SPD windows, STAT!

In an unusual case a couple of years ago, REFR actually got one of their theoretical customers to put out a PR more or less on their behalf.

Road Rescue, an ambulance manufacturer out of South Carolina, agreed to offer SPD windows as an option on their ambulances, and kicked off the rollout with a press release announcing the new feature.

Bully for REFR and SPD, but, um, what does variable transparency glass do for an ambulance, exactly? Ambulances don't have a lot of windows, and those in the patient compartment are already darkened for privacy and glare reduction. And in general the patients tend to have more things to worry about than the view out the window. Are there really any situations where they'd want those windows to not be shaded?

It appears that ambulance companies can't think of any, either, as the trend towards SPD windows in ambulances, like so many other things related to REFR's progress, has totally failed to occur. Instead, it was only the shareholders' portfolios that got sicker as a result.

Juno how smart garages are?

There seems to be no form of publicity for SPD that REFR won't pursue -- at least so long as it doesn't cost them anything apart from having to supply the demo film. Maybe, in a pinch, they'll install it, too.

An example of this was from the Popular Science Smart Garage exhibit in the summer of 2003. The exhibit's pages are long-gone from the Popular Science website (so proud of it are they), but the REFR press release proudly announcing their participation remains. Strangely, the NASCAR crowd to which the Smart Garage was shown wasn't wowed by SPD, at least not enough for it to stand out from the dozens of other pieces of gadgetry and whatnot on display in the exhibit. All in all a terribly disappointing comedown for the technology that won the coveted Best of "What's New" award from PopSci the year before.

But never mind that, let's go to Disneyworld! In April 2004, the Innoventions exhibit at EPCOT introduced the General Motors-sponsored Juno exhibit. And wouldn't you know it, it had SPD! Along with about a hundred other gadgets and doodads. (Amazing how that keeps happening.) One observer suggested Juno was put up to literally show off as many different technologies as possible. It was too overstuffed with gadgetry to even be plausible as a concept car. The people running the exhibit were said to have mentioned about how the windows could change tint, but again, the SPD name never came up. Such a pity, because I'm sure that couples on vacation with the kids are really in a mood to do some serious car shopping.

Just as well, of course, because SPD Inc. was just shutting down that month, with a successor yet to arise. How embarassing it would have been to actually get demand and be unable to fulfill it.

But I doubt that was a worry.

The vindictive approach to investing

Message board quote of the day:

"I suggest that these new [investors in REFR] would not sell here and may get angry enough at you shorts to buy more on the open market and teach you a lesson! LOL!"

Yes, buying out of anger, to "teach a lesson" to sellers. There's a classic investment strategy if I ever heard one.

BWAH!

Extreme Makeover: Stock Promotion Edition

While it's fun to watch the price of REFR collapse, it only presses the urgency to tell the many tales of REFR while time remains to do so. With that in mind...

Last spring, right about the same time as the SPD Inc. closure, REFR scored what appeared to be a promotional coup. A licensee, Steve Abadi (who seems to run several businesses out of his house, including Innovative Glass Corp.), arranged to have SPD featured on a special "live" edition of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The show, as per its format, selected a couple of deserving souls -- in this case, a couple of NYC firemen/roommmates who were present for the 9/11 attacks -- had their apparently completely refurbished and remodeled with updated appliances, seperate bedrooms, an "eternal flame" memorial to their fallen comrades, etc.

One feature that got a certain amount of pre-publicity was, if you haven't guessed, a number of SPD windows that were installed as part of the project. Think of it! SPD being shown off live in front of an audience of millions! Demand was sure to skyrocket from the publicity!

So much for the theory. The practice wasn't nearly so hot. In two excruciatingly boring hours mixing live and taped footage, which even an appearance by Regis Philbin couldn't save, the SPD windows got referred to about twice the entire show, and even then the term "SPD" was never mentioned. Furthermore, the SPD windows were installed on top of an internal room partition, basically out of the limelight. For whatever reason, the variable shading feature of the SPD glass was never demonstrated (possibly because they weren't able to get it working -- a callback to the Jeep Rescue debacle, perhaps?), and, almost as a final insult to REFR, the big finish of the reveal was motorized physical shades on the external windows -- exactly the sort of thing supposedly made obsolete by SPD.

