is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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13:39 AVFCY ADVFN Plc Sponsored ADR (UK) 04/13/2007
Anyone happen to recognize this one?
It's the parent company of Investors Hub and Silicon Investor. Each ADR (share) will represent 100 shares of the UK-traded stock, so once it's set up with a marketmaker or marketmakers, the current conversion rate would price the ADR's in the $5.20 range.
No ETA yet on when it should start trading over here.
http://ih.advfn.com/p.php?pid=nmona&cb=1177513785&article=20337422&symbol=L%5EAFN
My understanding is that it'll trade on the Pinks, but I'm going to do some research to see what the difference would be for OTCBB. If I understand the posts correctly (on the ADVFN message board for ADVFN) Level 1 ADR's impose the same (relatively light) burdens on the foreign company whether traded on the Pinks or OTCBB. I know the company, for now, would like to avoid even more expensive red tape/listing requirements and things are already getting nearly as tough in the UK as SarbOx here.
But they still want to be traded here not only to give site users and other Yanks the ability to be shareholders (it's really tough and expensive for me to buy their shares right now) but to increase the visibility of our sites over here.
Disclosure for those who don't know me from Adam: I worked for Silicon Investor as its Admin from 1997 to 2001. I joined Matt in 2002 to turn his hobby/obsession into a viable business and do the programming and we acquired SI in 2003. When ADVFN acquired Investors Hub and Silicon Investor in September, 2006, I became the President of US Operations for ADVFN and have accumulated a substantial position in the company's shares since then. Substantial, but not at the "have to report" level yet.
If anyone starts an AVFCY board, I'll be happy to participate and answer questions to the extent possible, but keep in mind that my visibility is only into the US side of things and I can't discuss anything very material about the company or the happenings on this side of the pond if it's not already covered in a PR.
The spike lasted the better part of a day, then it was gone.
It was a 2-4 bagger in one day, though I'd been accumulating shares for ages.
I was surprised that the size of my sell order allowed a fill all at one price.
Remebering that you're as much into old-school Queen as I am, have you checked out YouTube? Some excellent recordings of live performance of "Liar" and "Ogre Battle".
Incredible to believe they were making only about $100 a week by the time they recorded "Bohemian Rhapsody". No wonder the album starts with "Death on Two Legs" and the lyric "You suck my blood like a leach...", with emphasis on it really starting with just the two words "You suck".
I've always known Freddie Blassie as the guy whose song "Pencil-Necked Geek" as a staple of the Dr. Demento show back when I was an avid listener in the 70's and 80's. Back when Weird Al was getting popular doing songs recorded with his accordian in the dorm restroom ("My Bologna", "Another One Rides the Bus", "Yoda", etc)
Enjoyed Andre the Giant in "The Princess Bride".
Edit: Getting real tired of network errors and hope they go away soon.
I may be facing exactly that same situation soon.
The guy I bought the Datsun 2000 and BMW 530i from happens to have a DeLorean he'd like to sell. The price seems reasonable enough (attainable) but I have no idea what condition it's in yet aside from the fact that it looks costmetically perfect though not freshly-detailed clean by a long shot.
I'll be seeing him at the track in a couple of weeks and hope to find out more about the car.
Doing better than I. I couldn't make heads or tails of it when I read it later.
Wasn't their "big product" a long-lasting dog chew toy?
I hit REAL big on that one and it was pure dumb luck because of some email touting takeover or some such nonsense. Seemed it traded in the 4-6 cent range forever. Before I knew there was a term for it (tape-painting), I bought 5k of it right before the close every day at market if the last trade wasn't at the ask. Did that for months, so I ended up with way too large a position in it then happened to be at the computer the day of the spike and sold the whole position into it for more than a double, despite having written it off and quit buying long before then.
In retrospect, I can't imagine why I ever thought it could be a viable company or at least large enough to justify any kind of real valuation.
Several years ago there was a company I traded a lot with this same ticker. Surely not the same company. That one went belly up. Shortly after some tout email went out that handed me a golden bail-out opportunity, which I took.
