 10bag's comments. The SEC brings fraud suits all the time. I don't understand the idea of having to "turn it over to justice."
Where are you getting that info?
[By the way, none of my comments on this have been directed at grifco, just a discussion of the sec's role in general]
Zen, I don't know for sure, but I believe 10bag has it right.
The trade would probably show up in the Canadian volume if the American broker was buying from the Canadian broker in order to deliver to an American customer. But the transaction may occur with another American shareholder or if the broker himself holds some inventory of those shares and sells to you out of his inventory, then I don't think that would show up in the Canadian volume.
In fact, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I can remember an occasion or two where I bought 10,000 shares of a low-volume Canadian stock (via the pink sheet symbol), and yet the Canadian exchange showed volume that day of only 3,500 shares or something like that.
10bag, could you clarify what you meant by this,
"The SEC may NOT suspend any security for the infraction of it's rules and lieing in press releases or putting out phoney press releases because they do not fall under the rules of the SEC.. those are legal maters for the courts"
I don't understand that. Maybe I'm reading it out of context.
My understanding is the SEC can go after anyone who is committing fraud via publicly traded securities, whether the company has filed 10-K's and 10-Q's or not.
Yes, absolutely Bob, that's because the Canadian markets are open. I was just pointing out to the other poster that if you're trading via the pink sheet symbol then you cannot trade when the pink sheets and American brokers are closed.
Zen, there are no "Canadian pinks". The pink sheet symbol is only in America and is basically a paperwork function to be able to match up the Candadian securities on what are more or less arbitrage trades.
That is because Yahoo polls (checks for new content) only once an hour. You will not get the information instantly. RSS is a "pull" technology rather than a "push" technology (like email).
If too many people are polling a feed all at the same time, or too often, it can cause real problems for whoever is running the servers. Anything more than about once an hour is too much. The web-based centralized aggregators like yahoo, bloglines, msn, googlereader, etc, usually poll about once an hour but they also don't poll every single feed at exactly the same time, otherwise there would be this huge load coming at the top of the hour from everyone. (This is a problem with many desktop aggregators, because their default setting is to poll at the top of the hour, so sites get this big rush all at once.)
In normal web surfing, it's true that at some sites you may actually sit there and hit the refresh key every minute or two. But very, very rarely. With RSS, a machine is essentially doing that to every single site that you have as a feed, whether you ever go there or not, whether you truly need the information or not. This is needlessly wasteful. No one needs to keep pounding 50, or 100, or 200 sites checking for updates every two minutes. No one can possibly visit all those sites every two minutes. Once an hour is plenty.
Yeah, it's both bandwidth and load. But my understanding (and I'm not a techie) is that it's not what's in the feed. Nearly all feeds are small text files.
Nick Bradbury created FeedDemon. Here's a post of his that deals with how to handle things:
http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2004/09/rss_bandwidth_c.html
Marc Fletcher of Bloglines is the other guy who has written on how to handle this. This bandwidth/load issue was a real problem about two years ago. They've figured out how to handle it now. You just have to look for it.
But as an example, Leo Laporte does a weekly podcast and tried to do the feeds himself and didn't quite set things up right. AOL was hosting the audio downloads and providing all that for free. But the bandwidth cost for just his feeds, just those little text files, was like $30,000 a month.
Bandwidth. Just one more thing, Matt. Sounds like you're just getting familiar with RSS. If you're not familiar with how to set it up, I'd suggest you do a search for how to handle the bandwidth regarding RSS. If you don't set things up right on the server side, you may find yourself nailed with a huge bandwidth bill.
The centralized aggregators like yahoo and bloglines only poll your feeds once an hour. But when someone downloads a client, they might set it to check every minute. There are solutions to limit its impact. But if you don't do it, you could have a huge bandwidth bill.
TradeKing looked interesting and i liked the bit about them despising hidden fees.
Unfortunately, I went to their site and the $4.95 price is only on stocks over $2. You have to scour their site to find out that for stocks under $2, there is a charge of 1 cent per share on the entire order. So if you buy 20,000 shares of a small stock, it is ungodly expensive.
So much for no hidden fees.
Thanks for the article though. Always good to be on the lookout for someone trying to do it better.
Matt, I'm fairly familiar with RSS. Bloglines has the biggest market share by far. You need to have buttons for them. Here's how to add subscription buttons:
http://www.bloglines.com/about/subscribe
You should use one of the first two in the left hand column. Why? Because that little icon is going to be the standard from here on out:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Mozilla,_Internet_Explorer_adopt_universal_RSS_symbol
I use Bloglines. A lot. But frankly, as you have it set up now, I would not use the RSS feature on Ihub as you have it designed. In Bloglines, all that shows up are the Ihub headlines, then I have to click through to Ihub. You'd be better off sending the entire post and experimenting with ads in the feed. But even that doesn't make much sense because most people will want to read more than one message, so I'd think they'll be coming to the website. Gotta do that to post anyway.