The whole thing was unanimously considered a major disappointment (and given the rabidness of the company's defenders, that's saying something), but it did have the effect of distracting everyone from the implications of SPD Inc.'s shutdown, so perhaps it wasn't a total loss.

All the same, it was the beginning of a very cold year for REFR.

The dreaded auditor change

REFR filed an 8-K yesterday that, just a few years ago, would have put fear into the heart of even the most jaded investor -- the dreaded change of auditing firms, from KPMG to BDO Seidman.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the whole deal is probably nothing much. An article in the New York Times from a couple of months ago presaged this change, by highlighting companies, that, despite doing nothing in particular wrong, are being discontinued as clients by the Big Four firms, including KPMG. It all stems from the complexities and red tape introduced by the Sarbanes-Oxley act, filtering down through to the smaller companies, and making the task of their compliance too much for the major firms to handle.

So REFR moves to a "second-tier" accounting firm, and all is well on that score. REFR may be a chronic overpromiser and non-deliverer, but it has never been a book-cooker. Assuredly, if management were to partake of invented numbers, they would invent better ones than the ones they currently report.

Messing with the wrong people

So the debate on the board today seems to be about fears of repercussion from companies being criticized. Right now it isn't an issue with me, since I seem to be essentially writing to an audience of one at the moment, but nevertheless I doubt this blog will get Joe Harary seeking me out so he can put me on his Christmas card list.

It's interesting that there's much debate at all on this issue. I mean, haven't we seen the rise of "anti-SLAPP" legislation because companies were making trouble for critics in order to shut them up? Hasn't the company admitted hiring "former prosecutors" to investigate certain of its critics awhile back? (Either "too long ago to matter", or "due for some results anytime now", depending on which story the promoters are trying to sell.)

Maybe not the most fascinating topic ever, but the sight of the stock price setting in the west is speaking pretty well for everything else at the moment.

BRG, the loose-lipped licensee

Today's licensee spotlight is BRG Group, a licensee that, unlike Vision-Environmental and Leminur, at least lays claim to a website, if little else.

The quoted location for the company, within the light industrial buffer zone between the city of Detroit and the suburban residential areas, actually belongs to Reid Glass, a glass and mirror vendor. While there would seem to be some kind of natural synergy present, the actual relationship between Reid Glass and BRG is somewhat murky. BRG may be made up of current/former Reid Glass employees, or there may be some other kind of relationship entirely.

Never an outfit to avoid milking something for more than it is worth, REFR went on to make something out of BRG's proximity to Detroit, suggesting in its press release announcing the new licensee, that it would be in a great position to interface with the automakers. The fact that BRG and Reid were not at all in that line of business was apparently not important.

All of that would make BRG kind of a "ho-hum" licensee, and certainly not one of the first ones I would profile. But then...

In November 2003, Forbes magazine published an article discussing REFR's recent history. It was not a particularly complimentary article (as if any self-respecting journalist could look themselves in the mirror after writing a puff piece on these jokers), but one quote in particular stood out:

Not everyone is impressed with SmartGlass. "I don't think the quality's good enough for me to be able to sell it," says Joel Cothery, president of Reid Glass, a Southfield, Mich. glass fabricator and installer.

In a word, ouch. Burned, in effect, by one of its own licensees. Until that time promoters would make hay about how nobody involved with SPD had anything critical to say about it in public, but no more.

Amazingly, the BRG website is still up, though one of the primary contacts has subsequently moved to Las Vegas. Needless to say, the bloom was off the rose with respect to this particular business relationship.

That Forbes article, by the way, is a great source of info on the real story at REFR, and well worth reading all the way through. I will most likely reference it again at some future date.

Provided, of course, that REFR's stock price tailspin doesn't become terminal too quickly. Going down?

The disadvantages of isolation

Just six days after I wrote about how REFR sometimes benefitted from its relative isolation from the markets, we're treated to a stark example of the flip side of that argument. Today, the market is rallying broadly (though momentum is fading as I'm writing this), while REFR has dropped to a new 52 week low, at least temporarily taking out the vital $5.00 price level that is the difference between its hedge fund investors being able to sell at a profit and having to sell at a loss.

If this doesn't turn around pretty soon (say by the close tomorrow), this could get really ugly.

Buying for show

Today, REFR chairman Robert Saxe stepped up and purchased shares of stock as a show of confidence in his company's prospects.

