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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rjm2 who wrote (12974)	8/22/2001 6:34:17 PM
From: rjm2	Respond to of 79164

With the market & economy questionable, I have been increasing my positions in a couple of cash-rich shells. AMCE is trading at about their cash value ($1.67 per share,$7 million) and has proven to be a terrific trading vehicle for me for several years now. Historically has proven to be a good buy whenever it falls to $2 or below. The CEO has had several big winners in the past (from his personal 13-d's) and so I have every expectation that whenever he does merge something into this shell, it will have a lot of upside. A similar story is CRTQ...former bio-tech company that never made money. Corporate raider Paul Koether took over years ago and shut down the money losing stuff. They maintain several dozen or so patents with substantial value. Company has about $14 million in cash and is searching for an operating business in addition to finding more partners for its technology. 3 years ago, the then management had this to say about their science portfolio... "Cortech's science portfolio has real potential and value: Over $100 million has been invested in the research and development of the Company's science, patents, compounds and technology. Cortech has two compounds already in clinical development (CE-1037 and Bradycor(TM)), another one which could be rapidly advanced into the clinic (CP-0597), and an additional number of other compounds in earlier stages of development. We also have a separate, unique proprietary technology which we believe could be of use to numerous pharmaceutical companies in their quest to synthesize protease inhibitors to treat a host of different disorders. Our compounds have shown preclinical and clinical promise in such devastating injuries as stroke and traumatic brain injury, respectively. We believe that these compounds and the science behind them, if properly handled, offer substantial potential value to Cortech's investors." Insiders have a big position and Bio-Tech Value partners does too. The chairman is 64 so I suspect his timetable for seeing the value realized is not too long into the future. I remain bothered that the insider buy/sell ratio continues to be bearish. For this reason, I am more comfortable buying special situations where the downside is low & cash is high. In a market like this, they provide "VALUE" in piece of mind while still providing significant upside from an extrordinary event.