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Picksit, i love your optimism. But no matter how much i'd love to see it happen, i can't imagine a company with nearly no revenues rising to an eight billion dollar market cap in 2 to 3 years. The fact that we are currently valued at 150 million is entirely based on speculation that there will be some usage of paperclick and some level of "tolls" paid for use of neom's patents; but neom won't "own" the entire world of cell phone advertising, just a little piece of it. If we can just get enough people to recognize the value of neom's patents and word registry to make this a four hundred million dollar company, we will be doing great.
And though i am optimistic too, i see a lot of risks, the biggest still having to do with neom's management itself. Insiders continue to sell their stock, which they would not do if they foresaw such a meteoric rise in the near future. Our deal with cornell will be dilutive, though not to the extent that i had feared a week ago, hopefully. And no matter what anyone says i still firmly believe that a reverse split will remain in the cards unless revenues ramp up within the next twelve months. A major fortune 100 company getting involved would certainly put this fear to rest for me, especially if they took a major investment stake, since that would preclude any reverse split; but i can't count that chicken until it hatches.
As for getting relisted on the nasdaq or amex, which keeps coming up again and again, i personally don't believe getting relisted is any holy grail for us as speculative investors. I've seen many stocks get relisted, only to have their pps stabilize for good at a fairly low level (cypt being an example, now called hiv). You don't see the meteoric rises you see on the otcb on the nasdaq, simply because it is a much more controled forum for stocks. so if we want to rise by 50 to 100 times our pps, we're in the right place on the otcb. Plus, the only way we're getting on the nasdaq is through a reverse split, IMO, because of the sheer number of outstanding shares.
All that said, i do think we are witnessing an extremely rare moment; we are all in on the ground floor on something that really and truly has potential of running like crazy. It's so completely rare on the otc to find a stock like neom, that has already gone up a factor of 5 in the past year and a half. If it can do the same again over the next year and a half, we should all thank our lucky stars!
best
Joe
Redsoxfan, just to add to the posts here, I am "all in" on this one as well. At the moment i don't own any other stock. My entire IRA is in this one as well. Neom is my only stock investment. I've got more than two million shares and I am sitting on them all because I really think we've got a chance for a major move within the next couple of months. I'm trading a hundred and fifty thousand of my shares on the ups and downs, just for fun, but i'm going to hold the majority until at least a dollar (unless something funky happens). I believe we should see at least .50 on the virgin news, and if TS is right and we do get a fortune 100 company involved, we will see .65 or more. Then it will be decision time, at least for me- not because i don't see this going higher, but because i'll simply have too much cash on the line (some might say i've got too much cash on the line right now! I never really thought i'd have seven hundred thousand dollars tied up in an otcb penny stock, but there it is). Of course anything can happen with a stock like this, and I take things like insider selling and dilution very seriously (and i did sell my 150,000 trading shares as soon as the recent insider selling came out, just in case), but i feel like we've got things stacked in our favor going into this spring. If i go broke on this one, at least I took my shot with it.
And i'm also a redsoxfan. Live here in boston, actually. I just like joe dimaggio too.
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Joe
wow, was that a basher?
hah. that's fun.
Great start to the day.
If we continue to trend like this until friday and we get something- anything- positive out of the courts re-virgin, we're gonna break .50. That's my prediction. Then it's gonna be a free for all.
JP, i'm very much reminded of cypt right now. I distinctly remember the two week period where it ran from .28 to .78. Somehow, i held on, and it then ran from .78 to 1.20. Then things got crazy, and it ran from 1.2 to 1.7. I still held on. Then it dropped all the way from 1.7 to .7, and that's when i sold. So maybe i'm not that smart :)
I just want to thank everyone here for adding their points of view and all the great research. This board is hopefully going to make many of us very very rich. We are certainly taking care of the dilution issue with this rapid price rise, though i'm sure cornell and others will sell some major shares as we get higher, to generate cash. But as long as we have TS in our corner (and again, this rise has been generated by him), we're going to be in a strong position. I also see yesterdays news as extremely telling. As someone else here posted, you wouldn't be buying patents based on patents that won't hold up in court. Neom bought these new patents because their previous ones are about to be "ratified" by the virgin settlement. And they wanted to have more search capacity re paperclick. Why search capacity? Because, IMO, they are about to make a major deal with either Google or Microsoft (or yahoo, i guess) which will send this stock to the moon.
Interstingly enough, we've reached my target market cap now of around 150 million, but i ain't selling a share.
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Joe
No afterhours on otc. Every day that we have large price fluctuations or high volume we see these afterhour numbers, they are mms taking care of accounting from earlier in the day. They have no bearing on the pps.
It was interesting to me how the close price was essentially set at .28. We had a run brewing but the mms took it down to .28 in a really orderly fashion to close.
A nice run on very nice volume. IMO, entirely attributed to TS's advert yesterday. Hopefully he is correct and that news of a fortune 100 company is around the corner. He certainly seemed to believe it was so, and had some pretty detailed info about ti. If we don't get such news, however, IMO we will slide back down, as this is exactly what happened last time TS pumped us up, and then nothing happened. Not that i mind TS, i love him, he's done wonders for our stock.
However, it would be very nice for some news to hit us now while the pps is on the rise. Let's see that fortune 100 company materialize.
best
Joe
Just hit .29. Very good start to the day. The TS advert speculating that a fortune 100 company was going to get involved within three weeks is fueling this, IMO. I showed that message to a few big time super-rich friends of mine and they bought on it (and we're talking some really rich guys, in the tens of millions range, so i'm guessing a fair number of people who saw that decided to take the plunge.
I think we really could trend higher until the virgin suit or until this fortune 100 company situation happens (if it's for real. I'm praying it is, but speculation is still speculation).
I don't think a share buyback is feasible or necessary, at the moment. Getting the pps up high enough to insure less dilution is all we need. Keeping the share balance below 500 million can give us room for the pps to move, and we can stay there if the pps gets closer to a buck.
This could get very interesting. Lets hope not too many people decide to take their profits from .24 or so, when a large number bought in. I'm guessing there will be some profit taking at some point.
I'm not going anywhere with my 2 million plus shares, that's for sure. This is too entertaining.
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Joe
Wow. I took a nap and wake up to this. This should be my new method of investing, just sleep through it until the stock goes back up.
Movieguy, well said. I myself really wavered earlier today, actually wrote a couple of small sell orders then erased them before putting them through. Not because i don't know what i own; but because i am so invested in this stock, it makes a real difference in my life, in my portfolio, etc, and when the risk gets too great, i have to question the level of my holding. But i didn't sell, and i am pretty happy about it right now. Success, you were absolutely correct and i'm glad we had your posts to look at these past two days.
I think this should open up some continued upward movement through the week. I look forward to the virgin situation being completed, as that will be the major impetus to the real pps jump. That paragraph from the s4 about virgin is a really strong indicator, it seems.
Best
Joe
Success, thank you. That is helpful. I hope you are correct; I still don't see a problem with Neom explaining the cornell situation in broad terms; and certainly in the past three months since december there have been prs issued by neom, but it does sound as though the bsd/triton deal is tying their hands somewhat. I would still expect guidance that does not refer to this acquisition, but maybe that is indeed difficult for them.
