Sam B.: “Re: ‘How We Won‘ — please remove me from email list. Not interested in this political crap.”
Kathryn Lance: “GREAT piece about ‘How We Won.’ I am sharing widely. Inspirational is an understatement.”
Fred C.: “OK, we won. I’m glad. Can we please get back to finance occasionally? Such as, why did Bank of Utica pop $45 last week or is Delcath still a reasonable speculation or time to dump? Your column is worth the price but the election was 3 weeks ago.”
>> It’s over? You mean I didn’t just dream it?
Guru thinks DCTH may fall even further under pressure from year-end tax selling and announcement of another capital raise . . . but he thinks approval for treating ocular melanoma will come by June if not before and that the stock would then go to $3 or $4. This is clearly not what we had once hoped — imagine if we had sold it all at $14 instead of watching it drop to today’s $1.35 — but I’m not inclined to sell it here.
BKUTK “popped” $45 a share on, I think, 500 shares. If someone now rushed to sell 500 shares, it could pop right back down. But Chris Brown of Aristides says its liquidation value is north of $600 (and doesn’t seeing it liquidating), so at $385 he holds on with enthusiasm.
BOREALIS
Air Navigation Services of the Czech Republic has signed on as WheelTug’s “air traffic services partner for European operations.” Read it here. So we have airlines signed on to lease WheelTug if it can be produced and certified — KLM, Alitalia, El Al, Jet Airways, Israir, Onur Air — and a still-growing team signed on to produce and certify it. If they should succeed, which this video suggests they may, it’s hard for me to imagine why the operator of any commercial jet would ever not want this capability. So with each new development it seems increasingly possible that more than 10,000 aircraft may, in the intermediate future (a few years), be taxiing around with WheelTug systems that could net WheelTug perhaps $50,000 a year each — a pre-tax net of half a billion dollars a year. At its current $8.50 a share, Borealis, which owns most of WheelTug, is currently valued at about $45 million, which is to say more like “one-tenth times” dreamt-of earnings than the more traditional “ten times earnings.” For it to get from one-tenth to ten times — which it may surely never, ever, ever do — would be for it to rise a hundredfold from here.
The world is a funny place. Given your choice of $10,000 worth of Citicorp stock or General Motors or Enron — or Borealis — in 1999, when we first started buying these crazy shares, any prudent person would have taken one of the blue chips. But Citi is down 87% since then. And GM shareholders have fared even worse. (Enron, at least, with $100 billion in sales at the time and named by Fortune “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years, has probably done well. But for some reason I can’t find a stock quote.) Borealis, meanwhile, has tripled.
I do understand it may all amount to nothing. Who knows what hidden pitfalls and catastrophes lurk. But I also enjoy musing about the hidden upside — that if WheelTug actually succeeds, maybe the technology could find application elsewhere, as, for example, in automobiles. And maybe the company’s other technologies have value. And maybe — who let me out of the asylum? — its behemoth iron ore deposits have value as well.
I like to think each of you has at least a little money you can truly afford to lose — mad money! money for the fun of it! — and that, if you do, some of it sits not in cash but in a few shares of BOREF (purchased with a “limit order” via a discount broker).
