Baltbear on Finance markets are like marshmallows

i am increasingly reminded of the fact that people think “science” is a talking animal, that “says” and therefore has an oracular value to point to wealth.
as an 11k year running joke, it used to have great value.
here’s why not: ticker abcd:obb is developing a fail safe 1x vaccination that adds 5 years to life expectancy, and sells for $1 a dose.
let’s get semi real and price humasn life world wide at $4k a year. $20k times 7 bb people:
this is a >>>>$140 trillllllion<<<<< drug.  that’s what “the science” is worth.
in the course of moving from “development stage company” to fda approved product maker abcd.obb tranches out 2bb shares for $600mm, and……
it >>>succeeds<<<<.
the cog thru the factory is $0.60. the distro cost makes delivery a $5 purchase.
this gives a reasonable shot at 4 billion customers over the first 5 years, and an additional 2 billion over the patent life. (becuase outside of the g-7, lotttsa people will die before they have $5 to spend.)
7 billion over 17 years: $412mm in revenues per year.  $164mm a year to g&a of, let’s call it $30mm.
let’s add 400mm shares of options that strike @1,
while the puppy was trading 5/16…
on day of fda approval, abcd goes to 2, and keep rocketing, cause after all….”we all know” and 400mm shares option out to cash.
$133mm in revs to 2.4 billion in shares, w/ share price at 12x sales….. this puppy gets stable @ 21/32.
that’s what “the stock” is worth.
that’s all.
and it’s just that simple.
and the guys who trade into accumulation on the capitualtions and rallys along the line and have a basis of 1/16 on the day the “news” sends this puppy to 6 will make more $$ than the company ever will.
and those playing in the space between will be both agora and cramer, barron’s and ibd, and everybody in between.
and in the meantime, Fortuna? the wealth Goddess??
“She says, Hey babe
Take a walk on the wild side
I Said, Hey baby
Take a walk on the wild side
And the coloured girls go
Doo do doo do doo do do doo..

Posted under business

human rights for fun and profit.

over the past few weeks, courtesy of a google exec doing a social hack of facebook, zillions of opressed people (not in the usa) are beginning to think that “oppression is bad.” this is unlike wisconsin that thinks that undoing 40 years of labour rights is good for working people.
(thus adding the governor of wisconsin to the short list of people sleazier than mark zuckerberg.)

the safest financial bet on all this random “yearning for freedom” is that, as in wisconsin, freedom will once again be redefined as the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules while others warn that if they don’t get what they want they’ll blow a 50 amp fuse.
there may be minor changes to the noun antecedant, just as “czar” was changed to “stalin” without breaking the rule; and ak was changed to ak/neal/garfies when the revolution caused by financial collapse and debt swaps (an historic inevitable) hit biotime,
amex.
the viewing public may be hypnotised by “the politbureau reflects the will of the proletariat” or “mikey is a hero”..but, the facts remain.

thus, the prudent speculator, who has no desire to be cannon fodder for the game, hunts what idiots think of as safe harbours, gets there first, and starts charging rent.
and so, it’s finallly time for gold and silver.
why?  because dictators love them. idiots love them. people who think the mkts are run by lizard people from outerspace  and the aquabuddha and hold senate seats love them. thugs in wisconsin trying to co-erce working people out of the taft-hartley labour act love them.
and actual adults  doing adult things like manufacturing still use small amounts of both of them, and will be forced to compete for access, along with all the afore-mentioned climbing all over each other to place faith and credit into a something boiled out of a rock instead of honour.

as late as early december i was seeing gold as being in a near-term bubble peak, specifically based on landry corp having installed a “gold bar” vending machine in the golden nugget in vegas.

gold and silver have no basis as currencies–nothing actually does—except agreement. the stupidity of the human race causes that fact to be endlessly denied.

