Baltbear on Finance markets are like marshmallows

in a recent discussion about outstanding shares, authorised shares, and the point of re-allocating shareholder interest per share–which is either reduce it by increasing the number of shares–a “split”
or increasing it by reducing the number of shares - a “reverse split”-some classically amateur newbies suggested that “reverse splits are bad” or …. not much of anything else.
finally some body noted:

:”dont have a sellable product yet, why would they want to be listed?

They clearly dont care too much about the average investor, but a resverse split would tank this stock, ”

well…yes. corporations do >>not<< “get listed” because they have sellable product, or have some deep seated desire to care about other than themselves.

corporations do a “public offering” because they have a desire to get capital.

it is quite possible to get blue-sky’d on the premise that u are nothing but blue sky.
(which, btw, is the porigin of the term for doing some sort of filing–show that u are offering something other than the blue skys of kansas.)

“going public” is a broad area, defined by “how public??”

all over the world are mkt places where people who concern themselves with these pieces of paper and the putative wish list and blue sky they represent meet one way or another to “exchange” the pieces of paper –or database entries changing which name is associated with a piece of paper. to be considered as a reasonable candidate to be entered into the database –”get listed” –a corporation needs to meet certain standards unique to that mktplace, the exchange.
:”why would they want to be listed?”
did u ever wonder what that funny .ob (which back in the day was :obb) >>>>means<<<< ????
it means its “listed” on a list of ..lists.
certain lists have certain requirements.
it isn;t the list that comes and goes, its the criteris meeting that changes.
nyse–>amex–>pink
nasd.nm–>nasd.sc–>nasd.ob–> pink.

and actuallllllly… pink is a national exchange, and there are levels below it.

if “pink sheet” doesn;t sound like a wildly old time valid national exchange, ur probably unaware that until ruffly the 70’s and the majjjor ag rollups, “equity” was traded pink,
“beef” green, and if a swiss cheese memory serves, the reange live hogs to smoked bacon was traded in the blue sheet.

thus, when somebody says–like btim did a year or so ago–that it’s business plan was focussed on “moving from .ob to amex” it was only saying it wanted a beter chjance to get other people’s money.
when adls.ob contemplates a reverse split, it is doing the same.

since neither ticker could go anywhere without opm, the issue is not “moving up” or “getting ready to be sluaghtered” it is, in reality, what is mgt gonna do with the opm????

btim said,. …well, be us..cuase we are all that and a bag of stem cells.
adls.ob appears to my eyes to be saying get thru a previously approved fda protocol and place product.

both tickers face about the same amount of obstacle to get to $20mm gross…
btim has cash on hand, adls,. zilch.
btim tradeds 100x higher than adls.

2+ years ago btim had less cash than adls does now.

for maybe $2k loose chanhge (laws of a baltbear: risk tolerance has metricks) you can bet on either.

the ball has landed on btim like 12x in a row; hasn’t landed on adls more than 2x in its lifetime.

when somebody tells you “reverse split is bad” what they are referring to is the history of people falsely assoicatiing names and numbers “goog is a $500 stock selling at $460, i must buy it” “xyzd is a $2 stock selling at 10..im ust sell it”

if nobody has evvver heard of the puppy, they cannot think this way…

if serious and scummy $ know that something –like bpur–is bogus, they just keep hitting it, at any price…aiming @ 0.

fd: clients in adls;
fd; clients have paid me top keep them out of btim–with $ they paid me to keep them from believing that $1800 gold would happen in 2010.

does your advisor charge u just for holding ur $$???

i charge mine for clarifying the stories they hear elsewhere.
it’s their $$–and they can hold their own wallets.

Posted under business

someone suggested that his “buy and hold” strategy..which he says has been getting hit the last 2 quarters is much more intelligent than channeling, rolling,…whatever somebody wants to call “buy relatively cheap, sell relatively high”
this issue is always what is “relative” …
buffet (the one with dairy queen..not krispy kreme) has opined that it’s better to pay a lot for a well run company than get a sheap buy on a badly run one..or words to that effect.
thus, i offer, as a simple corollary to some law of a baltbear, if a puppy has a record of book not converting to sales, then sales multiples cannot be tooo far above reality check time.
when looking at a story stock, xyz.pk, that has $15mm in book, and has turned the last $10mm in cash into <$1mm in gross sales, the valid multiplier for p/s = 0.
if xyz.pk was expected to be getting $10mm in gov’t paid deals, and the gov’t changes its mind, the p/s is now <8.
etcetcetcydydydyydaaa… so if xyz.pk has been rolling 4 - 6 based on people’s expectations of that gov’t welfare, then the changed policy changes the rolling range. if the book val converts to >>actual i/p $$<< like a patent lease for $1mm a year, instead  of an imagined $12mm for the possible maybe o please future value of patents, then book multiplier can be moved up, and xyz.pk will possibly roll in a higher channel.
without a firm grasp on such realities, puppys will become mangy flea carriers in the port.
somebody who complains about other people makiing $$ rolling and channeling, but who refuses to place limit orders more than 10 minutes away from one he expects a fill said,
:”. It is not easy and many times they will skip your order.”
yeah… and???
if it was easy it wouldn;t pay. the idea that anybody can learn charting, and charting is always meaningful, and yhoo gives it for free…yeah. a sucker’s game to suck money to yhoo…
some amateurs think (ok, william james would call them paranoid delusionals) that if they wait til 11:06 to place a limit order for 1k @ 5 1/16, it will get filled, because the specialist is waiting for their order and wants to mess with them, but will be distracted by the sudden order and….. yeah….

