I’d decided not to participate in what has become a startlingly ugly exchange. Even one of my personal heroes of civility, Richard Hubbell, has taken the low and nasty road! But here I am anyway. Oh well. I wanted to tell everyone that Diane Burke (sic) at PRST, the comptroller who is sitting in as the IR person until JMT returns from maternity leave, answered my queries on the Agfa suit in the same way she answered Neil’s. Also I want to say to Pierre, to whom misspelling is quite important, that it was I who provided Ms. Bourque’s misspelled name to Neil. She pronounces it "berk", not "boork", as you would expect from the unusual spelling, when she answers the phone, which misled me.
By the way, to Steve Andrew, who implied Neil was selling PRST to "public customers": Neil has never sold a share of PRST to anybody. His interest is as a personal investor. Pierre, I’d be interested to know if you are professionally invested in PRST as a short position, or is your interest, like Neil’s, merely personal, that is, just in the few puts you mentioned that you personally own? I was wondering if you are, for example, on the payroll of someone who has an interest in your short-oriented postings on this thread; or if you are in some other professional relation to a short PRST position. I’m a personal investor, as you know. If you still decline to disclose this, I won’t bring it up again. I really am just curious. There’s no rule that says you have to tell, I was just reminded of this by the hostile accusation to Neil by Steve Andrew that he had "public customers" he was selling PRST to, implying that such a relation to the performance of the stock would have, if true, sordid implications as regards Neil’s ethics. I guess he’d feel about you, if you had "public customers", the same way.
This reminds me: Steve, is it truly your position that all you did in posting #1333 is "reporting a delay of a decision…pending attempts at compromise"? That’s it? You hadn’t the slightest intention of disseminating, from a secret source ("don’t harass me as to my source’s identity" ; "I will only say that he has been 100% accurate in the past and not given to hype or fiction.") the information that PRST had already lost the suit and "was attempting to mitigate the ramifications of a severe patent LOSS (my emphasis)" and that Agfa (the WINNER, right?) that Agfa – isn’t interested in business with PRST, and was just "complying with the arbitrator’s request to postpone any announcement until PRST could ATTEMPT (emphasis mine) to make new offers". So now, Steve, you are describing this posting as simply "Reporting a delay of a decision,…pending attempts at a compromise." That’s all. You weren’t quite unsubtly "releasing any arbitration decision prior to the exhaustion of any and all conciliatory efforts"? Because that would be wrong, right?
Amazing. It gives new meaning to the word disingenuous. And everybody except Paul Emerson, Richard for example, thinks Steve is straight as an arrow, no impropriety there, whatever could Neil mean?! But why would Steve have to rewrite his history as documented in #1333 by mischaracterizing the import of those remarks when he writes #1347? And why if all he was doing was reporting "a delay of decision" is his source so very mysterious? Those are rhetorical questions, obviously. Anyone who can read can see what he was saying in #1333 and how in #1347 he is pretending he did otherwise.
I’m not discussing now whether Steve is right or wrong about the result of the arbitration. The subject is whether Steve is honest in his claim that all he did in #1333 was report a "delay of decision." Everybody who believes that raise your hand. Take your thumb out of your mouth first or it will hurt.
Speaking of who is right, if Presstek’s comptroller is being untruthful (while they are being scrutinized by the SEC) that’s something we private PRST investors want very much to know, of course! I mean when she says the issue under arbitration is immaterial to Presstek’s future prospects. Tom seems to feel, based on his study of the patents, that however it turns out the issue will prove, indeed, immaterial to the earnings prospects of the company. Pierre and Steve etc. seem to think it will destroy PRST. Tom, if I’ve misstated your feelings about this, correct me.
By the way, Diane Bourque also told me that the deductions from earnings relating to those options will apply also to 3Q and 4Q bottom line. Too bad for us PRST bulls.
Well, I got off the track. I was intending to point out that Neil is giving opinion and data from research he reports the sources of, and that Steve Andrew’s posting was a different animal in more than one way.
By the way, Richard, Diane Bourque told me, and I told Neil, that there were people at Presstek who followed PRST on the Internet. She didn’t tell me that she herself had the SI address. I guess this unclarity makes me the one who deserves to be called a liar – "Ms. Veracity".
Speaking of addresses, Neil isn’t exactly anonymous. It took Jason 5 minutes to find him. If you call his firm and ask for him, he picks up the phone. Well, that’s if you call late at night. (During working hours his sec’y answers.) He’s usually there late at night (his postings show that) and his appalling working hours tell you something about why he sometimes can’t spend time researching PRST. Or as Pierre would express it, why he can’t always come "crawling out from under a rock" to post on this thread. Nice.
Neil, I wish you’d post the results of your research on an order backlog for 1997. James S. thinks there is no backlog going into 1997.
Jacklance, it sounds like you are really out to prove once and for all your thesis that Neil thought that PRST would go up during a period when it actually went down. Neil has made himself vulnerable, it’s true. People define themselves in various ways, don’t they. This thread is so interesting, even when it makes you feel dirty to read it. It will be the fullness of time that determines whether PRST is a good investment, more closely matching Tom’s table with its assumptions than the predictions of Steve Andrew and his admirers. |
