oddballstocks

Just received a tender offer in the mail. Looks like they're trying to acquire 3.5-4% of the company again, so another big float reduction if this goes through. Reading through the offer, they've purchased slightly over 200k shares this past year and this will be another nice chunk. This has been an extremely boring holding, but the company keeps doing the right things.

A topic near and dear... I have WFH for 10+ years in various roles. As a consultant to a health care company, doing investment research, and starting a software company. During this time I've had access to an office when I needed. For maybe 2-ish years (not continuous) I've worked out of an office. I'm an extrovert, very extroverted, but I love working from home. What I find in an office is I can talk all day and accomplish nothing. But I feel great because I was just talking. At home I can be focused, get work done, then get on the phone and talk. I'm on the phone all the time and it scratches the same itch as talking in person. I also have small kids (from 10 to 3), but since I've done this their entire life they know the drill. I have a home office and if the office door is closed it means "do not bother and please be quiet." If the door is open they can come in and share things with me. When the kids are in school it's extremely quiet, but even now it's not bad. This is really no different than summer when they're home all the time. I love that there's no commute. It's also nice to be able to take a bike ride or go swimming at lunch. There are days when I'm just in a funk and I'll go do something menial to think about my problems. In an office the only option for this was to take a walk, which I did often, but sometimes you can't due to weather. As for meetings in-person. There are dozens of co-working spaces near me and they all have the ability to rent conference rooms by the hour. That's not an issue. I think it's heavily job type, heavy personality (self-motivated). Here's something anecdotal. Some companies already run like this but they don't know it. When I consulted in health care it was a 15k person company. They had multiple locations and teams were split geographically. Every meeting was at your desk, you called in and used screen sharing. Over the years I was there the office emptied out because people realized there is no functional difference of being in a cube or being at home. Management realized this too and kept hiring without expanding their office space. When I left years ago I remember something like 55% of the company was at home, I'm sure it's more now.

Local print shop can usually make something like that cheap and quick. Some slightly larger local print shops will do design work too. I'd just call around and see what the turnaround time is. They're usually relatively cheap, even a giant plastic sign is only about $500.

Guess we know Tilson's alt on here... gambling away the Agora advance.. What if we already beat Tilson's numbers? Can I get $1m for doing more than 8.5% a year over the same period? Whitney er...jeffsreng..shoot me a DM and I can give you my address on where to send the check. Thanks!!

My guess is more due to the recent financials floating around.

Interesting dilemma! My suggestion would be to pull the stock out of the IRA into a certificate, or just a normal brokerage. Replace it with cash to satisfy the US Gov. From there you have some room to work. Next step is to sell directly to the French broker. Brokers do negotiated transactions all the time. You might take a bit of a haircut, but so what. They will be buying the shares from you, then just tendering directly on their own account. For them it's an easy way to make a spread. You can try to work with them directly, or work with a desk in the US who has relationships. I have talked to Fidelity traders in the past who phoned up brokers in Switzerland while I was on the phone to make trades. I know you don't want to go with Fidelity, but you need a more full service broker who can a) speak french and b) has those connections. I don't think you can have an IB trader make trades over the phone. They aren't built for that. If you're able to get certificates (which is highly unlikely) then you can negotiate directly with the company. Although I think you'll have more success working with the clearing broker. I'd go all out nuclear on this one. Look up employees who work in the back office at Gilbert Dupont and start to contact them directly. Say you have this problem and you need help, who do you talk to? People will help you out and get you directed to someone who can get this done. You just have to be persistent and ask everyone. I think the full service broker in the US is probably your best bet, but there is a price. Might be a few hundred euro to transact and tender, but that's a lot cheaper than spending months trying to get someone deep in a cube farm to handle the situation as a one-off.

I hate to say it, but my gut is that the SEC just rolls with this proposed rule. Reason being... I had a long conversation with a former regulator a few years ago, he worked in the pink/otc area. He said 90% was fraud and scammy companies (which we all know), and in the 10% there could be value. His boss held the view that ALL pink sheet companies were junk, and if a company was respectable they should just uplist. If they didn't uplist it just proved they were a scam. He was on a mission to eliminate the pink sheet stocks, that was the source of most of their regulatory problems, in their view. Fast forward, changes keep rolling forward. It's hard to trade most of these as-is, and now the SEC wants to make it harder. They will be successful. The irony of this is while they make public companies with some information hard to trade they are encouraging people to invest in private companies in venture rounds. In many ways it makes no sense to be public anymore. What's the point? You can raise capital easily as a private company, and being public brings no additional benefit.