more often, the specialist fills orders in an orderly fashion, good ones for him, ok ones for his friends, the rest in order of entry…and when u decide to try for a fill @ 5 1/16, the guy who decided yesterday gets filled, and ur told to wait ur turn…which may never come,,especiallly when the speciualist went naked on 1k @ 7, and covers by buying that 1k @ 5 1/16 himself.

:”Think about it, if someone could pull that off, they would be trading a large Fund somewhere and would not be on yahoo”
one of a few metricks i use in provenancing the cred of random posters. actuallly, it gets pulled off every day, in part by those guys hiring people to cover yhoo boards–and others–with garbage posts,
because those guys >>>are the swings<<<<.

:”A sale at 6 could end up proving very dumb if the stock gets to 7,8,10 etc.”
nope. listening to people who have already turned down 4 baggers because they want 20 is dumb. why? becuase they are, in reality, only trying to infect you with 4 bagger fever.

an entry for the purpose of getting 20% apr is an exit @ 20% apr. anybody who enters the mkt saying “i’m gonna get rich buying this expotic puppy of a story” will get killed. disciplined speculators seek returns..not fortunes… u wanna fortune??? goto vegas. tell elvis i said hi, how’s the diet working out for ya…  fortunes are made by clear-headed use of previously unavailable resources. that’s why the word derives from the latin word for “luck”…not “betting.”

“coulda woulda shoulda” is a child’s game.. the prudent speculator who asks, “how can i make 18%, year after year, thereby doubling my $$ every 4 years..without losing it all??” notices that if he makes 18% in one month, he can be in cds the rest of the year.

of course this attitude is anathema to the promoters who need to find buyers. they will continually preach the idea of never leaving a dime on the table for the next guy–so they can sell you theirs when they know its past time to go. a historical example: what brought leh down?? not being able to find any suckers for their bad paper except themselves until their “profits” consisted of feeds from buying and selling to themselves. the “buy and hold” market –including the otherwise great ben stein–missed that one totallly. laws of a baltbear “always leave money on the table for the next guy.”

:”some who are not even in the stock, telling people what to do????????”
anyone telling anyone what to do without a loaded gun stuck in their mouth is a poser playing one or another sociallly acceptible sand box games.

those who like this puppy and want to trust management will trade for a basis like that of management.

there are dozens of varieties of stating that fact. but most of them are disguised to sound righteous, and noble…and lulling….into a deadly sleep . a variant is to declare a holding “an investment for the future” and thus..not something to be watched, cared for, bought and sold..that works for actual “investments”–that is, castings of bronze or gold. but since the book of Daniel, it has been notably stupid to over-value such investments.

let’s get specific: are “stem cells” the new “beanie babies” ????

if one does not run a continual check of that problem, yes.

is information emerging so that “stem cells” as source material can be bypassed??
yup.
steadily.
the question is..with what economic utility??

those who want to roll over for the posers and the self-righteous will pay attention to garbage of future predictions like “50″  for some dog and keep making donations to insiders, their running buddies and the cult members.

to a specific puppy, btim.amex …
the buy and hold types are saying:”I think smart money added anywhere in the 4’s and is holding this particular stock for much higher prices.

Trading BTIM will likely lead someone to a major opportunity cost down the road and they will miss more gains then any short term profits they banked. Short term profits are taxed more aggressively and incur commission expenses as well.”

to which i reply, consistently…
ok…lol..u keep telling ur clients that.

and i’ll tell mine what i tell them…and offering a few freebies about how to do the dd on the story, and how to avoid the sharks.

and  “10″   and “4 - 6 with spikes” will continue to define the space, with “8″ as a measuring rod.

fd: i have been both paid and thanked for keeping people out of btim.
fd: clients in a related puppy, isco.ob.

Posted under business

“In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte  — co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab — unveiled a prototype of a $100 laptop for children in the developing world. India rejected that as too expensive and embarked on a multiyear effort to develop a cheaper option of its own.

Negroponte’s laptop ended up costing about $200, but in May his nonprofit association, One Laptop Per Child, said it plans to launch a basic tablet computer for $99.

Sibal turned to students and professors at India’s elite technical universities to develop the $35 tablet after receiving a “lukewarm” response from private sector players. He hopes to get the cost down to $10 eventually.”

MIT’s Media Lab should be one of America’s “elite technincal universities.” One upon a time it was–and still, probably, is.

In comments about this cited news release, at yahoo, the overwhelming response from Americans was that noting is made in America, this device will suck, it’ll be a cool toy. that last comment was the most intelligent, because those who made it usually said that their buying one would support the project.

Evidently, based on pure numbers, pure quant, pure “science” says that MIT made too many decisions that supported profits for the “cool people”.