The fact that he purchased all of 500 shares, at a net price of $2,575, gives one a pretty good idea of the amount of confidence he actually has.

It's curious that Saxe managed to pay $5.15 per share on a day where the trading high was $5.11, but be that as it may, the question bears asking, what is the point of making such a tiny purchase of stock?

The answer is found in the promotional rhetoric derived from said purchases. By making relatively large numbers of tiny purchases, insiders, and in particular, board member Dr. Al Malvino, paint a picture of steady insider accumulation, with which they hope to attract institutional interest.

Put another way, it's the one promotable aspect of the company they can control, having outsourced every possible operational aspect to various licensees. So they make certain to keep it as unblemished as possible.

The sad part of it is, that all of these purchases are fully funded by purchases of other sharedholders, so while the insiders take on the appearance of putting their own money up, they really aren't.

After all, they weren't exactly in line to take in any of that million share offering back in February, now were they?

When is a buyback not a buyback?

If you review REFR's archive of press releases, and go back to 20oo and earlier, you'll find a couple of releases announcing that REFR was buying back shares of its common stock. Besides those explicit releases, other reminders of the ongoing buyback were put out from time to time.

Now, a stock buyback is something a company normally does when it has large amounts of idle cash and wishes to use it to the benefit of its shareholders by permitting those who wish to sell to do so all in one shot, thus absorbing some of the supply of stock and allowing whatever demand there is to subsequently drive the stock price higher.

This is all well and good for large corporations with billions of dollars. But what is one to make of it when REFR, a company with just a handful of millions to its name and no net income, announces they are doing it?

The obvious question is, where is REFR getting the money to do such a buyback? Many shareholders jumped to the conclusion that REFR must suddenly be awash in cash as a result of some kind of as-yet unannounced deal.

The truth, however, was quite insidious, and only available to those who scanned REFR's SEC filings. REFR's stock buybacks were being funded... by sales of stock! Yes, REFR was buying back and "retiring" stock and making a big deal out of it, but at the exact same time issuing new shares of stock and not highlighting that fact at all. Worse yet, the total share count not only increased, but REFR was at the same time losing money with its share transactions. It was lose-lose for everyone involved and the only reason nobody cared was because the market was in a rampant bull phase and the share price was soaring regardless of anything else.

The fact that such obvious fraud was never met with so much as a public reprimand from the SEC, just goes to show how low REFR is in the food chain of targets regulators are going after. Mind you, it's not necessarily the case that the powers that be don't care. REFR did, after all, cease the buyback nonsense in 2001. But whether that was because of market conditions, or because someone from on high has them in their crosshairs, is something we don't know at present.

Regardless, whether anyone is watching or not, the fleecing of naive investors continues.

A great call

Bill Wexler is back, citing a great short call made on the message boards on July 1, 2001:

"My advice to YOU is to quickly sell/cover on all OTHER stock, take out a maximal mortgage on your house (if applicable) cash in all life insurance policies and so on. Get as many credit cards as you can and take out advances against them all and then short every share of REFR you can leverage."

REFR had closed that weekend at $27 a share, and three weeks later would peak at $29 before going into a tailspin from which it has never truly recovered.

Oh, I should add that the call was not made by Bill, but by someone posting as "B_IN_K" (a reference to a character from Piers Anthony's Xanth novels).

And I should also add that Bink's call was made entirely out of sarcasm, as he is, in fact, one of the loudest proponents of REFR on the message boards. He continued in that very posting: "Then, if I am right, please tell us each time you get margin calls or your car is reposessed."

It's really the sweetest kind of irony when someone who sets out to deliberately give the worst possible advice ends up making a home run call. You'd think the experience might be a bit humbling to Bink, but on that score you'd be wrong. Bink is back on the boards and posting like there's no tomorrow. Which makes one wonder if, for REFR, there is.

Vision-Ease: the one that got away

Time to tell another tale of a brief flirtation with legitimacy for REFR.

For this we go back to August 1997, when REFR caught a big fish on their licensee hook in the form of Orcolite, a division of Monsanto which was sold about seven months later to Vision-Ease, Inc.

The terms of said agreement would be enough to make any current REFR shareholder's eyes pop. In exchange for an exclusivity clause to the making of SPD eyewear, Orcolite agreed to pay minimum royalties which were scheduled to total $2,000,000 a year by 2004. To put that into perspective, REFR actual revenues over the entire period from 1997-2004 was about $1.45 million.