Thanks, i am very happy to be corrected on this. But neom needs to do something fast or we'll be back at a dime.
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Joe
Success, whatever option prices the directors were granted these shares at, they felt it prudent to sell a portion over the past month. We know now why that is.
I personally do not find any evidence that we are in a quiet period, nor do I see any legislation that states that neom can not explain this cornell financing agreement, or issue a pr explaining forward business in general terms. They were able to speak at length at CTIA to interested parties, show off new technology, and make statements about dilution not mattering as the stock price flies to 20 dollars a share. Surely they can issue a pr explaining a 100 million dollar dilutive financing deal??
Success, could you provide a link to a definition of this sort of quiet period? I know there are federally mandated quiet periods involving IPOs but i am not aware of the rules involving acquisitions or partnerships. I don't wholly believe that neom is in a quiet period regarding all business; if there is an acquisition in the works of course they can't mention that, but i don't see any legislation that states a company can not explain a financing move that impacts the pps to this degree. I can't find any explanation of a quiet period other than that involviing an IPO. could you please provide a link? Thanks
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Joe
Cloud, this isn't overreaction or manipulation. It's simply common sense. Without guidance the cornell situation is a difficult weight for investors to bear. Neom's management has sent a signal that they don't expect earnings over the next two years; they need to offset that signal with another signal that explains this move. Otherwise it makes sense that investors will lighten their loads by a percentage of their stake, just as Chas and the other directors did over the past two months.
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Joe
That should have read Chas, not Chase.
Interesting post from pondering primate. However, if this is the reason for the cornell financing agreement, why wouldn't neom's management put out a pr explaining this fact? Why would management allow the pps to drop so much, sending investors running, increasing the likelihood of more dilution, rather than put out a pr explaining that the cornell agreement was entered into because of numerous exciting projects in the works? The quiet period argument doesn't fly; you don't have to give specifics to calm investors.
I'm really amazed and disgusted by managements lack of care for the current investors. Over the past month and a half, the directors of this company sold 7 million or so of their own shares above .22. Then they announce a dilutive agreement with cornell, watch the stock price drop dramatically, and make no move to stem the slide?
Didn't chase sell 10 percent of his holdings three weeks before this announcement? Should we have done the same? Is that what neom's silence is telling us?
I'm sorry for the negative post but i just don't see the logic of saying nothing while the stock drops at this rate.
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Joe
Movieguy, thanks for the response. Why are you so certain neom will win the virgin suit?
I agree that cornell is a necessary evil. But the 100 million dollar financing wasn't necessary, and that's what makes me wonder what's up.
I believe we have different investment goals and strategies, which is why we differ on the next point, re neom management. I want the management of the company i invest in to put the pps above all else; becuase often, moves that help the company can be devastating to the current investors. Often in penny stocks, you use the first public investors to carry you into the next stage of your business plan, but those first public investors get screwed along the way, usually through a reverse split that saves the company but kills the investors who currently hold stock. I don't want management making decisions that help the company but hurt the pps along the way. I am not here to make chas and his partners rich. I don't give a damn whether or not neom makes it if my investment doesn't make me money. I know that in part, my investing in neom when it has no revenues gives management an opportunity to make deals like this cornell one, because i (and you, and the rest of us) are the people who will buy, and have bought, those cornell shares. but i would hate to have management take the view that all that matters is the success of the company, that those of us who are here now are just a means to that end.
For me, the pps is the end, not the means.
And finally, they need to pr this deal or the pps will slide. I fully expect a pps this week.
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Joe
And to reiterate, Cornell is not a partner or an investor; they trade cash for shares, then sell those shares on the market. They are a diluting agent that neom management uses when neom needs money. They will be disposing of a couple hundred million shares of neom onto the market over the next two years, at the very least, if neom takes the money that cornell offers- and neom will take that money, because despite what the salesman in charge of the company say to investors, neom cares way more about the future and survival of the company (and their jobs) then about the current investors.
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Joe
Hey JP, glad you're back, we all need to do some serious thinking at the moment re the cornell agreement and neom's path right now. We've momentarily weathered the sell-off, but we've definitely been shown the potential volatility here, and how quickly we can drop. There are an enormous number of shares here that are held by jittery investors who bought re TS's comments, who are ready to sell at the first sign of bad news. And let's face it, the Cornell agreement was bad news, because it was a clear indication that Neom management does not expect any real revenues within the next two years, nor do they seem to have any problem with diluting the heck out of the stock to stay in business. They tried to slip this agreement out on a friday after market close, with no pr, hoping the vast majority of shareholders did not see it. Most penny stock investors know all about cornell and how they work. Cloud, I'm not sure about the .20 price, it holds for some warrants, but for the majority of the 100 million? And can't it be amended at any time as the stock price declines?
JP, it's a very good question that both of us have now asked; why 100 million dollars, and why now? What is neom planning? It's not just bsds, and i don't believe it's paperclick. I think it's the word registry launch. And an acquisition that we don't yet know about. I'm hoping it gets pr'd soon. i do think this 100 million dollar loan means neom is not expecting any money in the virgin settlement; lets hope they at least get a positive finding without money, a settlement that allows a pr stating their patents hold up. I believe they will get that sort of finding, but i am not as sure as others on this board. I simply don't have the patent background to be confident in such a wide reaching and powerful verdict; giving neom this "bridge" would be an enormous thing, considering all the developments going on with barcodes and cell phones.
Ok, back to the cornell deal. I truly fear, and believe, that neom management would have no problem diluting to a billion shares. They have had no problem doubling the amoutn of shares in the past two years. And despite what they have intimated, I also believe they will have no problem reverse splitting when the shares get too high. It's a horrid thing, but all OTC companies do it sooner or later. It's the only way this stock will ever have even a remote chance at a reboad. IMO, there WILL NEVER be a buyback program; you don't borrow 100 million dollars by printing shares, then use the money to buyback shares. That's plain stupid. And there WILL NEVER be a real investment made in this company by a major fund as long as the Cornell deal stays in place.
I am also concerned that Chas sold 1.5 million shares about three weeks ago, and then this cornell agreement comes out. I can tell you right now, that the next time Chas sells a million shares, I'm selling a million shares too. I'm not intimating or accusing anyone of anything, i'm simply stating a point.
Now, that's all the negative. back to the positive. Why 100 million, why now? IMO, there will be a pr within the next two days; management can not ignore a drop in pps like this, so news will come. Let's hope they can do us some real good here with something important and offsetting.
I believe in neom's products and technology; I am hopeful in their virgin suit and the strength of their patents. I am optimistic about word registry and the possibility of paperclick taking off within a few years; and i think the RFID market will be huge if Neom lives long enough to see it; But I am not at all happy with Neom management. I am unhappy that they can not seem to make any revenues or get anyone to partner with them at this juncture; and I am frightened by their seeming lack of regard for the current investors, or for the pps.
There you go. I look forward to reading all of your posts, as many of you know much more than I do about many of these issues.
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Joe
The first round of panic seems to be over. There will be some selling of people who bought in today at .15-.17 for a quick profit, but otherwise i think we can close back toward .20. This is a nerve wracking time, though, because without a great pr (and god no paint crap) all we have is a massive dilution blimp hanging over us.