the social disruptions ranging across trhe southern med and red sea area are vaguely reminiscent of the after effects of the trojan war occurring right after a major conflict between egypt and babylon and the “global climate changes” cuased by santorini’s tantrum. there is no direct play in small boats capable of reaching the lavinian shores, and thus far tunisia and italy seem united in trapping localised pressure and denying mkt outlets.

when the venn space containing stupidity, fear, hurray for me, and social disruption is drawn, the interference pattern is shiny and metallic.

those best at playing that venn space to their own advantage  over the past century are currently styled jpm and c. when you notice the functional morality of c inre the social contract,  then it is even a more of a positive indicator towards fear/greed/stupid based social activity.
thus:

iau.nyse   clients in 021811 @ 13 19/32.
slv.nyse clients in 021811 @ 31 5/8.

iau.nyse. clients in 022110 @ 13 9/16
slv.nyse clients in 022110 @ 31 3/16

positions fully established.

goals: 20% above non-core usa inflation.

Posted under business

regular readers will recall that i have a certain fondness for the macro and the uber-micro
in systems organisation.
towards any number of pumper, boiler-room, poser and ultimately useless proclamations based on weak 19th century ontologies, it may be useful to point out to prudent speculators that ruffly 65% of the human genome is shared with yew trees.
towards places where puppies play, amex.
towards a rat’s dropping free overview in a 10k:
“commercializing its proprietary technology, the iBioLaunch™ platform, for the production of biologics including vaccines and therapeutic proteins. Our strategy is to utilize our technology for development and manufacture of our own product candidates and to work with both corporate and government clients to reduce their costs during product development and meet their needs for low cost, high quality biologics manufacturing systems. Our near-term focus is to establish business arrangements for use of our technology by licensees for the development and production of products for both therapeutic and vaccine uses. Vaccine candidates presently being advanced on our proprietary platform are applicable to newly emerging strains of H1N1 swine-like influenza and H5N1 for avian influenza. ”

towards prudent speculators: my clients in for random small tastes ~2 3/4, following the last improvement in the financials.
goals: 20% roa + shares <1/2.

as the usual btw: recently somebody made the claim that “long term” meant, lol…18 mos.
granted that for quick&dirty irs purposes for speculators,long term means year and a day…
but for >>>investors<< it means 5 years.
laws of a baltbear: (this one vikinged from peter lynch) if u wouldna own it 5 years, don;t own it 5 minutes.

Posted under business

since the “stem cell ” mania has slowed down, hardball gamers are looking for new plays.
this is usually easy, being merely a factor of correctly assessing the financial and technical knowledge of the american public.
a few months ago some serious hardball guys (who..if u were there, were central and critical to the implosion of the so-called net bubble) brought out a couple of puppies based on the “green” future
talked about by everyone except massey coal and bp (fd: clients in bp).
one has some worthwhile promise, the other is a mania stock.
but first a word from out sponsor, “how things work”: a decent definition for “why” washington and some other rich guys and harvard intellectuals decided george iii was a “bad king, bad king..go sit in the corner..bad king” was the anglo-centric practice of making it totalllly difficult to vertically integrate the value add inside the colonies. raw goods were moved to shippable sizes, sent to england, value added to maintain the english economy, and then exported back to the colonies. when you were in 5th grade us history this was called “mercantilism.” in the real world, it was the means by which english puritan fat cats who wanted to genocide their way into wealth got a return for the silver they put into everyone from jamestown to penn’s woods..
these days, over on the other side of the world, the chinese have noticed that they already are a country, have a world class track record on resisting genocide and conquest, and have tonnes of mining equipment far more efficient than what massey coal would use to remove a mountain top so that the carcinogens can flow  freely into the watershed.
meantime, back at the ranch in california–a place stolen from mexico on the seemingly reasonable grounds that the mexicans should like that more than having the russians steal it, that part of california now called colorado—and thence driven into prosperity by using hydraulic cannons to remove the mountain tops, some smart money noticed that there’s a fair amount of “rare earths” to be mined there. “rare earths” are all those cool minerals that make ur i-phone work.
so, slowly, land was picked up, on the assumption that for a few bux all good americans would learn that godless enemy water fluridating commies would crush us unless we closed the “rare earth gap”
( which would ..oddly enough be a cool name for a birkenstock wearing yuppie clad jam band to open for phish or somebody).
and thus was born molycorp, mcp:nyse.
and a few weeks ago, as luck would have it, the chinese announced that they were going to keep 10% more of their rare earths than they did the year before, since, well, the phreaking i-phone is made in china..so why export the raw materials unless it wanted to be a colony of taiwan. that concept being so utterly eisenhour/kenndy, and china being so aware that its current real estate bubble will break as soon as it goes back to monitoring bank’s books (maybe up to 1/3 of mortgages written in china are off the books, so that the borrower doesn’t have to explain how he got the down payment)  …anyway.. (does anybody wayyy back before 911 when dennis miller was funny?? ) …anyway…
this set off a “rally” on mcp that took it from a 12 ipo, to touching 50, in like 4 months.