Here's something you could offer by RSS that I think would be great. A stock price alert feature. Yes, a lot of brokerage accounts allow you to set alerts, but there's usually some sort of limit on the number of symbols. If I could read about a stock on Ihub and then create an rss alert feed right within Ihub, that would be great. Something simple like:
Enter ticker symbol:
Price rises to:
Price falls to:
Click a button and it creates a feed for whenver either of those two things occur. Use Yahoo quotes because they cover markets from all around the world. I may see a great stock, but am not interested unless it gets down to a certain price level, and that might be three months from now. It's tough to remember all your target prices on a regular watch list. Frankly, I'd rather not have to look at all the prices, but just be notified whenever one hits my price target. Then I can start paying closer attention.
Just set a feed for it and then don't have to look at it on a daily basis.
Anyway, just an idea. I have no idea how tough it would be to implement.
But you should add Bloglines to your ibox on feed readers.
Thanks indeed, Bob.
Len, gilead and wade are right. If you look at his posts Lowman does nothing but spam his one stock everywhere. The nonsense starts at post 35788 and 35789.
TSE, TSX, etc., info on Canadian Markets and Acronyms
Just wanted to clear up a little confusion, and there's plenty of reason for confusion after all the changes in acronyms over the last several years regarding the Canadian exchanges.
The TSE and the TSX are the same thing. Today, there are only two major exchanges in Canada: the TSX and the TSX Venture. They are both owned by the TSX Group (ticker symbol X on the TSX).
A little background. The exchanges used to all be by geography. There was the Toronto Exchange (TSE), Vancouver Exchange (VSE), Alberta Exchange (ASE), and Montreal Exchange. The Vancouver and Alberta generally had the biggest scams with the Vancouver leading the way.
Finally, someone figured out that scams are very destructive for everyone in the long run, and they decided to clean things up. As part of that process, the Vancouver and Alberta merged to form what was at the time called the Canadian Venture Exchange (CDNX). The Toronto exchange later bought the CDNX, and the combined entity was named the TSX Group. I guess as part of their branding, they decided to start referring to the big board as the TSX and the smaller board as the TSX Venture. In most interviews now you'll hear someone say something like "does it trade on the TSX or the Venture?"
There's also a third tier that just started awhile ago, this is called the Nex. All of these have a .H at the end of the symbol, but these are not usually stocks anyone here would dabble in.
But bottom line, the stocks whose symbols have ".TO" trade on the TSX, and the ones that have ".V" trade on the TSX Venture. (On Stockhouse, they show them as :TSX or :TSX-V)
I would also agree that things have gotten far, far better in Canada. They actually tend to read the filings and will make a company change things if something isn't right. They're not afraid to halt stocks or issue cease trading orders. I'd say the Venture is quite a bit better than OTCBB. On the BB, guys just run a scam, pump it up, the whole things collapses, buy back the float, claim to have changed businesses, and start the process again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Canada is usually much quicker to cease trading.
There can always be a scam anywhere, but Canada does just as good a job as anyone now.
TSNX, VanGO, no offense intended. But as you can imagine, because this is a popular board, we occasionally get people who stop by to pump a stock. Len, and the other moderators do their best to remove all stocks mentioned that are unprofitable, and the rest of us try to pitch in with help whenever we can. We don't catch everything. If the company mentioned is profitable, then it's fine and no one would look twice at when the alias was registered. But the board is limited to profitable stocks. The zip code changers board (listed below) is where unprofitable but promising stocks should go.
Here are the rules of the board (from the info box):
Value Microcaps is dedicated to finding profitable, low p/e, value stocks. Although our title would suggest a limit on market cap or stock price, we are primarily looking for the "Value" proposition and buy some stocks that are bigger. We avoid story stocks with no revenues or earnings. We do look for turnaround situations where companies have posted a profitable qtr and have indicated in their guidance that additional profits are imminent.
Only stocks that have posted earnings for the most recent quarter, or more earnings than losses for the previous 2, 3 or 4 quarters are appropriate stocks for this board. The word "value" implies earnings.
Also, please refrain from duplicate posting on Value Microcaps and Zip Code Changers. Determine which board is most appropriate and post only on that board.
RELATED BOARDS
Value Microcaps DD
http://investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=3266
We use this board to post semi permanent DD on our favorite stocks. You can post a shorter post on Value Microcaps but then post more detailed analysis on Value Microcaps DD and then refer anyone with interest to the longer post. Due to the smaller volume, it should be easily accessible and prevent the need for repetitive posts asking for basic info.
VM ZipCodeChangers
http://investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=3294
This is a board for stocks that aren't profitable yet or have high p/e and don't fit the Value Microcap formula. They should be stocks that have good to great potential and could potentially change your zipcode! Still a great place to discuss stocks but more open in format.
Mid Cap and Large Cap http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=4515 This board is for stocks that are larger than microcaps yet have similar value characterstics of the Value Microcap board.
Survey Board Survey Board (VMSB) http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=4121 This board is for a discussion of politics, religion and assorted other nonstock, potentially inflammatory issues.
As you post and follow the board, VanGo, please also do your best to point out when an unprofitable stock has been mentioned, to help out the moderators.
Anybody is welcome, but please keep within the rules of the board.
SFNL - Now in the everything business.
