October 1st Notes from "The Small Tech Prospector" That Look Pretty Darn Good on October 8th
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"Two consecutive closes over 155.55 (we’re not far now at 152.58) in the SPY would turn me bullish again for a quick 6-9% further rally.
Gold, oil and currencies are late for short (3-10 day), sharp down-moves. Look for them to start any day now. Their long-term up-trends are still intact, however. Among those, oil will be the first to falter for the intermediate-term, and only then heading to the support above $65." . . .
"On September 19th Cambridge Display Technology (OLED) was taken over by Sumitomo Chemical Company at approximately $12/share. As of that date 65 shares of OLED were removed from The Nanotechnology.com Small Technology IndexTM and replaced with 49 shares of Universal Display (PANL).
This is the 3rd of our original 30 Index stocks to be acquired in 18 months indicating the strength and significance of our original choices: (http://www.nanotechnology.com/stocks/?a=index)
Some examples of this deepening weakness from over just the last couple of months:
1. One of six early candidates that we were watching closely went public via a reverse takeover of a shell on the Bulletin Board, contrary to my specific, emphatic advice: the stock is completely illiquid, trading “by appointment” roughly 60,000 shares TOTAL at about a $3.50 average price in almost 4 months!!
2. Public company, Biophan, has watched its $500 million market cap in 2002, based on nanotechnology that may enable MRIs to be done on folks with pacemakers, dwindle to an $11 million sale of that technology.
3. Another nanotech company has delayed a Toronto Venture listing so many times that pre-public shareholder confidence is at risk of being lost.
4. A technological favorite of ours wants to try the traditional venture capital route one more time. They will be unsuccessful, as their total dollars sought is far under the VC radar.
5. Private company (once) extraordinaire, NanoOpto (about $70 million in VC money invested), and all its assets were acquired by a public company, API Nanotronics, for a ridiculous $4 million.
6. The CEO of another company claims he has raised $1.5 million from an investment bank after more than 2 years of effort, but won t name the firm for me until October when he has funds in hand (this is the 3rd delay date he has given me). Given the market and the early stage nature of his project, I seriously doubt this will come to fruition, at all, with ANY investment bank.
7. Finally, Cambridge Display (Symbol-OLED), arguably the leader in polymer light emitting diodes, was acquired by Sumitomo Chemical for $280 million. That seems great, until you realize that that is exactly the valuation they raised their IPO from the public only 2 years ago!
8. Nanogen (NGEN) announced they have contracted with Credit Suisse to help them sell their money-losing NanoChip instrument system.
9. Leading nano-investor, speaker, promoter and VC. Steve Jurvetson, doesn’t even appear at nanotech conferences anymore (none in 18 months that I know of), and I defy you to find any reference to the words nanotech or nanotechnology anywhere on the home pages of VC and research analysts, Lux Capital or Lux Research (oh, wait, there is a banner ad for a conference on the Research homepage that has the word). Cleantech, Greentech, Alternative Energy, emerging technologies and even “de novo investments” (huh?) are now the catch words used by these folks who jumped on the NANO-bandwagon and now are jumping off that terminology fast as the money gets tight.
Hey, I don’t blame them. I’ve been using the phrase “small & advanced technologies” myself for the better part of 3 years!
But I was saying the bad times were coming back then – while many of these folks were incorrectly trumpeting the new millennia."
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