Once again REFR CEO Joe Harary has collected another sweet paycheck over and above the rather substantial salary he collects for running this nearly operations-free company. This time the score was over $350,000, and could have been more had he not generously gifted 7,000 shares, about another $100,000 worth, to an undisclosed party.The timing of this option exercise and sale, literally days after a mention in Gene Marical's Inside Wall Street column bounced the stock as much as 15% on the day of its online release, naturally raises a couple of eyebrows, even as the general population on the message boards seems congratulatory if anything. Of more interest is the fact that the AP even found the sale worthy of mention. For a company that has made a living flying under the radar this may prove to be some unwelcome attention, particularly if the current prices fail to hold at some point in the near future.
1 comment:
I suppose this comment belongs on your Bus. Week story, but I hadn't checked your blog in a while because you post so infrequently.
I have been retired from Wall St. for more than ten years now, although I am still a very active investor for my own account. When I was a money manager, I was a source of stories for Gene Marcial, starting in the mid-1980s. He probably used at least a dozen of my ideas over time. The mechanism by which a story got in his column then was pretty simple--I called him up and gave him a short pitch, and he would ask me to give him the pitch in writing. Then he would call up and ask some questions, and I would reiterate the main points several times. Sometimes he called the company in question to verify some fact or another, but I don't believe he put a lot of work into that.
Let me put it this way: no one has ever confused Marcial with Albert Einstein. He is a nice fellow, he means well, but any pitch that wasn't totally straightforward and simple would be completely over his head, and he wouldn't use it. He was easy to convince, and he just didn't know how to ask any hard questions that might challenge your story.
I always tried to give him just my best stories, and I would always remind him when I gave him a new one how well the last couple had worked out. But I saw quite a few examples of people using him to pump some stock only so they could unload it--I knew some of his other sources, many of whom took a more short term approach to being one of his sources. Most of the time though, he never caught on.
Were the people at REFR aware the article was coming or not? Can't say for sure, but the quoted fund manager sure was. Oh, that's another thing--there was frequent front running of the stories by those who were quoted, since even though he never said what stories he was going to use, it was obvious by how many questions he asked and what they were whether or not he was going to use it.
No big deal either way, but I thought I'd provide a little background.
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