cause, yaknow…that “rare earth gap.” now predictably a random congressman or 3 wants to engage in some massive federal spending for a “rare earth strategic stockpile”–this, from the govt that still cain;t quite figure out how to do that yuma mtn thingy– at a time when the incoming congress have all sworn on their hannity/oreilly buttons to cut spending, while legally thdy are about to haver to raise the national debt ceiling.

and of course all that highly toxic rare earth refining will be re-imported to the usa, and of course dell laptops like the one suffering under my paws, and i-phones will soon be made in the usa, where the cheerful people of arizona will be happy with $178 a month jobs making them, just to reduce that nasty carbon footprint…

uhuh.

and of course the feds have an extra few billion to spend as guaranteed buyers, there being no other commodities..like housing… that the fed thinks of as defense worthy as an asset class.

and of course there are no chinese owned rare earth mines already in the usa…

and of course there will never be any value recovery model bizness (read: “recycling”) on this toxic rare earth stuff as a demand reducer that kicks in ever harder as commodity prices rise… cause adam smith was just like, whack….

and of course none of this stuff can be found in africa…

as a result of long discussions with clients, a couple went off the res and are doing thus:
they bought long time 50’s, and started shorting the traded common.
(i note that until short interest is reported within 20 minutes of r/t, it should be outlawed)

that’s one side of the coin.

the other is lsgc.ob …which actually has roots with the same $$$, but has >>>customers<<, and >>revenues<<. indeed, it’s current revs are like 3x those of btx…and at the time clients started chomping into lsgc, btx was like 3x higher priced.

there’s debt.. a chunk, which will swap its way out along the line.

however, there is a clear dot the i’s path towards entering the market across all retail and commercial frontiers adding to the one thing american biz learned in 2009: how to trim costs.
something tangible, diorect and doable to all the greenies in the retail space.
and no fda, ind, phase iii yaydyydydaaa that will continue to hammer biotechs.

clients are in @ 3 5/16 … and will take 2nd positions on the expected dips ..(bad news, stock coming to mkt… good news..because a class of p[referred got killed.)
and likely, if wise, 3rd, “defensive” tier positions.
goal? just trade into accumulation.
goal on mcp? 15% apr.

Posted under business

Advanced Life Sciences Holdings, Inc., that is to say, adls.ob–cause who really cares
what some puppy is called, the issue is what’s the ticker?–hit yesterday for the “whore stock”
portfolio. Client’s entry points? $0.055. In my voodoo that’s 1/100 of 5 1/2…or, perhaps, 1/10 of 9/16.
why mention that conversion? laws of a baltbear:” how do you make $$ on true “penny” stocks? u buys lottsa it.”

note that this entry price is wellll above the 52 week low…for reasons tba in this post…

here’s the story: pneumonia is still a major killer in the usa, and will be getting more that way as the idiots of the health care industry help more and stronger drug resistent versions of strep to evolve, kind of like the way stem cell ceos create evolutionary pressure favoring due diligence.

