Stock Gumshoe

This one’s from Christian DeHaemer for Material Profit, one of the “introductory” inexpensive newsletters from Taipan (on sale for $49 at the moment, apparently). This group is no stranger to your friendly neighborhood Gumshoe, but I don’t think I’ve looked at one from Material Profit before (I’ve looked at many from DeHaemer’s other services, most of which are more expensive — they’re all underwater at the moment).

But this is for a stock somehow related to India, which is always interesting for the Gumshoe. And DeHaemer makes a pretty good case for looking at India instead of (or at least, in addition to) other emerging markets.

Why do they think we should invest in India? Read the rest of this entry »

Once again, Streetsifter has scooped the Gumshoe and written up another one for you, this one on a way to “profit from Exxon’s misfortune” and “turn $4 into $45″ — just when the Gumshoe runs short on time, our friend Streetsifter seems to pull a great nicely-summarized sleuth job out of his hat for all of you. The following are mostly his words, with a few edits and minor additions:

The latest teaser ad for Christian DeHaemer’s Crisis Trader has all the necessary elements for a Hollywood action film, to the point where the copy writer must have been licking their literary chops as they composed the ad.

You can imagine the Hollywood agent giving the pitch to the A list movie producer. “The picture opens with this drill crew for a small Canadian energy company trying to commence operations of the coast of South America under grants from Undisclosed South American Country “A”, when suddenly gunboats from neighboring Undisclosed South American Country “B” show up in the middle of the night and force the drillers to evacuate, claiming the site falls within their territorial borders!” Then Country B tows the drill rig from the disputed waters. The two countries amass their military forces along their land border (but they’re small countries, so there’s not many forces to amass), and our offshore drilling crew is prevented from performing any work at ‘Gunboat Basin’, where an estimated $1.35 trillion in oil and gas lies beneath the ocean floor!”

Our imaginary Hollywood agent’s voice becomes more animated, and the producer listens intently as the pitch continues. “So now we segue seven years into the future, and the two countries have finally agreed to turn the dispute over to the United Nations international court. The fate of our Canadian energy company hangs in the balance as the court announces their unanimous decision. And the winner is . . Country A! The energy company now has rights to proceed with offshore drilling operations, and the major oil companies are likely to start a bidding war that will propel the tiny company’s stock, currently selling under $4 per share, up to as much as $45 dollars per share or more!”

And your price of admission for Mr. DeHaemer’s action packed “Gunboat Basin” adventure is a “special rate” subscription fee of $1,750, instead of the usual $5,000 fee. But, if you’re a regular Gumshoe reader, you already know that we can arrange a special pass to this feature at a far more reasonable rate.

Working off tips provided on the Stock Gumshoe Forum by Womanwithportfolio and by paid-up Gumshoe Irregular, Streetsifter, the Thinkolater comes up with:

CGX Energy (CGXEF: OTC or OYL.U on the TSX)

A press release from the CGX Energy website fills in the blanks from the teaser, stating, “the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) award on the maritime boundary dispute between Guyana and Suriname was released at 4:0 pm EST September 20, 2007.” The press release continues, “The decision is extremely positive for CGX, as it concludes that 93% of CGX’s Corentyne Licence and 100% of our Georgetown Licence are in Guyana territory” and it also provides confirmation of the gunboat incident, “In June 2000, a jack-up drilling rig leased by CGX from an American drilling contractor and operating under licence from the Government of Guyana was forced off its Eagle drilling location by gunboats from the Surinamese navy.”

The DeHaemer teaser compares the potential gains for CGX to those of another Canadian oil company, PetroKazakhstan, that was taken over by China National Petroleum Corporation at $55 per share. In bold print, the ad says the CGX is sitting on 30 times as much oil at PetroKazakhstan. CGX’s over-the-counter shares closed at $3.08 last Friday.

But the Gumshoe has covered other DeHaemer mining picks in the past, including Range Resources, which is down 10% since being added to our list of solutions (though “down 10%” is perhaps not a descriptive enough assessment of the wild volatility that stock has shown over the last six months — check out the chart and the announcements from the Somali parliament over the summer if you want to watch a crazy mover that follows wildly unpredictable news).

The GHX website includes a disclaimer, “There have been oil and gas shows in many of the 30 wells that have been drilled offshore Guyana and Suriname, but no discoveries. As a result, there are no hydrocarbon reserves attributable to these properties, only an estimate of resource potential based on wellbore and seismic analysis, and analogy to known reservoirs in the Atlantic margin”. And since the UN ruling only was issued in late September, it will be some time before the company can even commence drilling, much less actually extract oil. This may put GHX in the “lottery ticket” category for investors.

As always, you should perform your own due diligence, and anyone with insight to Guyana offshore drilling operations is welcome to share their knowledge on the Stock Gumshoe Forum. Thanks once again to Womanwithportfolio and Streetsifter for their contribution to this solution.

This one comes to us from Christian DeHaemer at Taipan, whose “reliable source” tells him that this stock could go from $5 to $15 in a matter of months … sounds like something we ought to take a look at, eh?

