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Strategies & Market Trends : Anthony @ Equity Investigations, Dear Anthony, -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Bishop who wrote (89329)	1/14/2005 5:28:20 PM
From: Bill Ulrich	Respond to of 122087

"worthless divvie collection" I had some of those in the form of spin off shares in one of those classic, "twistedly funky OTCBB deals". Company "A" was taking another company public, issuing shares of the Company "B" as the divvie to Company A shares. After the ex-div date, my account was noted with the "B" shares but since the offering hadn't happened yet, it was recorded as negative shares, waiting for the paper to be available to reconcile the account. Shortly thereafter, Company A abandoned the offering. But it never got recorded that my "negative shares" should be zero'ed out. So periodically, my borker's reconciliation dept. would send me a letter, "... according to our short-sale policies, you have to borrow some underlying paper to balance this currently naked short ..." Everytime I told my borker that the new company doesn't exist, zero the shares, they'd say, "Yeah, okay, we'll look into it." Then I'd get another nasty letter saying, "Dude, we're buying in your short". I'd reply back, "I'm not short. Never was short. Those were shares pending for a company that never happened". This went on for almost a year. Finally, I said, "Fine, 'buy in' my short. See if you can find the shares". I'd get back a letter, "We have not been able to locate any market shares of Company B to reconcile the short balance of your account". Finally, after a year of this crap, they finally come up with the idea, "Hey, looks like shares for Company B never existed. How 'bout we just zero these out for you, okay?"