I worked with someone to do this years ago. Mined the archives from 2003 forward. Looked at it very differently. Looked at the number of responses and subsequent return over trailing periods. Looked at people who posted specific investment threads. Result was more responses the worse the returns. There were some stellar ideas with zero to one comment. And the people posting those would post multiple ideas. Some solid gold from a few people. The problem was they never received any feedback, and thus their incentive to post disappeared. Nice work!

Sometimes you need to buy a share and call the CFO. Seems like a pain doesn't it? It is, but where information is hard to get it's extremely valuable. It's very hard to have an informational edge on Pfizer, but to have one on Thermwood Corporation you just need to spend a few cents for a share and call the CFO. Bump. Can it be argued that the people buying these type of stocks all go through the trouble of getting their financials that there isn't as much edge as you think there is? I find it hard to believe people just buy companies being completely in the dark about their numbers. I think there is this notion, especially on here that "everyone is doing it, the edge is gone." I've looked at shareholder lists for micro caps. Out of the thousands of shareholders for a given company maybe 100-150 are micro cap value investors. So the "smart money" is maybe 15% of the shareholder base. I don't know the odds, but if you were playing a game where you knew more than 85% of the participants wouldn't that seem like some sort of an edge? I'll also be the first to admit. In today's market you want to avoid microcaps. Purchase the tech stars of the world, the Tesla's, then sit back and count your cash. Work isn't rewarded in the market anymore and value doesn't work either.

I guess the question then is will we ever have high rates again?

I used to hang out on harmony central a LOT back in the late 90s early 2000s. Same as everyone else, reviewing albums, talking about dream band setups. In 99-2000 I was on a really active Pink Floyd and Rush newsgroup. They orchestrated meetups and live events. My brother took it to the next level, learned bass, became a professional, toured the world, played on the Tonight Show etc. Now he has a nice side business buying and selling vintage gear. He'll do normal stuff (vintage guitar/bass) here and there, but makes coin on vintage synths and really weird vintage recording gear. He's still active on a ton of gear and music sites. He has some awesome stories. I remember one, he sold some vintage amp or bass to a forum member. The buyer was relatively close so my brother said he'd deliver it. He ends up at some law firm, a partner purchased the amp. The guy was so excited he plugged the thing in in his office, hooked up a bass on the wall and they started jamming out in the middle of the work day. What I love about that story is the buyer and my brother would not be a natural connection, but they had a shared interest and a great time. Another story about gear. My brother left music and went into sales, he had a boss who had a sizable guitar flipping business on the side. He purchased Mexican Strats on craigslist, cleaned them and flipped them on craigslist at a 30-50% markup. He cleared $2-3k a weekend doing this in LA. I believe he purchased during the week and sold on the weekends.

Thanks! Online communities are pretty fragile, so I'd just encourage caution in the changes made to the format. I've seen it over and over again in my time on the internet over these past 25 years. There's a big change, almost everything is different, maybe it looks better but for some unforeseen reasons doesn't work as well or is too slow or there's some new UX annoyance, and there's a massive exodus or usage drops significantly and it's a spiral (fewer people contribute, so fewer people come to read, so fewer new people join, and so on). Happened to Digg, once one of the most popular sites on the internet, after a redesign that users didn't like. Not saying anything is going to happen, but your mention of the total redesign has brought back these memories, so I thought I'd mention it so it's on the radar. 100% this Used to visit a site AnalystForum.com religiously. There was some great stock picking banter on there, CFA banter etc. It was easy to search, easy to use. They "modernized it", which meant less information dense, more ads, more disconnected. I haven't visited in years. The site used to have thousands of posters, last visit it appeared to be mostly dead. There are other sites that I used to use that have been similar, a shame really.

While I agree with this, I think it's dangerous to mistake aunts and uncles arguing about politics and headlines is the same as being informed about what's going on. I equate the politics forum here to the aunts and uncles. My relatives can get quite heated about things, some factual, most emotional, and maybe it's good as a thermometer on an issue. Or maybe it just shows how much TV they watch.

The problem if you don't ignore it is the politics posts gum up the headings of the most recent posts. I'll make an admission, I visit the site every few days, skim the most recent posts and from there decide whether I want to click through. If it's an interesting title, or a name I know I'll read, otherwise I bounce. When politics is enabled it was hard to know that anything else was being talked about.

When have conference calls ever been clear? It isn't like everyone is calling in on their own (the analysts), they're all in a room with terrible acoustics sitting around with a microphone in the middle of the table talking. Obviously solution is for them to invest in very high end audio equipment with a mic for each person and some audio person to mix things. I guess I'm struggling as to why this is a revelation. This is 100% of conference calls daily in corporate America. Quality has VASTLY improved in the last 15 years.