Jetow: “I was trying to be nice before, but here goes... I don't waste my time arguing with idiots.”

That’s good to know. Otherwise you might spend hours arguing with the man you see in the mirror.

And calling someone a crybaby is your idea of nice?

You seem to be miserable reading thoughtful and reasoned posts about KBLB on iHub. Why not leave the board and save yourself the unhappiness that my posts engender in your life?

It must be especially difficult because you can’t argue that I’m wrong, just that you think I’m unhappy. To help you understand, I’m not unhappy at all that KBLB won’t be able to replace polyester and nylon in clothing apparel. That does not imply KBLB will fail in the market. KBLB would be pretty foolish to go after the Wal-Mart mens bulk t-shirt market. KBLB is better served by targeting the ‘luxury streetwear’ market, even though I don’t plan to buy a $1,000 Spydasilk blend hoodie.

But I know how hard it is to have ugly facts puncturing your wildest dreams and fantasies. Fortunately, no one is forcing you to read this board and you can simply spend your time reading things that make you happy. I’ll bet you could find some Barbie coloring books that would really brighten your day!

I have a couple of woven ties. Even still, the BOLT tie looked ugly to me. Can you state that its look showcased the strengths and advantages of spider silk? To me, it just looked like another mundane woven tie.

Without any particular evidence one way or the other, I believe the rapid sellout of 50 ties was due more to the novelty factor of owning a limited-edition ‘spider silk’ tie than to the actual appearance of the tie itself.

I believe one of Spiber’s products, a hoodie if I’m not mistaken, had a paragraph on the front extolling its use of Spiber’s protein-based fibers.

What I would like to see is a product that can showcase the beauty of BAM-1, something that makes people go ‘Wow! What is that?’ Not a hoodie you need to read a paragraph on the product to learn about its qualities or a tie that looks like so many others hanging around.

The post I was responding to made the argument that KBLB’s fibers could mitigate the problem of microplastics from clothing fibers. My post was to point out that particular problem would not be solved by KBLB in the foreseeable future.

Although I’m not a huge fan of the emphasis on cotton/silk blends, if Kings/MTM is still interested in buying $40 million of BAM-1 silk, I’m all for that. I’ve argued in the past that targeting upscale markets for clothing is the correct approach.

This seems to be a point where we mostly agree.

Good to know. I’ve had my eyes on an upscale house on the market. I’ll buy it today because I’ll have enough to pay cash by closing on June 30.

If KBLB was only at $1.11, I’d be in trouble, but since we are hitting $1.12, I’ll be fine.

Thanks for letting me know.

You choose to ignore bad decisions made by Thompson. I choose to interpret what is happening to our share price given that history.

People want to know why we aren’t at 50 cents or a dollar now. I’m providing an explanation. You respond with an attack.

Effective — NOT.

You don’t seem to like facts. They can be awkward at times, but facts represent truth that can be awkward.

Anyone supposing that KBLB’s silks will solve the problem of microplastics in our environment caused by clothing has to confront some basic facts. I spelled those out and showed it was simply not possible for KBLB’s silks to make a dent in the world’s fabric-produced microplastics problem.

You didn’t argue any of the facts, just accused me of crying ‘all day every day,’ and encouraged me to ‘sell out.’

What a convincing post — NOT.

Yes, the price would have slumped, but Thompson also lost additional credibility among investors, who recognized that his uplist plan was premature and badly executed.

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” … the KBLB way.

Polyester and nylon are cheaper to produce than Pima cotton and much much cheaper than silk. Society has a way of ignoring the hidden costs associated with products, which is why we still have coal- and gas-fired electric generation and gas stoves, in spite of the carbon footprint. The list of such offenders is long.

In 2022, the global production of polyester and nylon fibers was 87,000,000 metric tons. Global production of wool and cotton was 27,000,000 metric tons. Global production of silk was 91,221 metric tons.

If DS were to make a dent in the global textile market, it would have to replace all mundane silk production worldwide and then increase global silk production by a factor of 100.

If that were to happen, it would take decades.

Assuming KBLB is successful in producing and selling their silk, hopefully they will find sufficient markets to fuel rapid growth and we all become rich beyond our wildest dreams. I’m not expecting to live long enough to see KBLB’s world domination. It would be great to see some luxury hoodies and sports apparel. I’d even settle for a silk tie right now, but hopefully not one as ugly as BOLT made.

