I’ve never posted on this board before but I’ve been diligently reading this SPPH thread since I bought a small amount of it several months ago after they first announced the “buyout”. At the time I was new to trading stocks and it seemed like easy money. And when the stock shot up to .61 cents I thought I was a freaking genius and this game was almost too easy. In retrospect, I now know that I was what experienced investors like to call “dumb money”. Since that time, I’ve watched the stock fall as low as .06 cents a share. But rather than get frustrated or upset, I’ve used this as motivation to never make the same mistake again by reading, reading, and reading more about stocks, trading strategies, and, in particular, the pitfalls of trading penny stocks. Although I’m still far from being considered “smart money”, my steep learning curve with SPPH has, if nothing else, helped me to evolve quickly into what I like to call “cautious coin”. Unfortunately, that's the only return on my investment that I can take away from this experience.
So here are some grains of wisdom that I can impart to those penny stock investors who also lost money in this scam. The biggest thing I’ve learned is to read between the lines of the PRs as they are released. If you go back to day one of the SPPH saga, you can almost see the seeds of the scam being carefully laid with each cleverly worded press release. The first red flag was the fact that Al-Dorra reserved the right to buy shareholder's stock on the open market. This left the door open to some thrifty price manipulation down the road by the largest shareholders of the corporation, specifically Max & his French crony. Next, the suspicious and unexpected release of the last few PRs right before the March 17th deadline. The PR about the agreement with Univalor set up the next PR about animal testing, which in turn, set up today’s PR about the need to delay the buyout to allow more time to analyze the animal testing results. HOWEVER, in my opinion, the most interesting kernel that they placed in today’s PR was the line that read that Al-Dorra now owns “an aggregate of over 55% of the…shares in the company”. In other words, that means majority ownership. If Al-Dorra now has majority ownership of SPPH, why would they pay $1.10 per share (or over 15 times the current PPS) for the minority shares that they don’t even need? That makes no sense at all. Max & his crony merely inserted these words into the PR in order to set up the next PR which I believe will contain their final exit strategy to this whole scam. LET ME BE THE FIRST TO PREDICT that after a few weeks of a cooling-down period where we hear no news from SPPH, they will quietly issue another PR that says that because of the uncertainty surrounding the animal testing results (set up in their previous PR) that Al-Dorra is content to live with the majority ownership that they already possess (set up in today’s PR) and will not be purchasing the remaining shares. Then Max will turn over the keys to SPPH to Al-Dorra (an amorphous foreign entity that cannot be proven, disproven, or investigated by the SEC) and the whole SPPH store-front will fade off into oblivion never to be heard from again. And during the next few weeks when we hear nothing about SPPH and the price plummets to 5, 4, then 3 cents a share, it would not surprise me at all if Max & his crony have a plan to make one last haul off the death throes of the very scam that they created by shorting their own stock on the way down. Live and learn I guess. Next time I play around with penny stocks I’ll at least know how to protect my “cautious coin” a little better…good luck everyone!