I'm not entirely sure that cornell can only make money if the stock stays at .20. And again, remember, cornell is not an investor; they don't hold the stock, they sell it immediately, so as long as neom gets money from them, there will be downward pressure on the stock price.
Neom management should not be letting us down. I don't want to hear foolish pronouncements from them about dilution not mattering or how they don't watch the day to day pps. Dilution matters, as we see here, and the day to day pps matters even more, because that's what keeps us here. Come on, management, show that you care. Put out some explanation that spins this the right way. And if you're holdiing any great news, now's the time to let it out.
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Joe
well, i am surprised and again disappointed in neom management's lack of pr ability. there should have been a pr this morning explaining the cornell situation as a positive financing step in the aid of near term movement on word registry. there wasn't, so fearful investors dumped shares. I nearly dumped as well, but personally i'm hoping we close back near .20. I can tell you, though, without some clear guidance very soon, or some really big news, this will not be a stock you can hold in perpetuity, simply because of the dilution.
At the moment it's up to management to save the pps, and I wish the bashers were right, that neom was good at pr. But in my experience, i haven't seen that to be true. Today was a perfect example.
Hoping for some strength toward close. we shall see.
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Joe
Mactex,
Good points to discuss. First off, on Cornell's restriction to 9.9 percent; IMO this doesn't effect the extent of dilution because cornell has no intention of holding the shares they get. Cornell makes money by selling all the shares they are given on the open market. They loan money in return for cheap stock, which they dump for cash. IMO, they are not a partner to neomedia, nor are they an investor. And their only real risk is that the stock becomes worthless; however, there's a big difference between worthless and a .05 cent stock. They don't care whether they have to sell 1 million shares of stock at a dollar or 100 million shares of stock at 1 cent. We care, but they don't. If Neom wants Cornell's cash, they will continue to dilute, cornell will continue to sell (keeping their holdings below 9.9 percent) and the stock price will go down. Neom will put out prs to hold the price as high as possible to keep the dilution down as low as possible, but they'd need some serious pr's to get us higher.
Now, as for a much more difficult discussion, you quote Neom's management (i assume that's who The Man is) as saying "The man said (on our dilution concerns to him)"with a stock price of $5/10/ or 20 dilution is a non-issue". IMO, and no disrespect to anyone intended, this sounds like salesman talk to me. And a bad salesman at that. At 5 dollars this is a 2 billion dollar company- because of dilution! At 10 dollars, this would have to be a 4 billion dollar company! And at 20 dollars, an 8 billion dollar company! do you realize how absurd that is? A company with no real revenues, whose only investment comes from a stock for cash vulture deal, being valued at 8 billion dollars? Not possible. the stock price can not reach these numbers BECAUSE of the dilution, so it's absurd to state that the dilution won't matter as the stock price rises. If dilution continues to occur, the stock price CAN"T rise. The more dilution that occurs, the LESS the stock price can rise. If Neom's management made this statement on wall street to a vc firm, the vc firm would laugh and walk out the door. Any investor would be frightened by this bizarre logic.
The only way to raise the pps is for the value of the company to move foward faster than the dilution. Now if that's what the Man meant by this statement, then okay, what he should have said was that although the dilution is horrible for the current investors, it is necessary to help us reach our goals, creating enough revenue to sustain the higher market cap we'll need to reach to make the pps continue to rise. However, the idea that we can be a 20 dollar stock with half a billion shares, or more, on the market, is ridiculous. I love the word registry and i like paperclick, but i ain't seeing a ten billion dollar company any time soon. I'm still seeing my 150 million dollar company. If we dilute to 500 million shares, which i foresee in the next couple of months at this rate, then we're lookign at a pps about where we are now. And if we dilue further, that pps won't rise.
Look, bottom line is, neom has a plan for that 100 million bucks, and i'm praying that plan includes a big enough piece of news to make the company look good enough to get past it's horrid financial situation. I'm betting on that fact, along with the rest of the longs. But i am not hiding my eyes to the current situation or the ugliness of the means to our end.
best
Joe
And as much as i hate to say it (and as much as i risk the ire of many here, hopefully not too much ire), i've been perusing the raging bull board, more for entertainment than for knowledge, and seabiscut does have a lot of good points regarding this cornell situation. This cornell deal is great for Neomedia; but not necessarily great for those of us longs sitting on many shares. Neom can continue to dilute all the way to a billion shares; by doing so, they stand to generate as much as 100 million dollars from cornell. Great for them, not great for us.
However, neom can only do this if the pps stays up, and the only way the pps can stay up is with news. What seabiscut and others on raging bull get wrong is the idea that neom is great with prs, and that's how they've kept the stock price up. In point of fact, in my experience with other otc stocks, neom is actually quite poor at putting out prs. They haven't put together a great pr attack since the old days of amazon etc, which drove the pps to .40. The pps so far has been upheld not by neom's prs, but by TS's newsletter and the word registry deal with SAIC.
Now monday, there will be a chance for neom to change this, to put out a really well written pr to keep the pps up. "100 million dollars of financing in place" will be a good start, followed by "acquisition of BSDS" and then "Launch of word registry" and an exact date.
That's my two cents.
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Joe
Cloud et al, look, as much as i'd like it to be otherwise, Cornell Capital is a vulture spiral financing firm. They make their money by loaning money to companies with little or no revenues in exchange for massive amounts of stock. They force a continued dilution to pay off those loans. IMO, Neomedia will pay off the 1 million a month in stock, not in cash. that's the way it has been in the past, that's the way it will be in the future, that's the way cornell works with all of its "partners". Companies contract with groups like cornell because they need money and can't get it through avenues such as investors, funds, or real deep pocketed partners, either because of previous levels of dilution, or because they do not have any forseeable revenues with which to lure real investment money. Cornell is not an "investor" in neomedia, it is funding the company in exchange for stock, which it sells for cash. If neomedia were about to make revenues or sign a deal that could pay off a 1 million a month loan debt, they wouldn't need the loan in the first place, they'd simply use their revenues. And if they had real revenues like that on the horizon, they'd know they could get money from real investors or from a real partner, not from a spiral financing company.
Koko, and others, the idea that the dilution won't matter when virgin hits, when we get a partner, etc, is, IMO, incorrect. Dilution is the ONLY thing that matters when these things happen. Dilution is the thing that will keep the pps from skyrocketing to where it could go. This is a one hundred million dollar company with a pps of under .25 because of dilution. My fear is, if everything great happens, but the dilution continues unabated, this could still be a .25 five hundred million dollar company. The only way out of this sort of dilution is going to be a reverse split, and none of us want that to happen. Neomedia has to reign in the dilution. Or sacrifice the current investors.
All that being said (and yes, i know, that sounds very negative for someone who owns 2.5 million shares or so, and i'm sure the wonderful people over on the raging bull board can play with this all they want)the thing that interests me at the moment is the AMOUNT of the cornell deal. Why the heck does neomedia need 100 million dollars over two years? Why does it even need the option for that kind of money? Ten million, okay. Twenty million, okay. But 100 million??? Operating expenses are much less than that. Neom's company 'mergers' and takeovers, in the past, have involved small money and larger amounts of shares. It seems like a very big amount of money, and that makes me think that indeed something is up. Personally, i'm thinking it's word registry related. Maybe they are planning a very big marketing and pr based launch of the word registry (i'm assuming SAIC doesn't put up the cash for that sort of thing, maybe i'm wrong?). Paperclick doesn't need cash, it needs a service partner or a patent win to take off. But the word registry simply needs a marketing and advertising campaign to work. So maybe that's what the money is needed for. Or maybe neom is indeed thinking about a purchase of one of its major competitors. I don't know, but it does seem excessive for operating expenses. It's more than the company has spent in its entire existence, isn't it?
