Patience

Slavishly loyal readers of this page may recall the ‘patience, Jackass, patience’ story that so convulsed my brother and me, aged 11 and 7 at the time, and that became legend in our family. (What family doesn’t have its legends?)

After an endless shaggy-dog buildup . . . the jackass asking the camel for water and the camel responding ‘patience, jackass, patience’ and the jackass asking the camel for water and the camel responding ‘patience, jackass, patience’ and the jackass asking the camel for water and the camel responding ‘patience, jackass, patience’ . . . my dad fell for it and asked my brother to get to the point – and my brother responded, ‘Patience, jackass, patience‘ as he, and then I, wide-eyed with disbelief, burst into hysterical laughter. (Joined soon by my mother and, eventually, my father.)

The idea of my brother, aged 11, saying anything that incredibly disrespectful to my father was so risky, so out of character, so edgy for 1954 – well, it was Lenny Bruce come to Apartment 6C. And now you know.

I can’t think of the word patience without thinking of this story, and today I have been thinking of the word patience on two fronts:

DON’T SELL YOUR FMD

It dropped from 55 to 47 over the last few days before recovering a little to $49.56 yesterday, and – while there are certainly no guarantees in any of this – my guru tells me he used the dip to buy more. I am constitutionally incapable of buying shares at nearly double what we paid less than a year ago (adjusted for the 3-for-2 split), so I haven’t bought more myself. But knowing that he has makes me feel comfortable hanging on in hope of the gains he believes are yet to come. Three cheers for my FMD guru.

DON’T SELL YOUR BOREF

With the stock back up to $12 or so, triple where many of us started buying it, oh, so long ago, and double where it was just a couple of weeks ago, there is the natural temptation to take the money and run. And you absolutely should if your circumstances have changed and this is no longer money you can’t truly afford to lose – because you truly may.

But the point of this crazy speculation was never to double or triple our money – why risk total loss for that? The point has always been that we just might win the lottery. (Or some real-world equivalent thereof.) At $12, the whole company and all its subsidiaries and patents and so on are still only valued at $60 million, the cost of a single Gulfstream 5 corporate jet. So it may all go to nothing, but it may also be that – even after all these years – the game has only barely begun.

In addition to Monday’s hopeful news on the mining front, Borealis yesterday issued this press release, announcing some new patents I could never hope to comprehend . . . and the hiring of Hans Walitzki, whose credentials I am not remotely competent to evaluate.

The release says Dr. Walitzki has come on board to ‘manage the final development and commercialization of Power Chips and related technologies.’

Could this mean that there is actually the prospect of achieving ‘the final development and commercialization of Power Chips and related technologies?’ Well, who knows. But to me, it’s worth remaining patient a few more years to find out.

(And did I mention that the plane moved? That’s a whole separate technology that could be worth a great deal – mystifyingly slow though the progress has been.)