Dear Bret,
I guess I stumbled onto something that wasn't publicly available in terms of learning about the board meeting to vote on a reverse split. I live in the Bay Area and know a lot of people who know more about what is going on than an investor relations department will ever tell a shareholder. What I can't do is find something out that I want to know. I have a hundred questions about Bay Area companies that I'd love to know the answer to. Occasionally, though, quite by accident, an answer to a question presents itself to me. Not a rumor, but an actual fact. How I learned the board was meeting was by happenstance. It's kind of like going to a baseball game and getting a foul ball in the stands. Because I live here, I'm at the park, and once every blue moon a ball comes my way. What I'm trying to say is nobody told me, "Snake, MPRS is having a board meeting to vote on a reverse split." I do have a primary source for my information, but I'm sure the source is blissfully unaware that he did anything questionable in letting me find out.
Once I talked to an accountant at a company who told me he could tell me how many of a product had sold, but not the price. He had it quite backwards. Investor Relations at that company could tell me prices but not numbers. I would never post that person by name, of course. In fact, I'd try to talk to him again at the next annual meeting if I could. Another time a CFO of all people told me earnings would come out late because of an audit in the course of talking about their vacation. The funny thing is I haven't made much money on these tidbits because I am never certain if I know anything that isn't already priced into the stock. I didn't sell my MPRS last week, for instance. I could buy it back now at .75 cents on the dollar if I had made a quick move. I felt institutions might already know, anyway. It seems they found out a week after I did in this case, judging by Friday's volume! I am an investor who likes by nature to buy companies for the long haul, so I don't go for short term moves if I feel the long term looks great. In this case, it would just be like me to bite my own tail, (I am a Snake, after all) and sell MPRS at 1 and 31/32 because I learned of the reverse split, only to have some great news come out, like 200k of a new game have shipped, or a new deal has been signed, etc, and have the stock go up while I'm out after I've suffered for 3 years with the stock. In this case I would have done well, but I feel I will do well when MPRS has a big quarter later in this year, and I don't want to do anything to screw that up. I am going to average down (again) if the stock goes lower, and one more time after that if it goes lower still at the time earnings for Q4 are reported.
My decision to post the news about the reverse split was not an easy decision, actually. What was decisive for me is that this is a stock that has been traded on inside information in the past many times. I can point to just before the GT merger in October and just before the collapse of the merger in December as recent examples. They are far from the first. I posted because I wanted to forearm and forewarn the individual investors who have suffered through this stock without any compensation over the last few years. I felt for once they deserved to know something that was going on before the institutions and those in the past who have traded on what should be private knowledge.
Best Regards,
Snake |
