Has Putin Captured the American Presidency? No Joke January 29, 2017January 31, 2017 In case you missed it . . . Rachel: Has Putin captured the American presidency? Part 2. Meanwhile, Trump supporters believe most of the Women’s March marchers were paid to march. By George Soros. Scary. Watch. From Friday: a couple of updates and a new suggestion: GLDD seems to have come to life a bit. They finally have a new CEO — years of disappointing performance may be traced to his predecessor — and there seem to be some activist shareholders trying to move things along. Plus, they just announced an $88 million dredging award. Years ago, I had hoped we’d see the stock in the low teens; now, I’d hold on hoping for $7, which would hardly be a home run — barely a base hit after so long — but still, from here, better than a savings account. BOREF trades so thinly that even a 1,000 shares can bump it up or down 20%. So the only thing sillier than getting excited when it jumps to $6.75 as it did Wednesday is the fact that it’s so low to begin with. That’s just my view, of course — beware my happy gene — but as I’ve argued so many times over the years, this is a remarkable lottery ticket. With 5 million shares outstanding, at $6.75 it’s valued at $35 million. Yet its WheelTug subsidiary could save the airline industry billions of dollars a year. I won’t run through the whole spiel again; and it’s absolutely possible this lottery ticket will never pay off — it is a lottery ticket! — but with the FAA taking it seriously, and 22 airlines having signed up to try it if it ever reaches the market, it seems to me the lottery ticket should be worth more like $350 million than $35 million, in the expectation that, yes, like a lot of risky new efforts (Solyndra?), it might wash out; but that if it succeeded, it could one day be throwing off profits of $350 million per year. As always: only with money you can truly afford to lose. SPRT is a little company that a small group of activist investors bought into recently at $3 and change (it was $2.37 last I looked). So, being lazy, I say to myself: they must have done a lot of homework before committing their time and cash to this speculation, and here I get to buy in 20% cheaper! (So I did.) One of those investors told me that the original company, founded in 1997, had all sorts of woes, but that, now much shrunk, it will sit, he thinks, with more than $2 per share in cash net of debt once the losses are staunched . . . sits with $120 million in net operating losses that, while tricky to value or turn into cash, could be worth another $1 a share . . . and — oh! — has an actual business that might be worth $2 a share. So — in his view, at least — they ought to be able to avoid losingwhat they paid; and maybe cash out at more like $5. Only, as always, with money you can truly afford to lose.