You think Mojocash and igotthemojo are the same because the aliases were created two weeks apart. Thin ice. Very very thin. Even if they were the same individual, Mojocash has not posted on the KBLB board on IHub to my knowledge.

I believe they are two different people with similar names. Sorry.

The easiest way to resolve this is to click on the name of an individual and look at their history of posts. If you go back through Mojo’s posts, you will see that his current user name has posts that were skeptical (especially of Thompson) and are now more favorable.

IHub won’t allow two different users to have the same user name. It would be easy for someone to ‘fake’ an identity that way.

In short, whatever the data you have, I don’t believe that there are two posters with the same ‘Mojo’ IHub name.

Money managers have no interest in keeping the share price down. When the volume of shares traded is zero, they make no money at all. When the volume of shares is high, they can make their money.

The shifts in price are due to investors and traders who are trying to buy and sell shares in a stock. When someone offers a premium and their order is filled, the stock will jump down to the average level investors are willing to buy/sell shares.

If you want the share price to go up, buy a lot of shares at a high price. Might I suggest you put in an order to buy 10 million shares at a dollar a share? That will drive the share price up to a dollar/share … until your order is filled.

SMH

Unfortunately no.

Each moth does not produce eggs. Only those of the female persuasion. I’m pretty sure that females don’t count the number of eggs they produce and stop at 500. The number varies between 200 and 500.

But KBLB has discovered that you can’t just interbreed all of the silkworms you have grown. Some of them are better than others. Note the language from the most recent PR:

“Under the guidance of Dr. Nirmal Kumar and through a meticulous, statistically-based selective breeding protocol, the parental strains for the BAM-1 hybrid were further optimized during the production cycle.”

‘Selective breeding’ means not all of the silkworms were bred. We should all understand by now that maintaining and growing a breeding pool is far more complex than simply allowing all silkworms to make and keeping all of their progeny.

It’s hard to have patience when we have waited so long for success. Assuming the viability of the BAM-1 production model, KBLB can ramp up production over time. But they are not going from 0 metric tons to 1000 metric tons per month overnight, at least not if they want to maintain the quality of their silk.

I’d rather have KBLB go through a controlled growth that maintains quality than an uncontrolled growth that sacrifices quality. Wouldn’t you?

Trainer2: “Seems like there will be a time in the future where the rocket engine will be ignited.”

Emphasis on the word ‘future.’ Thompson has a long history of going off in too many different directions: immunity silkworms, nearly-pure spider silk, other variants on DS, all while neglecting the core problem: creating a robust silkworm platform to produce DS.

The last thing I want him to do is to attempt twelve more new directions at this time. KBLB may or may not continue to work on their 4-parent-line hybrid production model. If BAM-1 turns out to be good enough to abandon that model, I’d prefer he take up variants on spider silk silkworms instead of spending effort to develop a mundane silkworm production model that has a far lower profit margin.

Focus on your strengths, not on everything you might be able to do.

Until you have made your first substantial production cycle, you are still learning how to crawl.

Even if KBLB was capable of providing eggs for a thousand metric tons per year, don’t you think they would prefer a thousand tons of BAM-1/DS than eight hundred tons of mundane silk and 200 tons of BAM-1/DS.

Production costs will be about the same. Sales price for BAM-1/DS should be higher. Bigger markup = bigger profit.

KBLB may have done some useful work in developing disease resistant silkworms. But that can be done by other competitors. If it is a lucrative market, KBLB will have a lot of competition.

But let me ask you: What would you prefer? KBLB developing new and improved versions of DS, or developing mundane silkworms by crossing existing strains and breeding for disease resistance?

KBLB does not appear to currently have a line of mundane silkworms comparable to BAM-1. I suspect this project is on the back burner if it is still being considered at all.

KBLB would rather raise and sell a higher-premium silk like the DS based BAM-1 than to generate and sell mundane eggs. The markup is higher.

Ramping up to metric ton production levels will be KBLB’s next goal. Notice that I said ‘ramping up.’ KBLB does not appear to have the breeding pool necessary to support even a single metric ton of silk per breeding cycle. Reaching that level and sustaining it represents a new challenge for KBLB.

Before you climb into a rocket and fire the engine, learn how to fly.
Before you learn how to fly, learn how to run.
Before you learn how to run, learn how to walk.

KBLB needs to learn how to walk. If it succeeds, it will learn how to run.

