Mike,
Here are the details. Like I said there has never been anything going on with insider activity but exercising of options. We're talking seven pages single spaced from late 1995 alone. In the week of 2/6 to 214 there were three insider buys by G. Hewitt, I. Gruverman and M. Pelley. The first two are listed as directors and the last as an officer. The purchases (holdings) were 4,300 (70K), 65,000 (116K), and 13,000 (127K). The president (S. Loomis) sold 15,560 shares a couple of weeks ago but he still has 360K shares.
I have no idea what the buying means. However given the history of insider trading at this company, the buys stuck out like a sore thumb. They were both fairly large and concentrated in a short period of time. For myself, I decided to ride this one out rather than punt because of this. I couldn't see any good reason to sell with unusual insider buys like this. For me, my small holding in FOCS has always been that if it goes the reward might be large and if it went kaput I wasn't out anything I couldn't afford to lose.
Daniel,
Yep the balance sheet is UGLY. My speculation (capital s and worth maybe less than zero) is that someday the management will realize that they are simply too small and underfunded to capitalize on the technology. To me they'll end up selling out eventually to another firm who has the resources to do something with what they've got. Unfortunately, there may be a zillion shares outstanding before they throw in the towel. On the other hand, they own a lot of shares themselves. We shall see. This is kind of like staying up late to see how a bad movie ends.
Hope the above wasn't too windy. You folks have a great weekend.
Best Regards,
Charlie Sawyer |