Okay, enough for now. Awaiting JP's return, as i'm sure he'll have something interesting to post. Also awaiting monday's reaction. Often, you will find that a pps rises on the news of a financing system in place, and i'm expeciting (and hoping) for a nicely worded pr from neomedia about it. (CYPT were masters of this during their steady rise) They could say something simple like "Neomedia completes 100 million dollar financing agreement with cornell capital", make it sound like a great situation. On the other hand, the fact that they let this info slip after market's close makes me think they were trying to slip it out there, so who knows? It should be interesting. I'm just hoping, with all of you, that there's a big announcement in the next couple of weeks to make all my fears go away.
darn, i know i said i wasn't going to talk about dilution anymore but it's an addiction :)
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Joe
Movieguy, though I agree that there is now financing in place to keep neomedia a going concern for at least two more years, the cornell agreement, IMO, is not a positive development. Simply put, it means neom is preparing for many more months of limitted revenues; moreover, neom is not expecting money from Virgin or any real financing from any other source (nobody will add financing to neom as long as they have a relationship with a stock-for cash outfit like cornell). Neom isn't expecting funds to buy the stock, because again, no real fund will buy into a stock that can dilute and will dilute with such ease. Bottom line is, neom needed the money, and now they have access to the money. But this money will come at the expense of current shareholders.
Of course, this could all change suddenly with some good news, but it seems unlikely that neom would enter into such an agreement if big money were on the horizon. If some sort of major partnership had come out of CTIA, or if some sort of deal with anyone of the likes of google, microsoft, etc were soon approaching, neom would not have needed to make this agreement at this time.
I'm not sure whether the pps will react to this, as the potentials for the company haven't changed; but over time, if cornell is the way neom intends to fund itself, then certainly the value of our investment will continue to decrease month by month. Not a pleasant thought.
As to the USA today article, it's clear that it was aimed at an average investor; financials are all that an average investor who doesn't have the time or wherewithal to do serious research should look at. A stock that dilutes as dramatically as neom without earnings, that loses money this fast, is not a good investment for the average investor. However, if one believes that the technology and patents will be immensely valuable, then it's a great speculative move- speculative being the operative word.
As for the last few pr's not moving the pps up, the simple truth, IMO, is that these pr's were unimportant. Anything involving neom's paint division can be written off in terms of the overal pps, because neom's paint company isn't worth even a tiny bit of the near 100 million market cap. And any pr announcing a partnership with a sales or advertising agent does not affect revenues or the value of the property. Hiring or partnering with a sales agent is important to advance the company, but not important in terms of raising the pps or the market cap. Until we have virgin news or a service provider news, we won't move.
And again, and again, and again, it all boils down to the patents. The USA piece is wrong only if the patents turn out to be as valuable as we believe. if they are, then of course a company like nokia won't develop their own software, because they won't be able to.
Sadly, at the moment, with the new cornell financing deal, i'm guessing that these patent issues won't be solved any time soon, at least not in a definitive, money generating way. But hopefully neom will prove me wrong.
best
Joe
JP, I like all your scenarios, but I agree with movieg, a buyback just doesn't seem economically possible. I mean, to move us back to 200 million shares (which is still quite high), Neom would have to put in over 50 million dollars at the current pps! If the things you're talking about come to pass, we'll have an even higher pps, which means a buyback would be even more expensive. Why would neom pump 50 to 100 million in cash into buying back shares? A reverse split, as much as i hate the idea (and i can tell you i'd sell the day it was announced), is a much more likely scenario in terms of trying to reach a bigger board. Now i'm glad that Neom management has told us they won't do that, but if we reach an outstanding share count of 600 million or more, i don't think, eventually, they'll have any choice (and JP, you know as well as I that jsut about every 0TC stock tries it at some point). But hopefully well before that we'll be earning enough revenues to stop the dilution, to stop using cornell, etc.
As for the earlier comments re institutional buying and thompsons watch. the simple truth is, institutions aren't buying into neom yet at any real level (and the thompsons numbers are suspect, as they really don't measure anything specific, and can't be linked to real institional buying. Mutual funds, hedge funds, etc, won't buy into a stock with such high dilution, and the potential of more dilution. It's just too risky to have your investment diluted every quarter. It simply doesn't matter how good the technology is, if management is simply cutting your investment down by a quarter every 10q to pay the bills.
I know i keep harping on this, and this is the last i'm gonna talk about dilution, beacuse we are all well aware of why it's going on (it's necessary right now, neom needs the money and doesn't have revenues yet) and how bad it is for us, the investors. But I just wanted to be clear about it, because often we have people on the board wondering why the pps isn't rising, or making predictions that just don't seem likely because of the O/S. The idea that we can reach 5 dollars any time soon is really really really wishful thinking; becoming a 2 billion dollar market cap company will take massive revenue streams. My previous price target was based on an o/s of 250 million shares or so. My new price target has to be based on the current O/S, and on the likely future O/S when these things come to pass. Bottom line is, if by next 10q we're at 500 million outstanding shares (which seems extremely likely), then i am predicting a market cap of 150 million (without new major news), which puts the price at around .30 cents. With good news, we could get up to 250 million market cap, which is .50. With fantastic news, maybe we could near a market cap of 400 million, but anything beyond that, IMO, would need some really incredible revenue stream news, such as word registry really taking off, or the virgin suit not just settled, but splashed all over the news wires. And of course a partnership with google, microsoft, or anyone else would also push us toward these heights.
I do believe the virgin case will be settled fairly soon, based on what i've read here and the dockets, and on the thought that a settlement makes sense for virgin (and imo, would not be pricey for them, as i've said before, neom would be behooved to accept just about anything to be able to announce a positive settlement w virgin, thus boostering the strength of their patents). And like others here, i do expect a domino effect when that happens; someone will have to partner with neom if neom's patents are upheld, be it microsoft or google. And when that happens, we're going to move nicely up. 5 dollars, IMO is a pipe dream. But a buck is still a possibility.
Best,
Joe
Well, I'd like to believe that Neom could become a near billion market cap company before the dilution carries us too far, but I'm not willing to dream that far. I mean, think of the billion dollar companies out there, look at their revenues (except for a few notable exceptions), look at their cash structures, most important, look at their financing. You don't see many billion dollar companies involved in what is essentially a vulture, downward spiral financing scheme which is what we've got with Cornell (which, by the way, is the main reason we don't have major institutional, vc, or wall street money pouring in; no big player will pour money into neom as long as we've got a structure that allows this dilution). On the other hand, yes, if the virgin case settles the way we hope it does, this does become a very valuable company- almost overnight- but for us to be valued at billions, there has to be a proven revenue stream in the tens, if not hundreds, or millions. And as much as the paint repair system makes us some needed revenues, it will have to be spun off before neom is taken seriously as a billion dollar IT company (whenever i talk to my friend at the big finland cell phone maker, his first response is always- good luck with your paint company!- which is a painful reminder that neom isn't what it could be, yet).