So you saved the nudity for when you got an office with a door?
Really wish you'd close that darned thing sometimes!
I was re-reading that post of mine this morning when reading a PM'd reply to it.
I was stunned. I've written a LOT of sentences on these boards over the years and that one was, by far, the most horribly constructed one I've EVER written.
Let me rephrase it.
As a former "basher" myself, I know that when you start out pointing out flaws in the reasoning of the optimistic and vocal majority, and you get refuted, your feelings are easily hurt and you can get discouraged from continuing.
Only the really persistent end up thick-skinned enough to continue for any length of time.
To add to the point made by Dave, Shelly, and others:
In my experience, the majority of those whose opinions differ from the majority have thinner skin than the majority.
A mentality of "Why should I go over there and refute the 'facts'? I'm just gonna get called a 'basher', or outright flamed."
We're grabbing a bit tighter onto the reins so that those who have a point of view contrary to the crowd can feel better about expressing that point of view.
As long as they refute the supposed "facts" or even opinions without resorting to name-calling in doing so.
now launch a takeover of ADVFN...that was the plan all the time...right...RIGHT???
Actually, yes.
A marketing rep from ADVFN emailed me a long time ago expressing an interest in advertising here.
In the course of my normal DD for direct advertisers, I was so impressed with what I found that I replied back asking if they'd consider being acquired because they have exactly the kind of content/product we need and can't build on our own.
More digging and I realized they were a public company valued way outside our relatively meager means. So I did a follow-up email asking if they'd be interested in acquiring us.
Clem met me in Kansas just a week or two later and, over dinner, pints, and billiards, we reached a tentative verbal agreement. As I'm sure everyone has figured out by now, my and Matt's trip to London was so everyone could inspect everyone else, a deal was agreed to shortly after the trip, and it finally came to fruition a seeming eternity later.
I think Clem had me at "I'll buy this round". <g>
Really, everyone involved knew very quickly this was an ideal match. They wanted a big American footprint and we wanted exactly their kind of content to increase our shoe size.
I've often been asked if we shouldn't have waited and gotten a higher price or stayed private so the profits could just accumulate (and belong to a handful of people rather than a much larger company and its shareholders), but the bottom line is we've always been nothing more than message boards and while that model was good for a while (and still is), our heads would've been handed to us in a couple of years if we stuck with it.
now remind me why you sold this?
It's a joking-around question we ask in-house all the time.
Answer: Because as well as we're doing now, we still couldn't achieve even a fraction of what we've got in mind long-term without a LOT more resources (people and content) than we had.
One of the people running the site. Babies cry at the sight of them, dogs piddle on their shoes, and chicks don't dig them.
Trying to remember if I wrote that. Sounds like me.
Dang! Nice catch!
Am I the only other person who realizes that's Stan's older sister "Shelly" from South Park and she's real mean?
Fits in with the spirit of what Cheeky Kid did on SI making me Eric Cartman's "cop" character.
I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome and introduce the newest member of the iHub team, IH Admin [Shelly]. Her job is specifically Admin duties, helping relieve some of the burden for Dave and Matt.
Please go easy on her as we get her accustomed to her duties.
Shelly, don't let the revolving door scare ya. We've got our arms very nicely around the Admin position since all but one person in the organization has been an Admin or pre-WWW equivalent, including Meathead, and we know we picked a great person for the job.
Welcome Aboard!
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/profile.asp?user=97314
Wow! What a thorough yet concise and exactly correct answer!!!
Dye your hair?
You don't.
Subscriptions don't renew automatically. 5 days before, 2 days before, and on the day of your subscription expiration the system will PM you to let you know you're going to expire so you can manually get another subscription.
New subscriptions, btw, are tacked onto the end of current subscriptions, so you don't have to wait until the current one expires.
Didj'all get a answer?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in the United States of Americaland (I'm a Top Gear fanatic), they're closed Friday but will be open all day Monday.