Follwing up on our discussion yesterday, Secured Financial issued a press release today that is a company trying to sound legitimate if I've ever heard one,
"Secured Financial Network Acquires Corporation with More Than $12 Million in Net Assets"
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060214/20060214005267.html?.v=1
So now they're an application services provider, and in the wound care business, and in the secure internet business.
Do a quick search and you'll find that this is nothing more than a paper swap. Another junk public company (MB Software) owns these assets (that management bought from themselves). Look at MB's filings and you can see these assets are worthless.
I no longer own a position.
GAMM - In general, the numbers of this company look pretty decent, but this is what keeps me from buying (from the 10-K):
"ECONOMIC DEPENDENCIES
Our hosting services in the Netherlands Antilles, relies on one supplier for its bandwidth provisioning. Communication facilities are limited in this area, but we feel confident that our needs will be met by this provider. The loss of this
supplier would have a materially adverse impact on our business.
Prior to August 1, 2004, we received a substantial portion of our revenues from two customers. These two customers represented 98% of our 2004 revenues and 95% of our 2003 revenues. Effective August 1, 2004, one of these licensees, which accounted for 8.3% of our revenues, ceased using our software. Management has evaluated the impact of the loss of this licensee and determined that it will not have a materially adverse impact on our financial position. The loss of the remaining licensee would jeopardize our ability to continue as a going concern."
Dependent on one supplier and one customer. That's too much risk for me. I wouldn't be willing to pay much more than where it currently is with those kinds of risks.
Also don't like that they haven't updated any news on their own site since the end of 2004:
http://www.globalentertainmentinc.com/content/news/index.htm
Majority insider ownership concerns me as well.
SFNL - I actually own a little of this, but wouldn't recommend buying it because I'm concerned it's a scam. I bought a very small amount of shares to force myself to pay attention to it back when the interview first came out. But the more I look into it, it doesn't make sense. Has lots of red flags typical of a scam.
First, flashy website with absolutely no substance and no info whatsoever:
http://www.redfinnet.com/
Lots of hype and look at how they've got all the stock tied up, almost no float:
http://wallst.net/superstock/SFNL/sfnl.html
If the company was making 20-25% every 45 days, they'd be wealthy so fast it isn't funny. Money compounds so fast at that rate, there's no reason to be public. In the filings, related parties (themselves?) are allegedly lending money to the company at a low rate, so they can then go make 25% every 45 days. Makes no sense.
"The Company issues short-term notes (average 90-days) with a specific rate of return (average 4%) to acquire funds to invest into high yield activities (e.g. Container financing/investment)."
Makes no sense. Yet with a business that good, they're willing to give away more than 5% of the company to a touter? Why? If you were really making that much money, that stock will be worth tens of millions in very short order.
Another gem from the 10-Q, filed on 11-14-05:
"The Company has filed no income tax returns since inception. Management is planning to complete these during 2004."
No tax returns is bad enough, but they can't even get the year right. That's the kind of thing you see when someone is lying and can't keep their stories straight. As an investor, I might miss those dates when reading it, but no way would I miss that if I were the one writing it, and was an honest person trying to tell my truthful story.
The auditor also looks dirty to me. Nearly every company I could find from this auditor has ended up trading for less than a penny. Funny how the auditor has such bad luck.
-No disclosure of the relationship between the two Schultzes. It looks like a father and son, with the son resigning recently.
-Ceo boasts of founding Aqua Care Systems:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AQCR.PK
-The new guy, Burg, taking over for the son, "has served as a Director of a pharmaceutical company, Xechem International, Inc. and its Xechem Nigeria, Inc. subsidiary, for the past 11 years."
Here's Xechem:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=XKEM.OB
He's also Sec., Treas., of another worthless public company:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=SCMI.PK
-Both Schultzes most recently worked at Inteletech. There's a private yahoo board about how people got scammed by this company.
Long story short, yes, it may fly on hype, but it has lots of signs typical of a scam. They could very well just be making up all of the numbers.
10M post on 3/3/06 8:35am
OT - Thanks to All, re emachines
Your comments are much appreciated. Pretty darn good board where you can get instant feedback from people in similar situations and who have similar needs.
Thanks again.
OT - Emachines Computers, Any Good?
Thinking of buying another cheapie machine just for internet stuff. Anybody have an emachine? Or heard good or bad things about emachines?
Feel free to reply by private mail, if you like.
Re: SEDAR, it's actually worse than that. It's case sensitive. In the same word some can be uppercase and some lowercase. I mean, why waste everyone's time? Or at least give us a permanent cookie, so we only have to do it once.
I already sent an email complaining. If anybody else wants to complain here's the email contact directly from their site:
sedarwebmaster@cds.ca
http://www.sedar.com/sedar/how_to_contact_sedar_en.htm
Just a total waste of time for everyone.
Len and all re: SEDAR
Is everybody being asked to enter in one of those picture code thingies when they want to look up a document on SEDAR? I hate those things and it seems like a complete waste of time because these are links, not spam.
I can't even seem to get a constant cookie. They want me to sign-in every new browser session.
Len, UTYW is not a profitable company. Please remove the referenced post.
10-Q:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1100451/000132230005000022/unity10qsb093005.htm