One might well wonder just who thought the whole idea of SPD eyewear was such a great idea. To remain in its clear state, SPD requires a small but steady source of electricity. That requires installing some kind of power source -- in the best possible case, a AAA battery -- inside the eyewear. That alone figures to make them kind of heavy. Then there's the issue of where the eyewear would be used. One popularly discussed application was ski goggles. The question of the interaction between melted snow and the electrical components of the SPD shading never really seemed to spark debate among shareholders.

Whatever may have occurred behind the scenes, REFR got a nice revenue boost in 2000, quite possibly largely coming from Vision-Ease, then a sharp decline in 2001. Then, on New Years' Eve 2001, REFR quietly filed an 8-K form with the SEC, announcing that the licensing agreement with Vision-Ease was terminated "for non-payment of royalties". Even then they wanted to phrase it in a way that made it sound like it was Vision-Ease screwing up. Regardless, REFR promised to look into finding a new patsy, er, licensee for their SPD eyewear application.

Frankly, though, I just can't see it.

The advantages of isolation

So the market's getting killed again today, and yet there's REFR just puttering along, not going anywhere, actually up a few pennies.

Time was when the promoters would try to make a big deal of that. By now, however, even they have abandoned that tack, as it is simply too easy to point out that REFR's non-decline is simply a result of its from the greater market.

Institutions want to sell five million shares of IBM, and they want to do it yesterday. Same with Apple a day earlier, and they actually had good earnings.

No one's selling REFR, because no one owns REFR. The only people in it, as I've stated before, are the ignorant, the naive, and the indoctrinated. And those four anonymous hedge funds, all of whom have a vested interest in not crashing the price.

So REFR goes nowhere, and will continue to go nowhere until the hedge funds finally give up, or somehow manage to dispose of their holdings, or a year passes and a new set of funds get cut a deal on the next million shares that screws over the original four.

Still, on days like this, that almost sounds good.

The moving billboard

The rather flashy vehicle above is the sum total contribution of REFR's UK licensee, Vision-Environmental Ltd. to the SPD promotional cause.

Vision-Environmental is another one-man shop, though at least this one has some notable credentials in the architecture field. The proprietor's name is Bob Hudson, and he has a solid brace of projects such as malls and office buildings to his credit.

For SPD, Hudson took a Lotus Elise, gave it a spray-paint job to make it into the world's first (and, to date, last) "moving billboard" for SPD. And if you had happened to be in the right place at the right time in late 2003, you just might have caught a glimpse of this vehicle being driven from Hudson's home office in Waterlooville to the inaugural 100% Detail Exhibition in London.

How the "head-turned" viewer was supposed to know that SPD referred to the tinting of the windows, and in particular the fact that the tinting could change, one can only speculate.

At any rate, the car made it to London without incident and was shown off as promised, and, despite the "hundreds of serious inquiries" received, that was the last time anyone saw the car, heard of Vision-Environmental, or connected Mr. Hudson with REFR and SPD.

But Mr. Hudson did write a nice letter back reporting on the exhibition, so I guess it wasn't a total loss.

Ir-ratio-nality

Promoters and shareholders in REFR may vilify Motley Fool for their dogged sticking to the facts in their reporting on the company, but that doesn't mean they won't take cues from them when they think it to their advantage.

Back in the day, when the Fool ran model portfolios and dared to dip its toe in the waters of short selling and brave the backlash from the shareholders of the stock in question, they set guidelines for isolating short-sell candidates, as they do for all investment strategies.

One of the items in the Fool checklist for determining short candidates was called the short-interest ratio. The short-interest ratio is calculated by dividing the total short interest, a figure reported monthly by the exchanges, by the average daily volume. A high short interest ratio, anything above 10 or so, indicates a "crowded" short, which may be prone to a short squeeze, wherein too many short sellers attempt to cover on a downturn in the stock, thus turning it into an upturn. In some cases this can feed upon itself and turn into a huge gain for longs and a disaster for shorts. Short squeezes were everywhere one looked in the late 1990's, but have become quite rare since the peak of the bubble.

Now, I don't claim the Fool invented the metric or anything, but they certainly went a long way to popularizing it. Many investors, however, chose to use the metric the other way, deliberately looking for high-ratio stock as candidates for short squeezes. Again, this strategy worked fine from 1998 through early 2000 (then again, what long strategy didn't?), but after that, not so much.