Edit: Did you know we're now a British company? It seems to be a very well-guarded secret that we're a wholly-owned subsidiary of ADVFN. I'm even gradually learning to speak (or at least understand) English.
If I gave you the right answer about the markets over the holidays, perhaps you could return the favor by answering a question for me?
I recently used the phrase "pony up" (American for "fork over some money") only to have my British associate laugh at me and tell me "pony" is cockney rhyming slang where the omitted word is "trap", leading me to quickly realize what the rhyme was.
But what on earth is a pony trap and why would one need to trap a pony anyway?
BTW, I absolutely love the rhyming slang for "Yanks". :) Pony storage for those of us who are so remote we're not on "normal" water inflow/outflow systems.
If there is, I'm not aware of one, but if you or someone else starts one, I'll be an active participant.
I think the real estate bubble is nearing completion of its deflation cycle and plan to increase my participation. I'm eyeing some local houses along with a home-builder friend and even looking at a lot near the office with a long-vacant house and garage on it and a tiny house on the neighboring lot. I'm looking at the latter with the possibility in mind of leveling both houses and putting up a very large office building.
It's hard to gauge the demand for office space out here because there simply isn't any that's available. This town and the neighboring one I live in filled up very quickly in the past year with companies very much like this one. Ones that don't need proximity to any city and for whom the distance from the labor pool isn't an issue, though it's turned into one for us. That should improve, though, as houses and nice multi-family units are being built at a pretty rapid pace and none are vacant. They're usually filled before they're built.
Edit: A factor very much on the plus side of leveling the nearby houses and putting up a big enough office to hold multiple companies is that it's exactly next door to the phone company switching office, and I happen to know one company that's just a few more employees away from needing to move into more space. ;)
Actually, if you add "Discussion" below the ticker, we're golden and can discuss pricing via email.
do you mean a gray area legally??
Morally. The legal ramifications would fall to the advertiser; not us. We're just the publisher.
We've never allowed a ticker itself to be advertised. Because we don't want ads that smack of "Buy this stock". What you propose falls into a more palatable grab area because it'd be more like "Talk about this stock". Wouldn't likely cause me restless nights.
Email me at bobz@investorshub.com about it.
It's a bit of a gray area. Specifically the thing of a ticker being promoted rather than a company. Will have to think about it since the landing page would be here rather than an IR firm or the company itself.
Knee-jerk reaction: I'm open to it. Homepage is some real pricey real estate, though, and we try to reserve it for the big advertisers like the brokerages, but I don't think any of them are there right now.
As soon as possible (Meatloaf and the Grubmaster are busy moving computers right now), we'll make it possible to make donations via the site to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. They have a fund specifically for this and have quite a bit of support from the local community.
I'll post details as soon as we're ready. It'll be done through our current subscription-processing routines which I've already used repeatedly for non-subscription things.
I'm sure all of us know you need to conserve your energies and don't expect replies. More like "What're you doing posting?!? Heal!"
Know that you're very much in our thoughts, old friend. And I echo the sentiment that if anyone can beat it, our man Ze'ev's that guy!
I finally got that ad and located the culprit. Frequent brief outages of my internet connection making it hard to kill it. I've got sound-making ads disabled, but this one snuck through and I'm gonna just block SalesGenie completely. And Tribal Fusion is getting a major nasty-gram tomorrow.
Wow- I want to come work with you <vbg>.
With my track record? I think not. We went through bookkeepers (and even a programmer and now a CSR) like Spinal Tap went through drummers until Sonya came along.
Hey, I think in most cases the former employee is where the blame belongs on a mismatch. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has ever been loose with the truth when applying/interviewing for a job. A running joke around here is "[desired skillset here] is what I do best!" then when I'd get offered the job, I'd have to work like crazy to get up to proper speed. Like when a company asked me how well I knew Access programming and I said "It's what I do best!", got the gig, and on the way home bought Access and a lot of books.
