Why did I change my SI profile? It's pretty simple Mary - I don't want you to continue to use my SI profile as an excuse to keep publishing personal information about me on the web. Read the words that are there now in place of what was previously there - they speak directly to you.
I don't have the stomach for your particular brand of malice and distortion. If you want to spend 5-10 hours a day telling people distorted information about ASTN and a host of other companies out of the "goodness of your heart" -- and accuse people falsely of criminal activity, with a topping of vile personal attacks on how people look and how you imagine them to live, that's your karma. But your attempt to villianize ASTN and anybody and everybody who supports it or works for it or expresses positive opinions about it proves (to me anyway) that you are completely out of touch with reality on this one. A stock promoter is somebody who receives compensation for promoting a stock -- and a bad stock promoter is somebody who makes it all up for a fee. By contrast, we are just people expressing opinions and sharing information about something we support, something we want to succeed, and something we have invested in. We are not paid, and our interest in seeing it succeed is well known to anybody who has ever read our expressions of opinion. Rob, Don and I (and other longs who have expressed positive opinions and enthusiasm for ASTN over the years) have no interest in making money off of other people's losses. We want the company to succeed and we still think it will. We want it to continue to make progress in implementing its business plan. We want to see the current average of 1.5 - 2 Million revenue shares a day (about 10 times what it was 6 months ago) multiply by another 10 times over the rest of this fiscal year, and keep growing after that. And we want the stock price recover in a sustained fashion. We think it is entirely possible and we think the picture you paint of it is completely distorted, in a malicious way. We may have underestimated the amount of time that it would take to get where they are today by a wide margin (and we did, no doubt about that), but that does not make us criminals or stock promoters -- we are just human beings interested in an investment all of us have made. And the fact that we still support the company and what it is doing is no crime either. Your attempts to suggest it is -- and your attempts to label everybody who says anything positive about this company as a criminal -- is a figment of your warped imagination. And we do share a belief that your 24/7 posts about the company are a mix of important information, distorted information and outright lies -- and, taken as a whole, does not present a fair account of what the company is about, or what its prospects for the future are.
ASTN is NOT everything in my life, Mary, not by a long shot. As much time as I have spent following this investment, and expressing my opinion about it on the internet, and talking with others who share that interest, it still represents only a small part of my life, which is full of love and family and joy. If it fails, it will be a monetary loss, but as John Lennon once said, money can't buy you love. But I will never believe that I did anything but express honest and sincerely held opinions, and share lots of accurate information to people sharing the same interest. And I still think that the company will succeed. When I expressed that opinion in late 1998, the stock price rose over 1000% from what had been a 2-year abyss, due to a combination of factors -- a strong market for speculative tech stocks, a long awaited SEC approval that finally was given, and the very real possibility that the PHLX might merge into the NYSE (as reported by Reuters at the time). In hindsight, that rise led us to be more exuberant than circumstances warranted. In the interim, lengthy delays in implementation, the worst stock market for speculative tech stocks in our lifetime, and the problems that derive from that (dilution, etc.) have brought the stock price to what seems to many now like another abyss. Who is to say if your brand of bashing isn't as out of touch with reality as our exuberance was when the stock was at 17.
But let's be honest -- dilution and delisting are real possibilities and the ultimate upside is not what it once appeared it could be -- but that is not the end of the story. eVWAP volume is rising steadily and the company has experienced substantial (exponential) revenue growth -- that is indeniable. Expenses are down considerably, 100 Million shares a day of 2-sided liquidity is in place for the first time in the last 60 days, and volumes are rising as a result. There is a path to profitability, and they can point to results showing that path for the first time in 5 years. The picture you paint (that is, the part of it that is not pure distortion and lies) reflects some real concerns, but it is only 1/2 the story, at best -- the ugly half made even uglier by your particular brand of distortion. You are in denial if you think that there is nothing positive to be said about the company's performance over the past 6 months.
Whatever. We are all entitled to our opinions. I just don't get the personal attack part of this. They are not evil people, and those who support what they are trying to do are not evil people either -- Fred may not be an angel (who in the stock trading business is?) but he is not the evil person you make him out to be. He is a strong personality, to be sure, but he is also a visionary who knows this business inside out. You consider yourself a researcher -- do some research on the history of Instinet, how it started, where it was when he took over day to day operations, where it was when it was sold to Reuters and where it is now. And then there's Fred Weingard, Bill Uchimoto, Art Bacci and many many others who work for the company -- they are all good people, people we have met with and spoken to at length, and they are a large part of why the longs who support this company feel the way we do. That you feel compelled to characterize the whole lot of them (and those of us who support them) as a bunch of criminals is totally twisted.
That's all -- time will tell if your efforts to get people to sell the stock over the past 6 months were well spent. But whatever the outcome, I will always be proud to have people like Don and Rob as friends -- and grateful that I don't have to stoop to calling honest people criminals in order to make myself feel like a better person.
Mark |
