My take on it…
Frank and company are releasing these "fluff" PR's in order to keep the PPS down
Once you release a fluff PR saying "we might have a carrier" then you release a solid PR giving details, you can expect that the solid PR will not cause a flux of the PPS since it was expected and likely it was not as good as people are hoping.
It's like when I tell my boss I might finish a project early, and then at the end of the week I tell him I have finished early. He's not impressed, because he expected it.
Now you might wonder why they would want to keep the PPS down?
Potential has a lot of buying power that you can't touch with cash at times.
Example: Frank wants to hire Ellen, but she wants $10,000,000. Frank doesn't have that kind of cash.
But he does have stock, so if he can convince Ellen that his company and therefore his stock have potential value, he might be able to hire her for say 5,000,000 shares of stock. So if he keeps the PPS down, then that "potential" is worth more than it would be if the PPS were higher. This actually happens a lot in developing companies, they keep the PPS down intentionally so they can recruit better people using stock in place of a higher salary.
A real world example is a friend of mine signed with Amazon when it first started up. He was making about $110k a year as a development manager at Microsoft. He took the job at Amazon for $60k plus 100,000 shares of stock. Amazon worked to keep the PPS share low before they made their IPO, because a low PPS share is a powerful bargaining chip.
Just my .02
--sbcroix
AI