No such issue with Tree. He was very forthcoming and nothing he said in the interview was later found to be untrue. I'm as impressed with him today as I was 6 weeks ago and would gladly give him a good reference. Unfortunately, due to my not really understanding the position we were filling, we put the wrong person (but a good and valuable person) in the job. More unfortunately, the kind of tech savvy needed isn't easily found in and around Boogerville.
Out here, an IBM Selectric is leading edge stuff.
Tree is no longer an admin?
Correct. Tree is no longer an admin and really was a kinda "pseudo-admin" in a way. Not a full-blown admin (what we call a "judge" in-house) like Dave and Matt, but helping immensely with the support queue and some of the more obvious and egregious TOS violations.
He's still part of the family, though, and could be wearing a uniform for us in the future.
What happened is that we screwed up in the job definition and what skills would be needed for the position. We'd never had a CS Rep before and had mistakenly approached it with the belief that people skills (which Tree has) were more important than depth of technical expertise. A lot of the support that I took over when he was off were things I knew were way over his head and it'd take a long time for him to come up to speed.
So we're looking again and now we're a little wiser. We know that providing customer support for iHub, SI, and ADVFN is pretty darned technical.
Was a learning experience for us because Dave, John, and I are geeks and Matt's 60% of a geek (promoted from 50%) and since the former 3 of us are OLD geeks, we fell into the trap of thinking of a lot of stuff that's relatively easy for us as not being particularly "technical". To give an example, one of the calls I took was "Why can't I post when I just registered." The steps it took for me to determine that the user had entered their email address incorrectly were easy for me, but way beyond the scope of most people. Checking the account, remote-viewing our email server and filtering the SMTP logs to determine the verification email had bounced. Easy to say, tough to do.
We bear Tree no ill will and he bears us none and we parted friends with the understanding that we were dealing with a mismatch entirely of our own creation and that there could possibly be a niche within our organization that he could fill down the road, but it's not one we're trying to fill at the moment.
I agree about the default news views and showed them what I meant when a couple of them were out here last week. Hopefully it'll get changed for us.
To highlight multiple items that aren't adjacent to each other, hold down your Ctrl key with each click.
Edit: Can't believe the 1k grub was sitting there for half an hour!
Yeah, I'm not even remotely a fan of Java, but there are some cool things being done with it, especially in Charts, that simply can't be done in VBScript.
Odd. I'm at the office and when I use the new menu items I'm staying logged in, though I'm losing my personal CSS settings.
And I guess the Portfolio is cookie'd. I created one using my account at home (though it didn't appear I was logged in despite the face I was) and was able to revisit it at home, but can't at the office.
Needs to be tied to the user account; not cookies.
Is it just me or is hitting a link in the new second menu strap supposed to make it look like you're logged out? Complete with no CSS, MailBox link goes to RegUser, etc.
Edit: And the second strap should be mirrored in the bottom ala SI.
Edit 2: There's no bottom menu on any of the ih.advfn.com pages in addition to there being leaderboard ads at the top because I'm apparently not logged in as far as ih.advfn.com is concerned.
Edit 3: Maybe we should have a process in place where we, oh, I dunno, have multiple people within the company test things before they go into production. I don't think this bit is ready for prime-time yet and I kinda used to have this thing about getting most of the changing/fixing done before production.
Edit 4: The cat goes and gets an unpleasant intimate medical inspection done involving a pipe with 2-digit centimeter markings on it and comes back to find the mice have pimped out his scratching post with 22" spinners.
I discussed this with our sales rep and he's yanked the ad pending further information. It might take up to 15 minutes for the ad delivery system to quit delivering it though.
Ahhh.... Good point!
So I guess we'll have to patch it until we move SI next weekend.
We did? I can't think of any reason it'd break even temporarily. Same db box.
It's running on 2 webservers now and John said the 3rd would be up shortly.
We're going to have to figure out how to make the CSS thing work in the new environment since the files have to be on all webservers.
The Forex link 404'd on me. Hopefully John's reading this board while he's at the ISP.
My css settings are intact. I think John said he was going to copy the whole directory structure over.
How's responsiveness?