Instead of an explosion, (which tend to be messy and not sustainable), let’s hope that KBLB takes a more methodical approach and demonstrates they can do what everyone hopes they can. Selling mundane silkworms ought to be pretty low on KBLB’s radar right now.

Thompson has tripped over his own ambitions too many times already.

Good news. It also clarifies that no BAM-1 silkworms were used for producing silk — just an effort to increase the colony size. People who thought BAM-1 silk was being produced were mistaken. The 10-K report will be out sometime in the next 10 days or so and we will see if KBLB reported any increase in their silk inventory since January.

The other thing that caught my eye was wording “… in a batch of thousands of silkworms.”

Thousands of silkworms aren’t a lot. ‘Tens of thousands’ would have been quite a bit better. With fewer than 10,000 silkworms, nearly all of the viable moths will be used to increase the breeding pool of parental lines.

They may need to push back silk production until after the next crop reproduces, somewhere around the third or fourth week in June. If that is the case, the first BAM-1 silk should become available around the end of July.

It could be the case that ‘thousands of silkworms’ was simply imprecise and the number was in the tens of thousands.

We’ll learn more down the road … the KBLB way.

Four rooms like the one shown would not come anywhere close to a metric ton of silk.

5.5 million cocoons are needed for a metric ton. If we divide that by 4, each room would have to hold about 1.4 million cocoons. What they showed doesn’t come close to that.


Sorry, No Sale.

You want my prediction? A 50% chance of hitting a buck by the end of 2023. How about that?

People can fantasize all they like about how rich they think they will be. But arguing that other investors should ‘back the truck up’ and ‘load up on shares’ because they project a multi-dollar share price ‘soon’ is a not-so-subtle way to pump the stock.

I’m just trying to keep things real on the board. Potential investors need to understand the uncertainty involved here.

Thompson was never specific about his production timeline to investors. When did he state KBLB would produce their first metric ton? How many metric tons does he anticipate producing in 2023? Show me the PR.

You can’t.

Beat on your chest all you want. I’m still going to keep reminding people about the facts and reality we live in.

Thanks for providing yet more evidence why investors are skeptical of KBLB’s claims. We have an extensive track record of broken promises and I believe that weighs down on KBLB’s recent announcements and keeps the share price from moving up much on their PRs.

Having said that, KBLB is once again at a point where they are making a serious effort to ‘scale and sale.’ My impression is that Thompson knows a great deal more about what is necessary to produce silk at commercial quantities and has considerable confidence that the outcome will (at last) be sufficient to produce meaningful quantities of silk.

In early December, KBLB still seemed to me to be floundering about with no clear path to success. Today I think there is a great deal to be hopeful for, while still mindful of the risks involved.

We will see what the future holds, the KBLB way.

Want2retire: “Since December the company has provided consistent updates showing CONSISTENT PROGRESS.”

They have certainly shown CONSISTENT ACTIVITY. In late 2019, KBLB was providing updates on their CONSISTENT PROGRESS to produce silk. Exciting times! Until things fell apart in January the next year. OOPS! We’ve gotten a few progress reports and they have been good, but KBLB has remained vague about their timeline for production and there are still plenty of chances for the KBLB train to, once again, go off the rails.

Want2retire: “WHEN products and revenues happen, likely in the next few months, the markets will take notice and the share price will rocket higher. Soon after this OTC penny stock will be trading in dollars on NASDAQ.”

IF products and revenues happen in the next few months, the markets will take notice and the share price will increase. Will it reach a dollar? Two? Five? Eight? Twenty? (Eight and twenty were among the candidates suggested recently.)

No one, including you, knows.

But the higher the imagined price, the less likely that outcome will happen in the ‘soon after’ period. As fun as the multi-dollar visions of sugarplums happen to be, let’s start off by aiming for a buck a share, okay?

According to Mojo (who is never wrong), we are only 60 days away from that benchmark. We’ll see if we reach that benchmark on his timeline. Then discussions of uplisting to NASDAQ and multi-dollar share prices will be more than idle fantasies.

Please tell me how to exploit the people who believe me. I am eager to learn this exotic technique for making money in a stock I am not actively trading.

Inquiring minds want to know!

Agreed 100%.

Several of the PRs recently strike me as follows:

1) Thompson is moving pieces onto the board for a rapid growth in silk production under the assumption that Bam-1 will prove a viable platform for commercial scale silk production.