Picksit, unfortunately in my experience, from what i've seen, i am worried that a buyback is far less likely than a reverse split, which would be horrific for those of us holding large shares now. Now i don't expect a reverse split anytime soon, not until the virgin settlement or some other great news that starts us spiralling forward in value; but if we do intend to get back on a real board (which i've not heard any real mention of in neom's prs, anyway, and i think that's along long long way off), then we will probably see something like that. A buyback would be wonderful, but if the stock starts spirallying upward, it will be prohibitively expensive (if we hit .50, you're not going to see neom shelling out a hundred million bucks to get us back to a 240 million share position!). But i don't even want to think about a reverse split at this time, because it isn't necessary or usefull yet, and i'm sure neom's management knows that.
Beeh, yes, dilution has been immense. Since i've been a shareholder, we've gone from roughly 240 million shares to 440 million shares (is that right JP?) That's in a little more than a year i think. That's astronomical, and if it were not for the good news re the word registry, and TS's support, we would be much much lower in pps.
All that being said, again, i am positive on neom here and am not selling, because despite everything that scares me in the 10q, every time i get talking about what neom is trying to do, i get so excited i can't help myself. And i've sold so many really really really smart people on this stock, just by telling them about paperclick and the word registry, that i can't help but think theres some gold here.
As many of you know, i've (and jp too!) made a killing in a penny stock before. I had a major position in a stock that went from .12 to 1.70 in a matter of three months, and i cashed out, and moved over here. Why? I could have just taken my win and bought a ferrari or a condo and had my fun with it. But then is started reading about neom, getting emails from JP and the rest, and i realized that there's something real here, an extremely powerful idea. This is a once in a lifetime stock, IMO. You don't find stocks at .25 that could potentially be world-changing. However, as a realist, i know that Neom still has a lot of bad stuff to get past; the fundamentals are horrible, the dilution is untenable, and things need to happen fast (by 2007, mr TS, we'll be at over a billion shares if we don't start making revenues this summer!!). It would be a real shame not to see this thing take off.
And JP, yes, I'll be there in vegas. I'm actually quite a regular there, in fact, i've written the book on the place (quite literally). It would be awesome to celebrate hitting a dollar there by the time the new Wynn opens!
best
Joe
I haven't posted for a while, since along with everyone else I've been simply watching and waiting, still holding my fairly enormous block of shares. But I do want to thank the three great neomites who attended the conference in New Orleans and came back with such an informative post.
Other contacts of mine also attended the conference, and i made sure they stopped by the neom booth to check it out. One of these contacts actually works for a major cell phone maker (think Finland) and i was especially interested in his opinion. In his words, it's all going to boil down to the virgin suit and whether or not neom actually controls the patents that we believe they own. This is nothing new to any of us, of course, but it is really the simple truth at the moment, at least IMO. After reading the last 10q, the thing that stood out, of course, was the dilution. No matter what the Neom bigwigs say, the dilution is the primary issue in terms of the pps, and the future of our investment. We all saw the value of our investment drop by nearly 25% in the last 10q, without a change in the pps; what I mean by that is, with an extra 100 million shares, each of our positions diluted by a quarter; the fact that the pps didn't drop, as it should have (by about that same 25%) is indicative of the holding pattern we're in, waiting on the virgin case. Our market cap has now risen to 110 million or so; i've been saying all along that i believe this company should be valued at around 150 million based on my own opinions of the value of what it's got to offer; and now we're almost at the price without the pps going up, because we're simply diluting our way to a higher market cap.
I believe that this summer, we will see some impressive events in terms of the word registry, and we'll also hopefully get some great news re-virgin. We need this to happen before the dilution carries us so far that even with the great news, we'll get a very small rise in pps since the market cap will have ballooned already to sustain operations at this level.
Anyway, i am very hopeful at the moment, and that is why i haven't sold my shares. I believe there are some very good hints that the word registry is progressing, and there are also hints that the virgin suit will be settled in a positive way for neom.
Still long and strong.
Best, Joe
Has this been posted? it's a great story that sounds a lot like one that could eventually be ours...
Playing Penny-Stock Roulette
January 23, 2005
By GARY RIVLIN
Las Vegas
HIS hair is white and stringy, his beard thick and snowy in
the fashion of a hermit who decided long ago to park
himself high atop a mountain. He's a touch shy, a
self-deprecating man who describes himself as never before
lucky in life.
John L. Kingery knows that he is not the sort you would
expect to find here sipping a cocktail inside a high-roller
suite at the Mirage. Nor were most of the 15 or so others
who descended on the hotel this month to toast their
collective wisdom - and the millions they had collectively
made - in buying shares of Audible Inc., an Internet stock
so beaten down that for a time it could be found only in
the netherworld of penny-stock trading boards.
Their choice of place could not have been more apt. Mr.
Kingery and his fellow travelers, who included a lieutenant
colonel stationed inside the Pentagon, a semiretired
26-year-old and a part-time science fiction writer, had
each placed wagers as large and as bold as most people who
usually inhabit these suites.
The last few years have been a banner time for those
inclined to play penny stocks, if only because there are so
many of them. A record number of companies have been
delisted since the market began its collapse in the spring
of 2000, perhaps an outgrowth of the record number of
companies that went public during the 1990's. The Nasdaq
alone banished nearly 1,100 companies from 1999 to 2002,
stamping them as damaged goods because they either failed
to meet minimum financial standards or violated Securities
and Exchange Commission policy - or both.
Like others who study penny stocks, James J. Angel, a
professor of finance at the McDonough School of Business at
Georgetown University, cast them as treacherous grounds,
offering odds barely better than those of a roulette wheel.
Yet, as the story of Audible and its faithful show, risky
investing by amateurs does not seem to have perished along
with the likes of Pets.com and other dot-com flameouts.
Penny stocks come in several forms. They include those,
like Audible, that the Nasdaq tossed off its primary
exchange when they fell short in a set of financial tests,
though they could be traded on Nasdaq's bulletin board
because they remained current in their S.E.C. filings. Then
there are the ones kicked off the Nasdaq or the New York
Stock Exchange whose filings are not current. Those are
traded on the over-the-counter market known as the pink
sheets.
"Basically 95 out of 100 of these companies end up dead,"
Professor Angel said. "If you look three years out, you'll
see that very few of them rise like a phoenix from the
ashes." That figure does not include those penny stocks
that were never listed on one of the major exchanges,
either because they couldn't make the cut or because they
"didn't want to bow down to the authorities" at the S.E.C.,
Professor Angel said.
Audible, which lets people download audio books and other
material via the Internet, had a typical rise and fall,
then a not-so-typical rebound. The company, based in Wayne,
N.J., is again trading on the Nasdaq. Its stock, which
soared to $21 a share on its first day of trading in 1999
from an opening price of $15.25, hit a low of 15 cents in
February 2003 - all before a reverse 3-for-1 stock split in
June 2004.
But as the company approached a split-adjusted $10 a share
late last year, a group of Audible investors decided that a
celebration was in order, and they met at the Mirage.
Previously, they had communicated exclusively through
postings on an Internet site created by one of their own.
(The stock now trades at $25.47, or a split-adjusted
$8.49.)