adls.ob claims, in a way the fda finds plausible to talk about, to have a 1x a day pill that slams into all these hard-guy germs. it says it has its ducks in a row to the point it can ask for fast track status for the investigation, etc.

the next “vaccine scare” that floats across the usa will loft this puppy like lbj with a beagle…regardless of the realitys involved. thus..a whore stock.

here’s why the story matters: like all these puppies, the books were a disaster; hence the fall from the last vaccine scare being like from 13/16 to 1/16. debt all over the place, no $ in the treasury, etc…
but, like isco.ob, some actual cash finds cred in the story. that includes the ceo/chief scientist. after a d/e swap, and a fair sized tranche, adls.ob is back in the hunt.  thus, never mind  if adls.ob has a cure for the nation’s worst epeidemic–dd failure–if there can never be entrance into the mkt place, and can never be attribution to common.

the target range for the prudent speculator is—as always–20% roi + shares cheaper than insiders to
30% roi, to 20% roi plus share at 0. that’s a narrow range here, because the current meaningful insider price is $0.022. and the puppy is sitting at 0.060…

this is thus a play money whore stock. ..with possible huge upside.

thru it’s own merits in execution of biz plan, combined with the inevitable next “plague stock rally”, 1 is doable. if i were advising adls.ob i’d be looking to move a large tranche @ 5/8ish at such a time…
and that’s a trip to 10bag city arizona for those who ignore whatever pump&bucket house that will work the deal.

i am neither recommending, nor not recommending adls.ob.

if this puppy looks good to you with ur own dd, well…there it is.

and again, fd: clients in adls.ob.

Posted under business

here are 2 dialogs to answer that ever popular question:

how do you give quantification to the future?

A day or 3 ago, isco.ob concluded a deal. the deal has terms. they are readable….but not yet filed with the sec (isco is draggy on that…)

the deal involves $10mm. to which i commented: so what?
the deal appears to value isco’s i/p at this moment at $40mm…to which i said, that’s a large “what.”

a sometimes intelligent person asked me:

:”Are you for real balt??????”

very much so…

:”(during these particular times), ”
u mean when capital is buying junk paper at rates that ensure the double dip???
are u watching the spread between t-bills and corporate junk?? that tells the prudent speculator that cash inflows for speculation are masssive. (people who think of tv as a news source get confused by the dow not being 18ooo or whatever, and think that means that there’s no capital to be had…but the ability of industry to float crap bonds at <6% says plenty of $$$ is chasing a home..)

:”does not dilute we shareholders,” if it had it would be negative….and not “so what”…
(people who think buying retail common shares of a puppy with no ebitda is “investing” usually end up double and triple counting any positives. “no change” = 0 …..not +.

:”comes through on it’s promise ” –if that isn’t pretty much a given, it’s worth 0.
so it gets no points for being above 0–it was already there.
(this same class of speculators and gamblers are so used to enabling mgt failure that mgt competence is read as a miracle. that is, mgt failure is the fault of a “weak market” “investor ignorance” “obama/bush/fda/reptiles from outer space, and mgt competence is a miracle who needs all our money—in spite of the obvious fact that retail purchase of common puts >>>no<<< money into corporate treasuries. it does make it much easier for insiders to raise capital by showing actual investors what the mkt is as they roll over their positions.)

:”while still being a developmental stage company”
that’s the btim koolaid on your breath…a puppy that has been “development stage” since 1992…

:”the company is pulling rabbits out of it’s hat ”
if i thought that…i’d tell clients to dump asap… there’s only so many rabbits in any given hat..

