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Strategies & Market Trends : Shorting stocks: Broken stocks - Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Troy Shaw who wrote (1621)	8/7/1998 10:41:00 PM
From: Carl Yee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2506

I saw that news too. SYQT sort of dropped off my radar after it went below 5 and I covered my short; which now seems a long time ago. wonder if IOM will ever get into that fix?

To: Troy Shaw who wrote (1621)	8/10/1998 7:13:00 AM
From: Q.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2506

Troy, indeed, following Syquest was how I learned about discounted convertibles. They've done an endless number of such deals since then to sustain one of the world's lousiest manufacturing businesses. When it went public in '91, there were less than 3 M shares in the float. In '96, when I shorted the stock, there were about 12 M shares out, and the stock had a market cap of about $60 M. Now there are about 100 M shares out, and the stock is at about $0.50, so the market cap remains about where it was 2 years ago. In the last 2 years the stock has fallen by more than a factor of ten, while the market cap has remained flat. This demonstrates the hugely dilutive effects of this sort of financing. Shareholders have gotten nothing out of this. The only winners are the offshore financiers who have essentially sucked hundreds of millions of dollars out of the pockets of small investors, and the co. itself, which has remained in business. The investing public as a whole would have been better off if the company had just folded in 1996. Here's the chart of their entire public history. It is the epitome of the broken stock: tscn.com I'd guess at $0.50, they are now a candidate for a reverse split. The fundamentals are about the worst you'll ever see for a mature mfg. co.: cash flow from operations ($66 M) in H1 1998, on $79 M revenues.