PERHAPS the biggest surprise to be found inside that
high-rollers suite wasn't that a penny stock had created a
small cadre of big winners. Rather, it was the willingness
of this group of true believers to behave so recklessly,
despite all those billions lost by investors four years
ago.
Consider Keith Chadwell, the director of data services at a
company in Greenville, S.C.. He told his fellow investors
that he believed so enthusiastically in Audible.com - he
figures he has downloaded and listened to 350 books in the
past five years - that he invested all of his savings in
it, then set aside half of his take-home pay each week for
a year to buy more.
Another Audible groupie, Peter Graetz, a computer
consultant based in Düsseldorf, Germany, said he had
liquidated all of his other stock holdings to buy more
shares. "I was the crazy guy of the group," said Mr.
Graetz, who had logged 33 hours on airplanes and in
airports traveling here from Germany for the celebration.
"I was 100 percent Audible."
Mr. Kingery might have been even rasher. He said he bought
a large portion of his shares on margin - borrowed money.
As any student of the stock market knows, the riskiest
investments are those that offer the greatest payout. Mr.
Graetz would not share all the details of his investment,
but did say that the stock was now worth more than 10 times
what he had paid. Mr. Chadwell boasted to the group that he
had made 15 times his investment, turning a belief in
Audible and $25,000 into a $400,000 stash.
Mr. Kingery revealed that he had bought a split-adjusted
133,000 shares of Audible at an average cost of 40 cents
each. He sold half his holdings recently, when the stock
was near a split-adjusted high of $10 a share. His sale
translates into a larger payout than Mr. Chadwell's, based
on only half his holdings.
THE recent popularity of penny stocks reflects in part the
sheer number of technology casualties since the stock
bubble burst. "In the last several years we've seen a
number of legitimate tech companies that have been beaten
down badly but then came back from a near-death
experience," said Jay R. Ritter, a finance professor at the
University of Florida.
A stock price languishing below $1 a share is the most
common reason the Nasdaq boots a company off its primary
market, according to data provided by Professor Angel of
Georgetown. "If a stock is trading for under a buck, then
something has gone dreadfully wrong at that company," said
Professor Angel, who serves on a Nasdaq advisory board that
oversees its bulletin board. "Generally stocks go public at
$10, $15 a share. So if they're trading for under $1 a
share, then they've lost more than 90 percent of their
value."
Just as a high-end retailer doesn't carry cut-rate products
because shoppers may start to doubt the quality of all its
goods, the major markets don't want to sell the equivalent
of what he called "shoddy apparel."
So many Nasdaq stocks were trading for less than $1 just
after Sept. 11, 2001 - one in six, according to Professor
Angel - that Nasdaq felt obliged to impose a moratorium on
delistings. It lasted three months. Yet for many companies,
including Audible, that only meant delaying the inevitable.
"One of the things the Nasdaq does well," Professor Angel
said, "is flush the losers."
Some plainly needed to be flushed, like PlanetRX and
Webvan, two dot-coms that had once had high profiles but
that declared bankruptcy and are no longer traded on any
public exchanges. But hundreds of once-proud members of the
Nasdaq are barely hanging on. The Salon Media Group, for
instance, was trading on Friday at 13 cents a share - a
paltry figure, though not when compared with shares of
DrKoop.com, which were at one one-hundredth of a penny.
Then there are the dot-com comeback stories, including
Audible and others. Shares in the Varsity Group, which
sells textbooks and other education materials online, hit a
low of 16 cents in April 2001 but closed at $6.74 on
Friday. The Knot, an online wedding site, traded at 22
cents a share in July 2002; it is now at $5.00. The Knot
trades on the over-the-counter bulletin board but applied
this month for listing on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market.
And it is companies like these that provide the attraction,
for amateurs as well as for some professional investors.
Jeffrey D. Saut, the chief investment strategist at Raymond
James & Associates, the investment firm based in St.
Petersburg, Fla., is gung-ho on penny stocks. To him, the
ranks of the penny stocks are about the only place to find
real bargains, or what he described as "mispriced pieces of
paper, which is to say stock certificates that are
undervalued."
In just a few months, he said, he has had an 89 percent
return on an investment in a Canadian-based energy stock he
bought at 48 cents a share. He has had a return of 37
percent over roughly that same period on a battery
technology company trading on a Canadian penny stock
exchange.
Yet he sounded like a car commercial that cautions people
against trying the stunts themselves. "The average person
shouldn't be participating in the penny stock arena," Mr.
Saut said. "They don't have the skill set to determine if,
first of all, it's a real company or a fraud. And they
don't have skill set to understand the accounting or to
analyze the assets."
Unscrupulous promoters have exploited investors' ignorance
in the past, using false or misleading statements to
inflate the value of penny stocks, then cashing out before
the companies' true value - or lack of value - become
apparent and the stocks tumble. The process is so common
that the authorities have given it a name: pump-and-dump.
The amateurs who so aggressively invested in Audible,
however, seemed an entirely different breed, starting with
the tone of their discourse on the stock message boards so
popular on the Internet.
"I think it's fair to say the message boards aren't exactly
a model of intelligent interactions," said Donald R. Katz,
the founder and chief executive of Audible. The typical
participant posting messages at a place like Yahoo or
Silicon Investor tends to sound like a sports fan, using
too many exclamation points and having a propensity to
write in all capital letters, as if screaming.
"But here was a group that did their own financial models,"
Mr. Katz said. "They went deep into our financials and
worked up a pretty classic analytic analysis of the
company."
AUDIBLE had a scant 3,000 customers when it went public in
July 1999. Yet Mr. Katz said it wasn't impatience or greed
that prompted him to sell shares in his young company.
Instead, it was a concern about the half-dozen or so
competitors looking to cash in on this same market.
"The deal then was that if you didn't take the money, if
you didn't step up as the I.P.O. of the category, someone
else would have," he said. "Believe it or not, going public
was a defensive thing."
When Mr. Katz started Audible in 1995, there was no iPod.
Nor was there any mass-market digital player that would
serve as a natural platform for the books, magazines and
newspapers - including The New York Times - that Audible
now delivers digitally in digest form.
That meant Audible needed to invent both the hardware and
software required for people to download, store and listen
to the audio books and other content that the company
intended to sell. At the same time, Mr. Katz had to
persuade publishers to take a flier on his fledgling
enterprise. "That proved to be much more difficult than I
or my investors ever anticipated," he said, with an
expression somewhere between a frown and a smile.
Mr. Katz's company arranged for the Mirage suite and a full
bar and hors d'oeuvres to help his loyal investors
celebrate, and he was in an expansive, reflective mood
shortly before the party. A well-regarded author and
financial writer before "trying to prove whatever I'm
trying to prove with Audible," he said that one of his more
vivid memories from the company's early history was a chat
with Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of
Amazon.com.
"Jeff said he thought about building an entirely new
category, like I was doing, rather than a new business
system for an existing marketplace, like Amazon, but he
said his analysis showed starting a new category would take
10 years," Mr. Katz said. "I thought we'd get there much
sooner, but I hate to say, he was right."
Audible was able to start reporting profits last year, nine
years after it was created. Digital media players are now
ubiquitous, and the company now sells its audio content
through the Apple Computer iTunes store. More recently, it
signed a deal with Sprint, hoping to find a place on
people's mobile phones.