Now, it's one thing for investors to get into the short interest ratio calculations. However, when a company explicitly start taking an interest in such a figure, warning sirens should be going off at maximum decibels. But what company would do something like that?

Guess.

Yes, the focus of that press release might have been Asensio, but there it is in all its glory, REFR commenting on its own short interest ratio. Cooler heads presumably prevailed soon after, as the logical followup press release, "Research Frontiers Issues Strong Buy Recommendation on Itself", never appeared.

A funny thing about ratios, though. Because they're a function of two other figures, there are two ways to change them. In the case of the short interest ratio, it can go up under two circumstances: a) short interest goes higher, or b) average daily volume goes lower.

I emphasized (b) above because the current short interest ratio in REFR, still a fairly lofty 27 at last report, has been skewed by a marked decrease in average daily volume in REFR over the past couple of years. (I should note that this was not the case in the press release referenced above.) In fact, short interest has declined by more than half from its peak. (There may be reasons for that which do not relate directly to normal short selling, but that is a topic for another post.)

Nevertheless, the drumbeat that REFR is ripe for some kind of short squeeze never seems to cease. 27 days to cover! Never mind that the ratio peaked near 100 at one point. One might practically expect the shorts to spontaneously combust at that level, yet that did not happen. Furthermore, the whole "days to cover" business assumes, freakishly, that if some event were to occur to prompt short-covering, that the average volume in REFR would nevertheless remain at its current level, under 25,000 shares per day. A short squeeze in slow-motion, if you will. Quite an amusing concept.

Finally, of course, they ignore the four elephants in the room, the hedge funds that bought 1,000,000 shares of REFR at a fleeting discount, who would be more than happy, at this point, to grab profits by selling to the covering shorts, and exercising and cashing out the $7.50 warrants in the event the stock got that high.

Mr. Whipple need not fret. There will be no squeezing going on here anytime soon.

In descent

Not a whole lot of time for company-related stuff today, so I just thought I'd note the chart pattern of the last six weeks is forming what the chartists call a descending triangle, with successively lower highs coming off a flat bottom. The first run hit $6.50, the second petered out at $5.75, and the little spike to $5.40 today might just be all there is to the current rally. Of course, every little spike is greeted with the predictable "*gasp* someone must know something!" by some dimwit on the boards, but what can you do.

One other item: Just to prove that even the dryest of haystacks have their needles of useful information, the person who posts as numerous variations of "Bink" on the boards let on that Saint-Gobain Glass, a major proponent of electrochromic glass whose licensing was taken by the promoters as a repudiation of that technology in favor of EC, had instead dumped SPD. This was the same alias that called SPD Inc.'s closure a month in advance (as with Saint-Gobain, couching it in terms of "too bad for them") so it looks very much like another setback for Woodbury.

SPD the energy-saving wonder

Another tack used by REFR promoters, particularly of late with crude oil hovering over $50 a barrel, is to tout the incredible energy-saving properties of SPD film.

That's incredible, of course, in the sense of "not credible".

There is doubtless a certain amount of heat blockage inherent in the light-blocking capability of SPD. And the thickness of the glass is marginally increased by the inclusion of an SPD film layer, thus adding a nominal insulation value.

But the claims made (not independently tested, of course) by REFR and its promoters for energy savings using SPD film go far beyond that. A figure from 1998 (source unknown) suggests a 20% savings on energy costs from SPD. Later, a study came out that buildings lose 25% of their energy through the windows, so that became the standard value quoted -- as if SPD could magically prevent all energy lossage through windows on which it was installed.

One of the more humorous examples of the 25% figure apparently came from our good friends at InspecTech. The story was, that a pilot (for National Jets, presumably) reported that the cabin of his plane was "25% cooler" with SPD window shades installed.

When it was pointed out that it made no sense to use percents on temperature, since both common scales go negative, the story quickly changed to "25 degrees cooler". But even that strains credulity. Even assuming the Farenheit scale, does that mean the plane's cabin is routinely near 100 degrees? Or perhaps that SPD has some magical refrigeration property that takes that cabin down into the crisp upper 40's? All of this meanwhile, overlooks the fact that airplane windows, by the necessities brought on by high altitudes, are generally insulated roughly as well as the entire rest of the fusilage.