2) Thompson is releasing PRs to attract attention to KBLB and generate the best possible share price to create a high share price baseline for a big announcement.

Although the share price may not increase following these PRs, there is less likelihood of it dropping back down.

If you think of it as a PR campaign to best position KBLB’s share price before a big announcement, his actions are sensible.

I am still projecting the earliest significant production news date in mid-June, but investors might get more production-related PRs before then.

We will see. The KBLB way.

lol!

I am completely unashamed for arguing that investors should consider selling shares before a buyout.

KBLB may be wildly successful and Thompson decides not to accept any buyout offers, but the share price hits (engaging in wild fantasy now), $20/share.

An investor needs cash to pay for their child’s higher education. Would it be okay to do that? Or are they forced into waiting until a buyout occurs?

Same story for an investor with enormous health bills? What about someone who wants to pay off their 7% home mortgage?

Telling everyone to wait until a buyout ignores all of the real-world issues investors face.

Thompson has put himself in a situation once again where he is the only person who decides on accepting or rejecting a buyout offer. Perhaps he will make a decision we all agree on. Perhaps he doesn’t.

The future comes with no guarantees … except DoD funding is a ‘slam dunk.’ Or not.

There is no way to predict if or when a buyout will occur. You believe it is likely, but it may never happen.

There are lots and lots of good reasons not to wait for a buyout. Selling before a buyout is not ‘one of the worst things anyone can do in their lifetime.’

Small correction: the Federal government has a long-term capital gains tax that runs between 0%, 15%, and 20% depending on your gross annual income level and your filing status. State taxes (if any) are on top of this. Several states that I have paid taxes in don’t provide a long-term capital gains tax rate. The income is just taxed at the same rate normal income. That may vary by state, though.

There is an additional 3.8% federal net investment tax for income beyond a threshold that again depends on filing status.

Many online share traders will allow you to prioritize the sale of shares by tax lots. If you have some short shares and some long shares, you can specify the older tax lots to sell off and wait for the shares held for less than 1 year to reach that point.

If you assume that the share price will remain stable or increase over time, to minimize your overall tax payments, hold your short-term shares until they are long-term shares; consider splitting share sales across years to increase the percentage of shares sold in the 15% capital-gains tax rate.

Shares donated to a charitable organization can be deducted at their value on the date of transfer. Suppose you bought a million shares at 3 cents/share and gave that to a University or Foundation. Your $30,000 investment could produce a tax deduction of $1 million. However, there are limits to how much of this deduction can be claimed in the year of donation.

If a buyout occurs, you will owe taxes on all of the shares bought out on the date the buyout occurs. If the buyout is to be held early in the calendar year, consider selling half of your shares in December of the previous year and letting the other half be bought out. This will reduce your overall income tax liability. For a negotiated buyout price, the share price will be slightly lower than the buyout price as the buyout date nears.

But the advice to seek the services of a financial planner is wise especially if you expect to earn a 7-figure total from your sales.

Time to market depends on if/when the first metric ton of silk appears, what dilution ratios they employ, and the kind of products they want to make.

A metric ton of silk in a 90%/10% blend makes 10 tons of material. They could spin up a limited edition hoodie in about 6 months. A limited edition silk tie would be a little faster.

Lots of uncertainty in predicting the possibilities. If Thompson makes a half ton of silk in June, we might see products by Christmas. But 18 months to market is also a possibility.

Stay tuned…

Jealmc, thanks for your clarification of breeding practices. Some new information for me.

I am pretty sure that KBLB did not take cocoons over to Vietnam. Instead, they probably took over eggs that had been cooled for transportation. The timing on cocoons would just be all-but-impossible and handling issues are worse.

That means the cocoons photographed are the first generation of BAM-1 parental lines produced in Vietnam, not cocoons from HQ sent over to produce eggs for the first generation.

It’s really hard to get a good count of the actual number of cocoons on the racks: some layers have a bunch, others very few. On the rack in the center of the pictures I counted around 560 cocoons. If we multiply that by 11, that gives a count of 6,160. If we assume there were four batches of the same size, that means a total of 24,640.

It takes a breeding pool of 40,000 to 50,000 to sustain the breeding pool and produce enough eggs for metric ton production. Only about 250 males and 250 females are needed to produce those eggs. Let’s make a conservative estimate and say that 2000 silkworms will be set aside from this generation to produce the eggs for the next one. The remainder can be cross-bred for silk.