:”That is a big WHAT in my book. Bought more today.”
that’s nice. tiredof probably has a bridge in ft washington he can lease you cheap…if ak gets  a cut.
(that’s a reference to btim.amex, whose ceo holds himself out as the world’s #1 expert on stem cells, regardless of harvard, warf, etcetcetc… )

:”I would like to hear some of the directors that are responsible for closing these deals speak. ”
i want them to keep their mouths shut and keep working…but be able to do better than have i/r brag about minimal compliance on date of a 10q…

:”As far as ip goes, not possible to put a price on it yet”
that’s compleat nonsense. if u can;t put a price on something, the price is 0.

:”but 40 million? Ridiculously low. ”
well then, isco got screwed, didn;t it????
and all the ydydyydaaa smoke u said first means nothing.
(btim, frinstance, trades in part based on a putative valuation of a patent estate it >leases<, and of patent applications that are years from approval..and therefoire value @ ??? $.0.00 ..until cash flow from those patents is measurable.

:”You have 10 million people in need of corneas ”
that’s already been thoroly discussed..and comes down to 1 point:
that’;s nice–how much $$$ do they have?

:”it looks like we are there already” not to anyone who knows the drill. (actual IND, phase i,ii,iii, etc will require…2 years? 4? how many millions in paperwork??? enough for another tranche of funding to be necessary. but..in my analysis, isco can get seriuous and have the next tranche be > 1 7/16–which makes any buying now at retail the equivalent of “insider prices.”)

:”I could go on and on as I did before regarding all the other potential.”
yes…as you have, many times, without even beginning to do any actual dd…

:”The ip is likely worth much more then 40 million.”
whatever….then scream at aldrich how the krauts shafted him….

i am working from the data at hand:
somebody is excecuting a biz plan.
somebody who knows the biz says full access to 20% of the i/p is worth $10mm..

prudent speculators will note that this is a solid deal…and run their numbers, and run their voodoo.
and will be accumulating hard.

is the difference between these 2 pov obvious?? yeah. and yet, that poster is long isco, and i have clients long isco.

he’s long because isco management miraculously found $10mm.
i;m long because intelligent people ran a valuation, and thast valuation supports a price closer to 1 1/2 than 1…

he’s long isco because they’re going to growing eyeballs any day now.
i’m long becuase isco is steadily closing in on actual prodict and praxis that will lead to sales higher than overhead.

each decision i am making is based on a quant. that quant may be difficult to see—but if it can;t be seen, it’s worth 0.

no matter what the talk.

story stocks are about the odds of walking the talk.

from another board, a closely related discussion…what’s the “story” and what quants are there.
this one is a high point (in re the reduction in venom from a pawn of insider $$…) that also may help clarify to the prudent speculator what due diligence is.

:”BTIM sells stem cells and takes an interest in the upside of the discovery that may be created”
btim is certainly free to make such contracts with anyone who would fall for them….
on the other hand, millipore doesn’t.
:”Had You attended the annual meeting you would have known that, ” at the last ..lol..annual meeting, 9 months prior, numerous shareholders left with the understadning of how important rgi/nih direction was–and mikey was doing dog&pony on it—just a few days before nih said no.
and then it was never the plan at all.
now it is true that anytime mikey/garfies/ak/neal want to they can give judy $35 on her debit card and another “wholly owned subsidiary to…” can appear.
:”what makes Harvard the expert? only your opinion…”
rotfl….
u forgot to dis warf….
:”when anything comes Out in the Media, Dr West is the first person”
cuase he takes the call, knows how to put on makeup and can do 8 second soundbytes.
how come when there is a real peer review conference on stem cells, mikey is always too busy hyping whatever puppy he’s doing to have actual work to present?
:”plan to be the picks & shovels supplier dictates constant predictable cash flow, thus steady long term growth, once again, ”
yup. totallllly. yup. u betcha..of course, that discounts ur opening point, unless dealing with somebody so broke that they pay for picks and shovels by offering a shares in the mine…which is not predictiable cash flow.
:”just like anything the components cost bucks and one company can get rich creating the components, to deny that is foolish…”
yes. one company can–if it has both first mover and quasi-monopoly…like 65% of potentuial mkt share… it’s sometehing i read for when i’m looking at proposals.
or–if it can be made cheap enuff, and then have a ginormous markup for convenience.
:”Millipor picked Biotime,” not in evidence as to who went to whom… even if mil initaited, yeah, they were adding stem cells to the mix..a 150 page catalog…which was 150 pages thick when btim signed on to have 2 items in it.