The MIT  project depends on $100 per unit subsidy from taxpayers of some kind.
:”India plans to subsidize the cost of the tablet for its students, bringing the purchase price down to around $20.” That’s not a difference of just $85 per unit, it is a critical difference of 60% vs 100%.
There is an obvious Forex-like arb in currency conversion, but the % is what it is, and nothing else.

This device from India probably won’t have the panache and real world support of an i-Pad.
Assuming it works 1/3 as well, a retail buyer can get 5 of them, and run them til they break,
and be a full 50% ahead of buying an i-Pad.

But, without cultural changes, they won’t be “cool people.”

America is becoming a nation of “cool people” who have nothing but their self-absorption, living on borrowed money.  o, wait–it always was. the “money” was first the entire capital wealth of the first natrions people from the Quahog to the Lakota. Then it was the entire prodictive output of 100,000,000 slaves and “push” delivered “immigrants” (as opposed to the African slaves who were “pull” delivered.)

and then, in a “better” world, leaving people where they were, and importing their capital assets–neo-colonialism–and then, for the past generation, just importing their money–at interest.

What has America exported to balance this? belief systems it didn’t want. these were workable belief systems, as India, China, and others have shown. but they just weren’t cool anymore.

When the prudent speculator sees some stem cell stock going overseas to get work done, this is not because the USA can’t do it…but because the insiders at that puppy are working for “coolness”–profits on the books. the question then is where does this coolness flow: to the insiders or to common stock. The easy way to measure is whether the non-USA partners are putting skin in the game, or is the “foreign outreach” based on tax scams and buddy-buddy “cool people” partnerships.

Posted under business

This is a general piece for the prudent speculator. It is about a tool for measuring, at an amotional level some cold hard facts ypou are going to need.
A little history:
once upon a time when the people who said this liquidity crisis couldn’t happn hadn’t been born yet, every 3 months publicly traded corporations wrote up dozens to hundreds of pages of impenetrable beancounter language and sent it to the sec as “proof” of something.
Then, eventuallly, the sec said it would no longer accept “the dog ate my homework”, “10k? the mailmain must have lost it”.
(if an adult reader doesn’t think this kind of excuse is till being made, i offr the 10q of biotime, btim:obb which contains the statement that becuse creditors of the self-styled stem cell research company are in different parts of the country, it took an extra time period to give an honest statement of the debt. some weeks later biotime filed, and the debt had been restructured in a d/e swap showing a clearing price of $1. )
the sec said that a transparent and liquid market is the goal of regulation, and thus mandated electronic filing of text files with readable data.
in just a few years the sec got around to noting that the .txt files could be made almost unreadable by human beings, and that the goal of regulation is a transparent and liquid market. thus, filins in .html became required. (this gives a file that opens from the sec website through your browser window, and then “reads” like a piece of paper.)
as an example:
compare the effort of reading
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/876343/000091957409002146/d964196_13d-a.htm
with
http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/876343/000095000502000064/p14825_s3a.txt

A while ago, the securities and exchange commission got serious about the idea that actually, since relational databases and accessing data from them has been around for 50 years, they might have value for thw actual owners of a corporation–the people that hire management that then thinks it is the ownership–and potential owners have a right to not read, but actually understand what the filings say, as internally consistent documents.
since lotus notes, excel spread seets etc had been around for about 25 years, average people could find the relationships that had meaning to them.
since in about 1998 there had been serious work done, in part by tim berners lee, to find algorithms which would describe relationship between relationships seen by others, there could be an extensible markup language….xml..
CAn you see a thought emerging in the pea in the brontosauric sec’s head yet?
can you begin to imagine that since adobe acrobat has been capable of making a .pdf that contains pictures, movies, music–a complete little “website” all in one document, secure and shippable and readable, for >>>4 years<<< that corporations wishing te trust and money of the american people could be obliged to make the critical elements inside their filings “clickable” so that people could jump through them making sure there was honesty in them?
thus, there came, after lots of “pick me” “can i buy your congressman a nice plane ride” ? etc… a defined “extensible business relational language.”
xbrl.
an sec filing in xbrl is as searchable as this blog.
and any prudent speculator deserves one.
looking at some new ticker? wanting to get a feel for what your dd can get you?
call investor relations and ask them abot xbrl. if the answer is “we’ll do it as soon as we wil be kicked off the exchanges if we don’t” no matter how that is phrased, walk.
away.
the phrasing can be tricky. recently i was told by one posssible whore to dance with that management was far too involved in creating new products to hace paid much attention to another burdensome government regulation. i’ll never get near that puppy, becuase i never short.
i was told by another that they are looking forward to providing xbrl docs to the sec, because it will reduce calls to i/r to only those that point the company to ever more transparent means of presentation.
in reality, most tickers that speculators can work from are not your friends. they see you as fruit to be smashed to give them the juice to party on.
with this knowledge in hand, you can rob them of the secrets of their failures, double speaks, waste, hype, etc, by taking an x-barreled shotgun to their filings.
if they don;t want you to have that weapon, they are not your friends.

Posted under business