Alto Ingredients Inc (ALTO)

[Harry Winston]

I'm not complaining. I'm really not.

Pacific Ethanol is one of the companies that is involved in some litigation with about two dozen other companies against the Greenshift Corporation, so theoretically, every time there's good news in the courtroom for Greenshift, that should mean bad news for Pacific Ethanol, and the price of PEIX stock should go down.

This relationship should work just as well in reverse, too. If there's good news in court for the group of companies that are being sued by Greenshift, then the PEIX price should go up and the GERS price should come down.

Here's the interesting part. On Thursday the 7th, this Statement of Compliance was filed with the Appeals Court on Wednesday March 6th. It was reported on the unofficial Greenshift news site on Thursday March 7th.

The owner of the website emphasized that the specific language of the filing said that settlement negotiations have been conducted (not that they are being conducted. This is explicitly what they said.

Plaintiffs-Appellants GS Cleantech Corporation and GreenShift Corporation, Defendants-Appellees, and Defendant-Cross-Appellant, identified below, hereby certify that they have conducted settlement discussions in accordance with Federal Circuit Rule 33(a)(2).

The owner of that website either believes or wants to believe that the settlement mentioned here is some talks that were concluded half a year ago without an agreement of any kind.

I said on the Greenshift board that I didn't necessarily agree with his analysis. In fact, I said that the language of this filing left open the possibility that settlement negotiations were in progress now! If that is what is happening, then the probability of a financial loss for Pacific Ethanol has gone down, and that is a good reason why the price of PEIX stock jumped 17% on Friday even though the price of GERS stock was down only 1% the same day after doubling during the previous week and a half.

There's some justification for my belief, too. The Appeals Court required some settlement talks to take place prior to the case being heard by those judges, so Pacific Ethanol and the other defendants in the case did negotiate with Greenshift, but after many months of negotiations, they couldn't agree to much of anything. This was reported to the Appeals Court, which is why the case is now being heard by the Appeals Court judges.

This stock is listed on the NASDAQ, but its' market cap is only around $65 million, even after Friday's 17% jump, Friday's trading volume was more than double the average volume that Yahoo reports, and it isn't on a major energy index.

In my very humble opinion, the market for PEIX reacted positively to the possibility of a settlement.