:”post their names,”
post urs…u impotent boytoy poser…

:”look at calculators”…yeah..go ahead..look…i watched the price of a hot handheld ti move from $1200 to $10 for the same functions over 8 years…and to $1 over the next 5.
cars? tata is on ther mkt at like $2600….

:”and Balt not all lottery tickets are a buck,” i’ll take ur word for it…not a part of my portfolio strategy…

:”and insiders continue to invest more funds,”
yup. so determining >>>>their basis<<<< is the issue.
and those who like this puppy should be trading to get a basis like that of insiders…which is close to 0.

(this cannot be stressed enough. the prudent speculator should not be lazarus at the gate, waiting for a dog to lick his wounds. the prudent speculator does not homage the insiders and grant them some natural right to more profits. if insiders will finance so that gthey are functionallly in @ $1–then prudent speculators will trade to that basis. “buy and hold” is an abomination–a false god that lets the pumpers, bucket shops, and insiders keep drawing their bonuses at the speculator’s expense, usually by telling him he is an “investor.” )

:”so he helped me make over 1000% on my money, not you.. ”
u’ve reported before being in this puppy at 4ish ion the way down…or 4ish on the way up the first time after ak came on board…

but u are in fact making the critical point again: those in this puppy <2 have reason to like it a lot.
that has nothing >>>>at all<<<< to do with it at 5 3/8…

(another example of the same problem. the most generous estimate i can give for btim prices 2 1/4. insider finance games keep it above 4. the principal insider is in close to 0. so unless this puppy were offered at <2 1/2….it’s overpriced. can you buy 5 1/2, sell 7, keeping enough shares to share a few odd lots at insiders prices? then, if you like this puppy, go for it. if not, then you’re cannon fodder for the gamers.)

:”sees upside 100 times where the stock is today”
nope…he sees 100x growth in gross revs for the sector.

(Another point that cannnnot be stressed enough. the common stock of a given equity is not the sector, and historically, about 85% of everything goes broke without affecting the sector’s long time story arc. the prudent speculator is invited to read the history of railroad industry financing…hehe)

the issue is how much of that goes to btim ebitda..

that’s “worth” 1 7/8–2 1/2… ak will keep this puppy 4 — 6 with occasional spikes..and keep getting shares at $0 net..

prudent speculators will do the same.

if its 100% your money, your ability to beleive stock board “guidance” is set at 0%.

so…yes. you can quant a fairy tale. one piece of straw at a time.

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

Prudent speculators will often be accusede of all kinds of things.

Here’s an example of a simple baltbear being accused (in a rd person remark)
“. I personally think he has an agenda which I have told him directly and the negativity toward the investments of ISCO”

readers familiar with my pov on isco will note i have 2 clients in isco.ob at this time. They got there “because I said so.”

But i expect isco to head towards 2 1/2— a near double… and then drift towards 4… after it >proves< something.

That gives me an “agenda.”

and there it is….
new readers are invited to note a poster or 6 here and there muttering about prices north of 4…without having read the filings that formed isco in the first place….this same alleged heavy duty hitter thought isco.ob was ipo’d on its own name. Thinking such a thing means they have never read the filings, which shiw it being a double reverse merger shell property.

