DRG, I do appreciate a respectful disagreement when it occurs; you have managed to express an alternate viewpoint without any insults or name calling! I'm good with that!
And I am also tapped out! I can no longer put additional funds into this investment; all I can do now is pray that the warrant holders see the benefit of exercising the warrants as soon as they are in the money (or shortly after - just long enough to be confident in the PPS trend). As much as I'd like to triple my current position, I'm stuck where I am and that should do just fine. I've done the math on virtually all feasible outcomes from 50 cents to $200 per share, and what each does to my potential retirement date. I'm at peace with the worst case scenario and would be ecstatic with the best case.
I still don't see the "blunder after blunder" as such; I see good, steady progress on the development side, and I see a bad circumstance that happened regarding this past raise, giving the shorts an opportunity to ravage our price and as long as they can continue to maintain the current atmosphere of negative investor sentiment, they will continue to fill their pockets. It's not their fault; it's what they do and we know that; the delay in the raise enhanced the negativity and gave the shorts a huge bonus riding the rip tide. Was it a management screw up? Was it our buddy Phil spreading continued misinformation so his pals can get rich? Was it blatant incompetence by Northland or Bloom? I have no idea if it was none, one, or all of the above. And there is nothing I can do about it except look forward.
I have been prone to being a little more defensive overall here, mostly out of frustration with some of the opinions expressed here. Occasionally they seem to be aimed a little too directly at me and I am not one usually one to bow out of a battle of wits, but I occasionally try to just ignore and move on. Not always. The excessively blatant misinformation and some of the general stupidity just needs to be squashed with facts and logic on occasion. SPORT, I'm not talking about you specifically here; we seem to have had some contentious posts lately but I do recall a similar situation a few weeks back and at the end I agreed to disagree and offered to buy you a drink in Vegas, should we meet up there.
I know I can't make everybody happy and I wish there was something I could do to make people less miserable. Maybe it will help if I can provide an explanation as to just part of why I am so upbeat about this company:
Folks have expressed doubt here about the design freeze. They don't seem to know that a confidence build represents 99.X% of the final design; it is effectively frozen for the next round of trials from a system/electrical/mechanical standpoint; basic control software algorithms are all typically in place by that point. They most likely are porting existing code to a newer OS with support for the new processors and digital architecture, and adding redundancy and other safety features to the software but the functionality is there; maybe just adding a few features. Another purpose for the confidence build is to work with suppliers and manufacturers to thoroughly document the subassembly designs, perform revised sub-system verifications and final integration testing. They will probably tweak their QMS to accommodate some supplier specialties. Manufacturing instructions are typically developed, reviewed, and approved (at least preliminarily - those are always subject to change!) during and/or right after this phase. They have stated that they are seeking a sleeker, lighter design; I caught somewhere that they are eliminating external cabling (anyone who has been in an OR probably dreaded cleaning a system with external cables and the "pinch points" where cables are secured). Any feature you've heard them mention should be in this confidence build. Formal design freeze means they have put some proverbial miles on the hardware and collected data to accompany the design documentation for regulatory filings; the clinical data will need to include patient data with results and follow-ups as well as utilization data regarding the SPORT system itself. If you look at the latest milestones, you'll see the confidence build wrap up in Q4 2018, and the next two milestones are predominantly documentation and prep for filing. BTW, these milestones are good targets for reeling in a schedule. Q1 and Q2 2019 are all documentation!
Manufacturing doc updates will include things like "we should use blue loctite vs. red because we may need to replace that assembly on a service call" or "Crap! There's no copper in this grade of stainless so that threadlock won't cure!" or "I'm not sure that suppler will be around much longer so let's evaluate some options." Design freeze in the schedule is a formality for the regulatory process, but in reality the design is pretty damned close to frozen right now. That is the part of my investment that I best know and understand, and I hope this helps explain why I am so upbeat about this investment.
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With all due respect '66. Most of those who aren't being good "SPORTS" about it are the ones who can no longer dump money into this investment. Those who are still able to dump thousands upon thousands of dollars into it in order to offset further dilution seem to be the ones who have an easier time being good "SPORTS" and displaying good attitudes even though management seems to make blunder after blunder.