Finally, there's never, to my knowledge, been a comparison between the energy savings of windows with SPD, and windows affixed with a futuristic technology known as a windowshade. This, I strongly suspect, is because the results of such a comparison would be, at best, uncomfortably similar.

None of this, of course, keeps the promotional machine from its incessant claims that SPD is the miracle energy-saving technology that the world so desperately needs.

I just hope the world likes blue.

When life hands you Leminur

Did you know that they're selling SPD in the former Soviet republics?

Well, no, they're not, actually, but REFR does have a licensee all set up to handle that burgeoning market for color-changing glass.

The licensee's name is Leminur Ltd., and, well, apart from what is contained in the press release about their licensing, that's about all anyone seems to know about them, or their two "directors" Vadim and Alexander Khromov. Their given email is from a free email and web hosting service, and yet despite the free access to the latter, they have yet to put up a web page.

Really, there's not a lot to say about this group, other than it stands as proof positive that REFR will license just about anyone, if it means being able to add to their licensee count.

Those who will not learn from history...

Today I thought I'd webify a periodic posting that Bill Wexler makes on the SI and Yahoo boards. It's called "REFR's Uninterrupted History of Fraud" and is a pretty damning display of what REFR has said over the years, that has ultimately amounted to nothing.

REFR's uninterrupted history of fraud

1992: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
1993: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
1994: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
1995: "I am confident that products using SPD film technology will begin to appear in the near future."
1996: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
1997: RESEARCH FRONTIERS LICENSEE EXPECTS TO COMMERCIALIZE SPD PRODUCTS AND ESTABLISH NEW PRODUCTION FACILITIES NEXT YEAR
1998: REFR takes the year off, apparently.
1999: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
2000: "As a leading integrator of businesses and technologies within the $8 billion replacement window/door industry, we are very enthusiastic about the potential for SPD light control technology to enhance the value of our custom vinyl window products," commented Steve Hoffman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ThermoView Industries, Inc.
2001: The REFR stock fraud announces an aviation deal
2001: The REFR stock fraud comments on short-selling, makes misleading statements about trading activity in REFR stock...and mentions itself and Qualcomm in the same breath, in a not-so-subtle and laughable implication that the fraudulent Research Frontiers can generate revenue from its worthless patents much the same way legitimate companies such as Qualcomm exploit their valuable intellectual property.
2002: "In his address to shareholders, Robert L. Saxe gave an overview of the Company’s progress and reconfirmed that based upon projections given to Research Frontiers by several of its licensees, it was a reasonable goal to expect the Company to have its first full year of profitability in 2003."
2002: The REFR stock fraud announces "backlog of customer orders"
2002: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
2003: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
2003: The REFR stock fraud announces another automotive deal
2004: The REFR stock fraud announces an automotive deal
2004: "Research Frontiers Incorporated announced today that it will write off its remaining investment in SPD Inc..."
2005: "This funding will help us continue to improve the performance of SPD technology, and to help our 34 licensees across the world roll out SPD chemical, film and end-products..."

Revenues from commerical SPD products from 1992 to date: $0.

Maintaining appearances

A followup, almost by way of epilogue to the investigating101 survey of InspecTech, was submitted early this year by soulard1_1999, one of the regular critics on the Yahoo! REFR message board.

Apparently Soulard called National Jets and asked the receptionist about James Lang, president and sole proprietor of InspecTech, whose office space is located within the headquarters of National Jets.

Soulard learned that James Lang was in fact an employee of National Jets. This no doubt goes a long way to explain how his office came to be in a "secure area" within the National Jets building. Then Soulard asked what department Lang worked in.

"Maintenance," he was told.

Soulard went on to converse with Lang's boss at National Jets, named Forrest "Twig" Dodd, who went on to reveal that Lang's jobs was primarily "inspections". Thus, the name "InspecTech", one might surmise.

This matter raises a number of disturbing questions about the complicity of National Jets in the whole phony promotional effort, but that is a line of discussion for another day and most likely another forum.

In summary, we have seen that REFR made a profitability projection in 2001 -- and in the process significantly boosted its stock -- based on a "sales goal" set by a maintenance worker at National Jets. This is either an example of inexcusably poor scrutinization on the part of REFR management, or conspiracy to commit fraud.

And yet some people claim to trust these people with their investment capital. Just incredible.