For early investors, though, Mr. Katz's miscalculation
proved painful. The company's stock hit an intraday high of
$25 on its first day of trading but within a year it was at
less than $5 a share, and after 15 months it was below $1.
(The numbers are not adjusted for the subsequent reverse
split.)
"It felt for a while there like we had gone away," Mr. Katz
said, and in a way it did. Wall Street analysts stopped
following the company, and the institutional investors who
had believed in it sold their shares. Audible continued its
practice of having a quarterly conference call to report on
its financial picture and to field questions from the
analysts and institutional investors, though almost no one
bothered to participate.
"I'd be the only one asking questions," said Ray Unger, the
president of Unger Capital Management, an investment
advisory firm in Madison, Wis., with $26 million under
management. "I'd ask, 'Tell me about your churn rate; tell
me about your cash flow.' And then they'd ask, 'Any other
questions?,' and there'd be silence until they said
goodbye."
Mr. Unger, who described his investment in Audible as a
"career win," said the routine repeated itself for around
18 months.
Small-time investors communicated with one another through
a message board on Yahoo, but that Internet portal, as is
its policy, dropped its Audible site after the company was
delisted in February 2003. That prompted William T. Katz -
no relation to the founder - to create his own Audible
site, which served as the catalyst for the group that would
eventually rendezvous in Las Vegas this month.
"People really got riled up when the company was delisted,"
Mr. Katz said. "They felt it was unfair. People wanted to
rally around the company."
Mr. Katz, the investor, once described the hard-core
Audible advocates who sometimes posted as many as 10
messages a day as a "motley crew." He upgraded his
assessment to "very eccentric" after meeting several of
them for the first time the night before the party. He
might have offered himself as Exhibit A. Mr. Katz, 40, has
an M.D. and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the
University of Virginia, but nowadays he devotes his time to
writing science fiction and developing an authors' Web site
called Writertopia. When proposing a meeting here with a
reporter, he suggested a "Star Trek"-theme bar at the
Hilton.
Mr. Katz bought shares of Audible shortly after it went
public, but instead of feeling burned by a stock that fell
so precipitously, he saw a prime buying opportunity. He was
a true believer in the service, heartened that the company
showed revenue growth quarter after quarter, despite its
financial woes. (It burned through $49 million from 2001 to
2003.) Convinced that Audible's stock was priced
"irrationally low," he said, he kept buying. Ultimately, he
stopped after roughly 60,000 shares, most of which cost him
less than $1 each, because he began to worry that he was
risking too much of his portfolio on a highly speculative
stock.
SUCH stories were heard over and over at the Mirage
celebration. At one point during the party, the investors,
standing in a circle, took turns sharing tales that seemed
to differ only in the specifics. Tom Hallam, 60, a retiree
from Hilton Head Island, S.C., told the group that he kept
buying shares as the stock price fell, until he ran out of
discretionary income when the stock was trading at 30
cents.
Though he owned more than 30,000 shares, he held on until
the company hit a split-adjusted $10. Only then did he sell
roughly half his stake. "I never would have had the courage
to hold the stock without the support of you guys," he
said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/business/yourmoney/23penny.html?ex=1107491669&ei=1&en=c7e0...
I'll chime in with my two cents.
With the recent acquisition of BSD and the power of the SAIC/word registry, the potential of a google or microsoft or virgin partnership, i'd guess that if all goes well, in the next year we'd see the market cap get closer to the 250 million range, which, if the o/s continues to rise as it has (and i'm assuming that the rise will continue as shares are needed to pay costs of the acquisitions, and pay overhead, as revenues aren't going to change significantly this year, IMO), we'll be at a pps of around .60 with around 420 million oustanding shares. This is significantly higher than my previous predictions of a market cap in the 150 million range, which would put the price at closer to .35 cents, and is due to the word registry, which i think will make a huge difference in the company's value in the google/microsoft war.
I think that in the upcoming months, we'll see a pop on good news into the .50 range, then a pullback to the .30's, and then a rise to the new pps base.
Personally, my sell point is around a dollar, hoping for a 1.25 but will prob sell a good portion before then. Anyway, barring any unforseen problems, i'd put my guess for dec '05 at .60
best
Joe
well, movieguy, that's where i disagree. You're right in that 5 million shares isn't much when the price is at .25 and he has 48 million shares. However, if, as many of us believe, the price is about to go to a lot higher, we're talking about giving up a lot of money instead of waiting a short amount of time. If you believed this stock was going to a dollar within, say six months, would you give up close to five million dollars, or wait for the price rise? It's not a small amount, when you think about it. It's quite a large amount of money not to wait a few months. My guess is, either he doesn't think the price is going to rise that far that fast, he's taking capital losses (all though you're right, that seems kind of unlikely), or he was in desperate need of 1.25 million bucks (and that seems unlikely too. Desperate enough to forgo 5 million dollars by waiting six months???) That leaves me with the thought that Fritz does not think this stock is going to a dollar within the next few months.
Not trying to dampen any enthusiasm, just being realistic and trying to keep track of the situation. I foresee a nice push in the next few weeks, but if vodafone or google were right around the corner- would fritz really sell 5 million shares? Would you? Even if you had 50 million?
best
Joe
orangecowboy, that's a very interesting thought. Sell at .25 to get losses against potential gains when the stock goes flying up. So if you'v got a million shares that you bought at 15 bucks, and you sell em at a quarter a share, you take a huge loss. then when the stock goes to 2 dollars, you sell more shares, and can pay small capital gains taes on it. does it make more sense than just waiting and selling at a higher price and taking the losses? I'm not sure about the math. My point is simply that we here on this board are highly optimistic, looking for gains into the dollar ranges very soon; if fritz believed those gains are that close, would he sell a few millions shares, or wait until the stock hits that dollar? Even if he needed money now, wouldn't he wait a little bit if the stock were about to announce something huge?
But i like your theory, it might explain things.
best
Joe
Great posts today. Things looking very good going into this weekend. I've got friends in Vegas checking things out. I feel like we are very close to either a service provider or a google related moment. I also believe that Matt at USA Today's advice (and people who think like him) is the reason that we were able to get into this stock at such a great price. If the OTC board weren't so full of scam artists, a gem like Neom that is still in a reconstruction phase, and thus lumped into the world of shaky fundamentals, would never have presented itself to us. I agree that one day we will see Neom move off this board- but personally, i'm in no rush to see it happen. I want neom to jump from this pps to one ten or twenty times this level- and you don't see that happening as quickly on the other boards, as often. I truly believe we are in at ground level on what could be a once in a lifetime situation. I wouldn't sell a share at this moment, i think you'd be crazy to (and i still wonder why fritz sold some, even if he has bills to pay, why would you sell a million shares at .22 if you believed a big jump in the pps was coming soon??).
Best
Joe
Good questions. I'm guessing (and hoping) that the selling that is going on right before the end of the year has to do with taxes; the big boys on the inside are taking some tax losses, IMO. These shares were bought at much higher levels, and by selling them now, right before the end of the year, they can write off the tax losses. remember, these shares were in the dollars a few years ago; 1 million shares at 2 dollars sold now for .26 cents is an enormous tax write off.
however, that being said, if i was an insider, and i believed the stock was going to a buck within a few months, would i sell a million plus shares? it's certainly disconcerting. BUt my bet still is it has to do with taxes, since this is the last week of the year. the fact that the pps hasn't dropped off is very encouraging. if we can close out the year above .25 i think we'll have a very good january.
best
joe
Ask and ye shall receive :).