That implies 22,640 silkworms from the current crop could be cross-bred. That should produce about 2.2 million eggs. In that case, the first crop of BAM-1 silk should be about half a metric ton. This will require about 45 days for production, meaning June 10th or so for the first half-ton of BAM-1 DS.

YMMV.

I think the average female lays between 200 to 300 eggs, not 500. Whether or not the BAM-1 parent strains produce a larger number, it’s hard to say.

These numbers should always be treated as approximations. Not every female will produce viable eggs and they don’t all lay the same number of eggs.

I’ve used 300 eggs/female in my calculations. An average number across a large pool of females (including those whose eggs are not viable for one reason or another) might be more along the lower boundary of 200 eggs/female, but the computations don’t vary that much.

Jetow: “All that said I believe we are close to production and contract news…. Won't be that long in my opinion.”

So many ways to convey the same vague idea: “coming soon.”

Heard that before. I’ve stated mid-June or early August for a while now as the date we get the first batch of Bam-1 silk.

We already have a contract. Determining the date of another is impossible without more data. But it is ‘coming soon,’ I’m sure.

I agree that it takes 5.5 million silkworms (approximately) to make a metric ton. But you don’t breed all 5.5 million silkworms.

You need about 20,000 breeding pairs to produce the eggs needed for silk and to sustain the breeding colony. Thus they only need to select 20,000 males and 20,000 females to place in the breeding cups.

I’m guessing they collect all of the hatched moths at some time, put the males from Bam-1A into one bin, the females from Bam-1A into another, take them all into the breeding room, pick out a male 1A and a female 1B, place them under a cup, and repeat 20,000 times. That gives you about 6 million eggs. 5.5 million of those eggs won’t be bred.

Again, this is how sericulture currently operates. It is labor intensive to maintain the breeding pool and distribute the eggs. This is the main reason why we don’t produce much silk in the US. Too labor intensive.

I understood your question. Are they planning to reel some of the cocoons for silk, or are they rearing them all for egg production. Since these cocoons have been taken out of the spinning racks, it’s a great question to ask.

I don’t have the answer.

I was adding new information, that even the silkworms raised for egg production can contribute something useful to KBLB.

During the mating process, a male silkworm and a female silkworm are placed underneath a cup on a piece of special material. It is easy to determine the male and female silkworms: females are much larger than males. After mating, the female will lay her eggs on the material underneath her cup. She dies shortly after laying eggs.

Because silkworms are blind, they don’t really care that things are happening in the dark.

In short, this process is part of the normal activity in rearing silkworms. All KBLB has to do is to keep the parent lines in separate rooms. As they hatch, they grab a female from one room and a male from the other, put them under the cup, and nature takes its course.

The only real trick here is that the parent lines have to hatch at the same time. The moths only live a few days after hatching. They can’t eat or drink in moth form.

Money4Nothing: “The last photo in the PR shows a huge pile of cocoons without holes. Do they pull them off the trays to let them emerge somewhere else? Or do they let them emerge on those racks.

“Or is that big pile in the photo headed for the boiling water?”

Good questions. I’ve always assumed the cocoons were removed from the spinning racks before hatching, but that may not be the case.

There are apparently a couple of methods that can turn cocoons back into ‘goo.’ This can be done on hatched cocoons and is potentially a way to use the silk in other applications. The ratio is about 150:1, but if you think of raising 5.5 million silkworms for a metric ton of silk, that still leaves you with around 40,000 cocoons that could be used for goo purposes.

Once again, thanks for sharing DD about KBLB’s competitors. Always useful to me to keep track of what they are up to.

The walls at Prodigy tended towards white as well. I don’t think these eggs are being reared at Prodigy. Would be interesting to know where they have chosen to raise BAM-1.

Not sure that it matters. The facility seems to be well-equipped for its job. We may find out more in the future.

You seem to be forgetting ‘genetic drift.’ KBLB linked eye-color and the genetic sequences for producing GMO silk together. They then selected silkworms for breeding that had the correct eye color. Unfortunately, the genetic sequences for GMO silk got lost in that selection/replication process.

It happened before. Don’t pretend genetic replication across generations is assured by biology. Simply not true, especially when messing around with the genome of an organism using gene editing tools.

I’m just trying to reduce the confusion that other readers on this board may have on these points. Nothing I am going to say will impact the entrenched misunderstandings of a number of posters here who disagree with the truth.