Well the price of the IPOs from SFE has traditionally been small, $5 shr, so participating has been a no brainer. With DSSPs, SFE may offer the only way into the ICGE IPOs, since it appears ICGE will not attempt DSSPs. Meanwhile CMGI is offering 100 shrs to all holders of 100 shrs + no matter what. That would favor holding small amounts of CMGI in many accounts (which would be interesting, not to mention the miles you'd get with etrade, waterhouse, etc for opening all those accts).
But if SFE offers a 10:1 or a 20:1 offering %, (that's what they did with ICGE and USIT), and remember it has several overlap companies with ICGE, then SFE with the DSSPs wil probably match or equal their historic rate of retrn (which I believe is about 30% -- check their web site)
Not many companies can match that over a 20=3- year period. If you factor out the IPOs, don't know what SFE would look like. In 10 years its up 25X (2,500%); in 13 years its up 60X (6,000%), not counting "dividends"
I've held SFE for about 13 years and my investment has done better than any holding over a long period. You *should* participate in the IPOs, even the duds, cause you never know which ones will be great.
FWIW, I've considered selling SFE at peaks, but never did ,even without tax conseq. so I could've done much better than I have. |
