In Search Of: the point

The Yahoo! REFR board, REFR's primary promotional outlet over the past year, did the almost unthinkable and actually took much of the holiday weekend off.

Not everyone was enjoying the three-day respite, however. The person posting as "N. Dixon" on Silicon Investor (a name I can't read without thinking in spoonerism terms) was apparently quite hard at work, compiling a voluminous series of postings, in order to prove... well, a point, I guess. I'm really not sure, maybe this person is trying to amass a volume of positive data to counter this admittedly mostly-negative collection of observations about REFR.

At any rate, it's a fine source of material for me, as one of my goals with this blog is to exhaustively look into every bullish argument that has been hoisted to convince investors this company is something other than what it is, a method of transferring wealth from shareholders to company management.

Some of the items Dixon posted yesterday have been covered already, and several others are just echoes of the company line disguised as independent observations.

A few, though, have me scratching my head and wondering just what possible point Dixon could have in mind.

Consider this post: TWO SPD LICENSES[sic] WORKING TOGETHER!!!!

Now, you can look as hard as you like through that post, but you won't see anything about SPD. I guess the theory is that because DuPont holds an SPD license, and Isoclima holds an SPD license, and because they're working together on something, that must mean... I don't know, that maybe the topic of SPD comes up at lunch? Who knows?

(By the way, for those of you complaining that this blog doesn't accept on-site replies, please note that I do read the Yahoo and SI message boards and you are more than welcome to post your comments there. If someone comes up with a sane explanation of the thought process here, I'll be sure to post it.)

What makes this all the more bizarre is that the post is not, in fact, a single press release at all, but actually an amalgamation of a press release and a case study on the DuPont website. The case study is the part that shows DuPont and Isoclima "working together" (though clearly stating in a subsequent paragraph that the material being used is PVB, not SPD). The only reason I can think of for splashing the segment of the press release at the top is for the headline, New DuPont Technology Gives Auto Safety Glass a New "Look", which, if one never bothered to read past it or look at the pictures, might leave one with the impression that SPD could be involved.

So, the bottom line, Dixon has somehow managed to say absolutely nothing and yet still be transparently dishonest. I have to admit, that takes some talent.

More on this source in the days to come.