Seems management is much more aware of the pps situation then i suggested. And this really is a new neom. This Triton thing has been brewing a long time, and bodes extremely well for Neom. In fact, i'd say this is a phenomenal indicator. First in terms of revenues; we're really building toward a revenue model that will support a much higher market cap. Second, in terms of the value of the company as a whole to a potential partner/buyer such as google or microsoft. Eventually, my guess is neom will spin off the micropaint division to dupont, and continue this retooling toward a true tele-tech giant.
Many of you are much more savvy on the BSDS situation than me (in the past i've asked many times why this is a good acquisition for them, and i've been answered many times) and i'd love to hear more from those of you who are expert on it (remember how fastcash kept claiming this would never ever happen, that neom could never get this merger off the ground, etc?)
We're on a new road here, in 2005 this company is going to make one heck of a name for itself. I'm much less concerned by the pps at this moment than i was two hours ago. Any sell-off now would be foolish, IMO. Companies on the way down do not acquire key components and revenue generators such as triton; companies trying to fatten themselves up for Google or microsoft, however, do.
Best, and thank you management,
Joe
Interesting point, Koko. i did notice the same thing, that there have been very few prs while TS did the talking. Interesting.
Joe
Movieguy, that's exactly right. That would be a simple pr. What has frustrated me from day one with neom (and i have been a rock solid shareholder despite this frustration, btw) is their seeming disregard for share price. They are very forward thinking, swept up in the ideas and the tech, which is great- but at this stage of the game, the PPS is the key element that will either make or break this company. If you can't get market cap up- and keep it stable- you can't get off the otc board. You can't attract real investors (who, other than a gambler, would invest big money in a company that goes from .31 to .16 in a few days?). You can't get away from cornell. Market cap can't fluctuate so much and be taken seriously. I'm just not convinced that Neom's management watches the pps daily, knows when to step in, etc. My guess is, in this case, the whole TS thing took them by surprise as well; the stock shot up on TS's newsletter, neom wasn't really ready to announce anything yet. They did announce the word registry, but with almost no details, and then they just sat back. Well, our pps flew to a great level, we were in prime position to keep on moving- and now we're a bouncing ball.
Anyway, just my two cents.
best
Joe
Moxa, even when there's no news to release, there are always projections, predictions, overviews, etc. If Neom is moving in a good direction, management needs to let shareholders know that. Company's concerned with PPS often support the share price by releasing prs into runs. Neom is attempting to create a new paradigm; they're attempting to become the standard for a whole new business. One announcement of the word registry simply isn't enough, IMO. Their relationship with SAIC could be made more clear with another pr. How the word registry will work could be layed out. I'm not asking for anything on Virgin or Google; I'm asking for a reiteration of the importance of the word registry, SAIC's involvement, where we're heading as a company, especially as the end of the year is coming. Supporting the pps should be the single most important job a company like Neom's management has; they need to keep this market cap up until there is a revenue model that works, otherwise they are going to be continually subject to the vulture financing of Cornell, and to the whims of the market.
Best
Joe
Well, this is what i feared. No news, no pr, the TS traders are leaving with their trading profits, and we're moving back down. Management had an opportunity to truly base above .20 but either a lack of concern for PPS or lack of pr capability is letting the air out of the run. It's difficult to watch, no matter how long you are, when fifty percent of your position disappears in three days. It's made more difficult by the assumption that cornell, and neom, probably sold into the run while longs held firm.
If there's anything good going on behind the scenes, now is the time for Neom to report them. Gotta stem this tide before it takes us all the way down.
best
Joe
It certainly would be disheartening to see this ride back down to .12 without management throwing something out there to stem the fall. A lot of people who've bought because of TS's newsletter will be looking for the exits if they don't see some news that makes them think TS was right about the future of Neom. It's hard to ignore the fact that a year ago, we saw a similar explosion in pps followed by... nothing. I believe we're in a different place now, and that there is great news coming- re google or microsoft. But it would be a shame to lose this fantastic base by waiting until too long to announce the new news. The problem is, management probably wants to hold out until after the holidays to release news. But the PPS won't hold that far. So even though this is not the best time to release news in terms of getting noticed on wall street or nationally, this is the right time to realease news in terms of the current shareholders.
Best
Joe
By Siri i ment sirius radio, is that the stock letters? I don' even know, that's how out of it i am. I only have eyes for Neom :)
I just want to welcome all the new posters and investors. As i'm sure you've noticed, this board is an incredible resource, by far better than raging bull or any other board i've seen. There are some truly brilliant posters here, and some people who's resources and research acumen simply befuddles my mind. If you want to quickly go through the 4000 posts, pay attention to any posts from JP, Kokonut, and Retiredandplaying, you'll get a pretty full idea of this stock's potential from them. There are others, of course, who really know this company, and you'll quickly figure out a who's who of the people who've spent some serious time researching this baby.
Again, i'm heartened by today's price movement. A slight drop on good volume is nothing to be frightened by. We flirted with .31 all day today, and that ain't a sell-off by any notion. I'm very excited by the strength of this pps. I'm in NY at the moment, have been meeting with some very intelligent big big players on wall street (not for any Neom related reason, just because of my real job) and as i told them about neom, they really perked up (actually, a couple are going to move in in a big way over the next few days). They were touting Siri, of course, but when they read what i sent them about neom they realized that this has way way way more potential. This could really be the next google.
I'm still looking for 1.25. Will i sell before then? Heck, i don't know. Sitting on 700 thousand dollars of a penny stock is hard to do. But i simply love the potential of this company. The word registry was simply a brilliant move. I don't believe they'll get 800 bucks per word, but i think if they can really make themselves the standard, they will make a bundle. I'm still curious as to the patentability- ownership- of this concept. Can neom really own this word registry?? Can google or microsoft simply offer their own version of the same idea? I don't know. Some of you are smarter than me in this realm and might be able to tell me. I understand the idea of owning a bridge in terms of barcodes, but in terms of a word search? I don't know. BUt it's still a brilliant idea, and if I were Google, i'd buy Neom, or partner with them, in two seconds. It just seems to make sense for them.
Anyway, best of luck to all, and welcome new viewers. Lets keep this board as top notch as its been. Dissent is welcome, bashing is not. I like to hear differing views (i myself still find the Cornell situation ugly and unbearable). Just keep the discourse as well reasoned as possible.
Best
Joe
Todays price movement is even more heartening than yesterdays; we had a slight pullback on some profit taking, now we're back holding .28. We're in a prime position to move up on any news. I'm praying that we get somethign on Virgin or Google while we're at this level. That would send us flying.
I'm not selling a share at this moment, that's for sure. It's too hard to play this, imo. A few thousand here and there ain't worth the chance of missing the real runup.
Would love to hear from management some overall guidance on where they see us going in the next couple of months, re revenues, word registry, vodafone, google, Cornell, etc. Even some broad strokes. I want to hold for a dollar, not sure i'll have the balls to do it, but def through the .30's.
Best to all,
Joe