Past scorecards

A post from 2001 on the Yahoo! REFR board uncovered a similar scorecard to the one posted last Wednesday. For the period from August 2001 through July 2002, the following events were slated to occur (added comments in italics):

August:

• THV surfaces with demos and catalog

(After Saxe's margin call sale four days after the Thermoview rollout began, Thermoview was never heard from again on the sales front, and has subsequently had difficulty making their pre-negotiated minimum royalty payments.)

October:

• Inspectech announces major contract(s) (Boeing, Airbus, or Lockheed)

(Inspectech did actually announce a major contract in October. Unfortunately, there were two catches. First, the announcement was about Bombardier, not any of the big three named above. Second, and more importantly, the announcement was entirely phony.)

• Lang-Mekra demos at truck show create major buzz

(Lang-Mekra has not been heard from on the SPD front in years, and was not in 2001.)

• RFI runs expo for windows and building industry, architects, etc.; causes major excitement in the press & TV

(On their operating budget? Ha!)

By December:

• Hankuk/SPDInc announces new factory up and ready to mass produce

(The announcement was delayed to February. Whether it was ever "ready to mass produce" is something that will remain unknown, but we do know that it only produced a very small amount of film for specific demonstration projects.)

Possibly by December:

• Hankuk or OEMs announce contracts for moon roofs, visors, mirrors (Daimler; Hyundai? Kia? Other?)

(E. None of the above)

• GE, AP Technoglass, Bekaert announce that they will produce/market film

(GE hasn't been heard from since 1995, Bekaert much the same, and a representative from AP Technoglass was quote as saying, "nothing much ever came" of their SPD license.)

January:

• Lang-Mekra announces major contract(s) for truck mirors(sic)

(Again, Lang-Mekra had put SPD far behind it by this time.)

Possibly by February:

• THV announces growing level of orders for windows, skylights, etc.

(Thermoview was by this point starting to worry about staying in business at all.)

March through June:

• RFI announces several additional licensees

(This one came true. AGP Group was added as a licensee in June, and Isoclima in July. Give REFR this, they know how to play to their strengths!)

• Analysts begin following RFI, publishing; institutions start buying aggressively

(There actually was some buying as REFR entered its third (and final) year on the Russell 2000, but strangely, analyst coverage did not follow. Well, unless you count R. J. Falkner.)

• RFI earnings announced

(Hilariously, they never even "announce" losses even to this day.)

• Stock (now above 50) splits

(REFR dropped below $20 for the last time in August 2001, and was below $9 by the end of July 2002. I suppose you could call that a 2-for-1 split "the hard way")

• Black and faster particles announced

(Nope.)

• RFI begins to license companies in flat panel and PDA market

(Ha!)

• Vision Ease produces/sells spd sun glasses

(Vision-Ease was already gone by this time and, shockingly, did not come back.)

• Dividends declared

(Bwah!)

July:

• RFI breaks 100, unadjested(sic) for split

(Very ad-"jest"-ed, if you ask me.)

After July:

• Further run-up and second split by end of 2002

(Mercifully for shareholders, REFR's share price stabilized for the latter half of 2002. Otherwise the market bottom in 2003 might have been much more painful.)

• Many articles appear profiling Saxe's achievement.

(Yes, but none that the shareholders much liked. At least it wasn't going to be a biography.)

Of course, today, shareholders are carefully instructed to ignore the failings to meet past expectations as irrelevant to the glorious future REFR has ahead of it.

Sometimes you wonder if there's no punishment too great for this kind of stuff.

The case of the planted article

All the furor over the false story in Newsweek over the disposition of religious materials recalls a (fortunately) much less eventful, though not really less egregious, case of press tampering that took place in the fall of 2003 involving REFR and SPD Inc.

According to those who claim to be able to read Korean, the Korean Business Herald published a story stating that BMW had ordered, and been shipped, 1000 square meter pieces of SPD film from SPD Inc. at $1000 each, a tidy million dollar order and a very promising development for the joint venture between REFR and Hankuk.

The problem was, the story was completely phony. There was no order, there was no shipment, and SPD Inc. itself was in fact in the process of going out of business.

But of course, since the publication is way off in Korea, there seems no practical way to figure out who planted the story and how it was that the very much English-speaking promoters on the REFR boards came to find out about it.

But I guess, in light of this week's events, we should just be glad nobody died because of that story.

REFR Announcement Scorecard

You have to hand it to the promoters, they never, ever seem to be at a loss for optimism. They've even crafted a scorecard by which to track their future failures. I thought it only fitting to keep track appropriately here on the REFR Madness blog.

I decided to omit the best-selling biography of Robert Saxe. That one was a bit over the top even by these guys' standards.

REFR Announcement Scorecard

Announcement	Happened? (date if so)

Commercial film production by one or more film licensees (currently, Hitachi, Dainippon, Isoclima, Air Products)	Yes, Feb '07
Subsequent announcements by wholesale and end-product licensees (subject?)	NO
SPD as an option for skylights, visors, glass roofs, side windows or rearview mirrors, by an automotive OEM	NO
SPD use on new jumbo jets, by Boeing or Airbus	NO
"Rapidly burgeoning demand" for SPD aircraft retrofitting, by Inspectech	NO
G2 film that is wider and faster than initially announced(?)	Maybe, initial announcement was unclear
Major planned marine application	NO
Product incorporation by any of: Pilkington, Isoclima, Asahi, Nippon Sheet Glass, or GE.	NO
Cost reductions in G2 film from volume production and competition	NO
Gen 3 film offered by Dupont or Hitachi	NO
SPD retrofit license given to window treatment company	NO
Major architectural project embodying G2 SPD	NO

The "Quality Four" coming to light?

Recent updates to the Nasdaq website are revealing the identities of large acquirers of REFR stock -- almost certainly the four "quality investors" that bought $5 million of the stock last February and have been choking on it ever since. As of this writing two such names have appeared.

The first one is a name familiar one to REFR message board denizens and not in a good way. Botti Brown has long been decried as one of the "fake longs" whose positions in actual fact represent a covering of a short position. This upsets them because it indicates, in theory anyway, potential ammunition to drive the share price down even further. The fact that no sane financial entity uses its own selling to drive down a share price (without a death-spiral convert to hedge against) never seems to register with them.

The second one is less familiar, and, predictably, has the longs considerably more excited. Stark Offshore Management, LLC, one of a small group of similarly named hedge funds (the only other one of significance being the creatively-named Stark Onshore Managment, LLC) operating out of the Milwaukee area by Brian Stark and Michael Roth. These two are relative veterans of the hedge fund industry, which makes their choices in recent events a bit peculiar, such as bankruptcy candidates Delta Air Lines and Calpine. There is surely some hedging involved with those positions, of course, but going long the common stock is nevertheless an unusual way to play those companies regardless of what tricks you might have.

A couple of trouble signs for Stark: One of "onshore"'s largest holdings is the GM debt that was recently downgraded to "junk" -- an event that has proven lethal to several hedge funds already. More telling is a 2002 newspaper article that lists them as controlling $2.2 billion in customer assets. Today that figure has dwindled to $1.5 billion: never a good sign.

Not that investing over $2.5 million in REFR, without anything apparent to hedge against, is a raging positive either.