There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Such a procedure can save thousands of dollars in useless fees to lawyers and other scum. But since this is not exactly ancient history, and is publy available from the sec, >not knowing it<< is a signal of something–specifically, lack of prudence.

i say this is a place to start nibbling, isco.ob because 2 1/2 is coming back… and that’s “negative” in the minds of those who, over and over, say “it’s different this time” whther this time is real estate, the internet, stem cells, “plastics” –going back to “tulips.”

when everyone agrees it’s time to look for the koolaid pitcher that is feeeding it. those who doubt this are cordially invited to read the chaerts of aig, fnm, wamu (o wait, it’s wamu>>q<<) citibank, et al.

personally and professionally i don;t think >>anyone<< is without an agenda.
the issue is…what >>is<< the agenda, and do you benefit or suffer by working for/against it…

as an example of objectivity let’s taqke this statement about the market size for synthetic corneas :”going blind or had vision problems that could be rectified by a pair of corneas, I would pay just about anything.”

uhuh…so, that only says u have $$.

it is a fundamental law of econ that u cannot spend more than u have + what others think u can pay back…unless you steal.

so,tards dd, what % of “10mm people need corneas” can get their hands on …let’s call it, just to be as long as possible on isco…. $3000????

data? source of data?

i can cheeerfully see isco licensing the tech so that somebody in bumphreakistan gets eyesight, and isco gets
~$15 per event.
that might be 3mm custoimers over 10 years @ let’s go conservative and say 50mm o/s….. 9 cents a share >>>straight to the bottom line<<<<…

and people get to see. and isco gets to have a reasonable “fair value” of 4-6…

but pumpers don’t get houses by the lake.

and that is why so many voices here see me as a “basher.”

when somebody wants you to listen to their investment strategy, ask for their agenda. If they say they have none….run away.

mine is based on observing this item of “laws of a baltbear”
“some want to be sharks, some want to be dolphins–nobody wants to be tuna.”

if you are nobody–feel free to see if i’m available for consultation.

fd: 2 clients long isco.

Posted under business

In a day or three, depending on how the euro is doing as people begin to realise that false claims of progress will always be undone by inefficiencies and corruption, i’ll be talking about the most dangerous words in the speculator’s environment: “it’s different this time”.

recall the crazy valuations in the days of the net bubble?

at the time, it was “different this time.”

recall the “artificial blood” stocks of 98-99?

at the time it was “different this time.”

recall mortgage deals of 2005-2008 as the real estate industry sold off its assets??

at the time it was “different this time.”

i recently picked up a reasonable enough fee for explaining to a guy managing a fair chunk of other people’s money what “the big deal” is with stem cell stocks, from gern to isco.obb.

and is different about pricing them for speculation than is true about f, or ge, or mot…and what was the same, because the ojne thing always true for the prudent speculator is that it is never different this time.

Posted under business

those following fnm as a proxy for the economy (and who followed my suggdstions on it)
re-acuired a chunk of fnm when it broke back below $1.
one dollar is a magic marker for fnm. currently it is trading  just under 1 3/16. (new readers are asked to note that i still run charts by the normative trasing currency, the “bit”: 1/8 of $1.)
currently the so-called press is caught up in looking at bernanke’s lack of interest on accepting responsibility for the failure of regulators to regulate. that is in fact a critical problem. fixing that problem is its own issue.
“fixing housing” is yet another problem. with 30% decline in pricing in some critical markets, with bottom only beginning to be in sight, let alone formed, there’s lots of need for right-offs, re-papering, and generic games that will leave fnm common as wall paper.
the difference here is that the mkt will eventuallly sort thru housing. it may take 5-20 years.
at some point, the us treasury will be acquiring fnm stock @ 1. and bleeding it into the mkt…or it will be forgiving the debt. if the mkt requires that forgiveness, things suck.
the treasury bet is that it will profit from the wts (unlike some other tickers, where warrants are used to game the mkt) and will be bleeding some stock into the mkt in slow intervals.
so..if fnm a buy @ 1 3/16??
or is it time to cash out on the recent buys @ 31/32?
those who bought at 31/32 have 40% apr for the year locked in now for that part of their risk capital sectiojned to real estate.

Posted under business