This is an ad for his Volume Spike Alert, by the way — one of many newsletters under his name. It’ll run you $995 at the current sale price if you’d care to subscribe.

If you just want the name of this $5 microcap, however, just read on.

In his words, “A stunning breakthrough in laser technology could alter the online marketplace for years to come…sending 100 million video fanatics into a frenzy…and launching a tiny $5 microcap to as much as $15…$20…even $25 per share.”

Woohoo!

So what is this little company?

Well, they’re in the laser projection space, which they as much as say in the ad if we read between the lines — the promise is that this company uses it’s revolutionary green laser technology to help combine video, social networking, and cell phones, and make video on cell phones much more compelling by making it shareable without having to have your friends gather around a tiny screen.

So, this is something that leverages the cutting edge in video by cell phone, and appeals to that highly desirable young male gadget freak professional demographic.

There’s a quote in the ad, too: “One magazine called it a ‘movie projector you can fit in your cellphone’ and added ‘it’s the coolest toy you can’t get — yet.’”

So, clearly there’s a high gadget demand for cool stuff like this — how high is, of course, the $43 billion question.

Oh, wait, the $43 billion is the sales number for the big cell phone company that’s agreed to include their projector in their new phones, according to the ad.

So, what else do we know about this specific company?

Apparently, the green laser breakthrough is the big deal here — they’ve got some kind of cost or production breakthrough that makes it feasible (and you need green for the full color projection).

“By working with some of the biggest names in optics and electronics, this incredible $5 company has reduced the cost and size of the green laser so that it can affordably fit in a cell
phone.”

The CEO walked away from a managerial position at a Fortune 500 company to join this firm, and he has apparently telegraphed their future growth by mentioning that “…we’re currently in negotiations with several (cellphone) handset manufacturers, and consumer electronics companies. And we expect to enter additional agreements in the future.”

So that sounds pretty good, eh?

What’s the company?

Based on this information, the Thinkolator spits and sputters a little bit, but eventually reveals that the name of this laser microprojector company is …

Microvision (MVIS)

I’ve actually traded in the options of this stock a few times in the past, and I currently do hold near-the-money options … I think it’s an exciting business, but I’m interested in it because of the level of interest I think they’ll get from investors, not necessarily because I think they’re going to be a great big success in the future. This is a relatively short term guess investment on my part, going out 6-9 months.

What can I tell you about them? The green laser thing is a big deal — here’s the press release from the company announcing that they had integrated an efficient green laser into their display engine.

But there are two sides of this — several investors have argued that the company is getting far ahead of itself in its promise that this green laser is “cost effective”, including an anonymous hedge fund manager who wrote at SeekingAlpha the day after this announcement came out (he was short the shares, according to his disclosure, and that was certainly the right call from then to now as the price fell from $5 and change to $4 and change. I expect the $5 price in the teaser is from before earnings, which came out on November 1 and brought the shares down a bit.

I don’t personally know whether they’ll be able to develop a built-in projector for cell phones, with Motorola (that big cell phone company that’s their announced significant partner so far, though they also have an undisclosed asian manufacturer on board, too). It seems that their two main products will be a plug-in credit-card size projector for any cell phone, and an actual built-in projector for some high level new phones.

I get the feeling from reading up just a little bit on the business this technology may be a little bit perilous for investors — many companies have gone broke developing cost-effective laser projection technologies, and I have no idea whether Microvision will have the wherewithal to survive long enough to get some big deals on board and some actual manufactured products that people are excited to buy next Christmas (2008, not next month). But, I do think this volatile little company has some potentially significant short term upside in the coming year if they announce some exciting deals — that’s why I’m trading the options a little, but am not comfortable calling the shares a good long term investment for me.

For you, of course, the story may be entirely different. I’d check out SeekingAlpha, they’ve got a few contributors who have written heavily about MVIS (though one of the big proponents over the past year, Ant and Sons, was also a heavy booster of the worst Gumshoe stock of all time, GoFish, the one stock in the spreadsheet that seems desperate to somehow get below $0.)

And if you’re thinking about this as a real investment, where you’re committed to riding some ups and downs with the dream of long term riches, I’d read their filings carefully and try to get a real understanding of how cheap these projectors will really be to produce, and what kind of market you think they’ll really have. There’s a decent transcription of their July conference call that a blogger put up that might also be worth your time (that’s where the CEO quote above came from, by the way), and certainly a look at their latest earnings report (came out last week) would be worthwhile — the press release is here. The stock has been moving downhill since earnings, and this one really moves, like a biotech company, on deals and technological advancements more than on actual earnings (since they’re still losing buckets of money)

Personally, I think the technology is sort of silly, but I won’t make my investing decisions based on that feeling because I also though the idea of a camera phone was idiotic. Clearly, I’m no bellwether for consumer taste or interest.

MVIS has been pretty popular among individual investors all year — and it was also recommended by Investor’s Daily Edge (and sleuthed out here) back in May, at about the same price it trades for now. And maybe you’ve owned it, too — so whaddya think?