Quarterly report time

As per standard procedure, REFR released its quarterly figures via its SEC 10-Q filing, with no fanfare whatsoever.

A glance at the balance sheet reveals that the cash position has indeed pulled back from the brink, up to $6.2 million, meaning that the company has bought themselves almost exactly five more quarters with their latest shelf offering. The quarterly loss was down as well, due mostly to the lack of a partially-owned subsidiary being shut down and written off this year.

That leads in to what was basically the only other item of interest in the filing, a lengthy paragraph detailing the whole sorry story of REFR's investment in SPD Inc. The bottom line, REFR invested about $825,000 in SPD inc., and in the end received a liquidation payment of $44,203, for a return of -94.6% on their investment.

Compared to that, an investment in REFR stock was actually relatively good.

In living color?

One of the facts of life that continuously dogs REFR shareholders can be summed up by a semi-famous line by Bret Spiner on Star Trek: "It is blue."

To be sure, they often try to pretend otherwise, calling the blue "cool", "soothing", or perhaps "futuristic". But all of that is shown up for the bluff it is by the rush of unbridled excitement that happens whenever the the latest rumor floats about the holy grail of SPD: the black particle.

The black particle dates back to at least 1998, when REFR issued a press release (what else?) announcing the invention of the black SPD particle. Needless to say, this got a lot of people excited. Now SPD would be able to shed the "blue stigma" and look just like other electrochromic technology. Better yet, if they could make the particles black, perhaps they could make them other colors as well. The dream of SPD computer displays might not be dead after all.

And so the vigil for the black SPD particle began. And continued. And went on some more. And so on. After all, it might take a little while to go from "invention" to practical application, but surely that transition was inevitable, right?

Perhaps not. Five years later, at the 2003 annual meeting, Robert Saxe admitted that the black particle was "not ready". And that was basically the first, and last, official word on the black particle since the "invention" announcement.

So there we have another case of "it never really panned out" from the company that seems to specialize in failing to pan out.

Coming to a screen near you?

Hard as it may be to believe, but a decade ago, shareholders in REFR were being told (while happily lapping up every word) that laptop and other flat-panel displays of the future would be powered by SPD technology.

No, really.

SPD, which to this day has a switching time measured in seconds, was being touted has having the potential to become the standard for what was at the time a very hot technological development field -- the ability to make affordable flat screens that weren't dim and flickering.

Never mind that SPD came (and still comes) exclusively in a monocolor blue. (Attempts at other colors are an overdue topic for another post.) Never mind that switching times were atrocious. Never mind that they weren't even close to even a VGA (640x480) resolution. No, SPD was going to be a bona fide flat-panel display technology, because Bob and Joe said so, and that was the end of it.

Amazingly, even to this day, REFR still lists computer displays as a feasible use for SPD, even as OLED technology is poised to make SPD even more thoroughly obsolete.

Technology may be in constant advance, but some hype never changes.

A stock even a wunderkind could hate

Possibly the seminal event of the depths of the bear market in early 2003, was when none other than Jonathan Lebed, the teen who rose to fame as a bubble-era stock guru before getting in all kinds of hot water with the SEC, starting putting out sell calls on his new site. If ever there was a moment in recent memory to say, this shorting business has gotten too easy, time to switch back to the long side, that was it.

The stock Lebed put out his first short call on? REFR.

Mind you, ever since, the sins of Lebed have been transferred to all of REFR's critics by the promoters, but as usual that misses the point. Which is, when you're the first short idea from someone known up until that point (and, for all anyone knows, ever since) as a permabull, man, you know you're on the bottom of the barrel.

Yet still the suckers buy more and more.

Pure contempt

One thing I have to give props to for the REFR shareholder corps. They never let the fact that their company shows pure contempt for them by going all but completely silent on important company matters, like the specific status of any of the major production licensees as to their state of "SPD-readiness", get them down. (Yes, they did just give a general overview in the Letter to Shareholders last week, but I sure couldn't glean anything resembling a time frame from what they had to say.)

Lacking for information from the company, our intrepid longs go out and find their own news. Today, for example, the "hot" news item is the discovery of an article from an edition of some publication called Pure Contemporary from January, which references, among several other "futuristic" home decorating ideas, SPD windows. And specifically, the SPD windows that were barely mentioned in the Extreme Makeover show from May 2004.

Yes, they're fawning over a rehash of a year-old SPD publicity attempt that was a complete failure even then, an mentioned in an article obscure enough that they didn't find it themselves until four months after its publishing.

And this is supposed to scare the shorts? Really?