TIBURON, California -- Recall please the years 1999, 2000 and into 2001, then leaping into 2003. This was when feel-good bids were the trump cards of a sexually transmitted stock market.
These were in part the Bill Clinton years, the Tony Blair years, the Alan Greenspan easy-money years of genuinely improved productivity in manufacturing ... and hey, profits all around.
The best speculating -- in my personal and professional books -- delivered into our laps the overlooked micro-organisms of the market. Didn't matter: biomedical, resources, Internet, battery makers -- they all levitated from pennies to dollars rapidly, sometimes within a few days' span.
These days they call those tiny particles NanoCaps, but when I was theorizing with a large, a very large audience, at CBS MarketWatch, I think I used to call 'em grains of sand.
Sexually transmitted grains. Beach orgy, I guess.
Switching metaphors before I get into trouble: the
melt-up was more than a grilled cheese sandwich, and it was gone as fast, too. The penny dreadfuls came hot off the griddle and transformed into dollar-priced smorgasbords.
Factors for the quick money included easier online trading, an overall hot technology market worldwide, the proliferation of e-mail and Internet chat rooms, rising money supply in western nations, IPO sizzle and just that feeling that no matter what happened in the world, in the morning at our desktops, anything was possible.
It was. We all know folks, ordinary folks, who made millions and tens of millions of dollars trading (mostly) equities, but also options, futures and other derivatives: housewives, real estate brokers, teen-agers, ourselves.
Part of that penny-orgy, sadly, came from
vaporware -- a term to describe how excellent corporate wordsmiths were at producing "news" out of vapor and steaming their releases into the portals of cyberspace.
I think we might be on the verge of that again. Not necessarily the vaporware part, which probably is a born-and-bred component of speculative excess.
For sure, the melt-up of
particle pricing is happening now, AND has been happening, intermittently, for spans following the 2008-2009 disruption of capital markets.
If I am correct, I will be able to move us all to Singapore, with the third flat in London. Overnight.
These are some of our
TCR possibilities -- one of them a member of the
TCR featured
8. These securities are exhibiting signs of of looming and maybe rapid acceleration:
-- Bitterroot Resources (
TSX:V.BTT,
Stock Forum) was a benchmark orgasmatron in 2003. It rose sixfold or more, much of it in a week. The now-platinum-group-metals prospector is betting that it’s just closed equity raise of about $200,000 will finance the Michigan drill-holes that send the stock back to 50 cents, or even a dollar. I own it, and if The Root misses this time, I guess I'll still give the 5-cent stock a home in our portfolio here at home, although I imagine BTT won't be a 5-cent stock if that happens. More like 2 cents. "Only three weeks to redemption, or not," says Bitteroot's
Mike S. Carr from Vancouver, Canada. See:
https://ceo.ca/2014/03/07/the-roots-timeline-to-success-3-weeks/
-- Diamonds: I have yet to make money on diamonds. This time, I am close to the dyke that could turn Rotterdam heads with its Sierra Leone gems. I have been to Karl Smithson's flagship operation in Sierra Leone. I have been purchasing shares of
STEL,
Stellar-Diamonds, in London this month. I have owned STEL for three years now, when I first visited Tongo Diamond Project in SL, and the stock looks like it will crystallize and surge starting Monday. But then, decide for yourself. See:
Stellar-Diamonds. It’s a few pence and I own perhaps a half-million shares.
-- More diamonds? I met
Brazil Minerals' Marc Fogassa in Los Angeles in November, and I never bought shares of the diamond, gold prospector and producer. Marc is a freak of nature: mid-40s, Harvard trained medical doctor, MIT-trained engineer and a CV that includes Goldman Sachs. A Brazilian who lives in Anaheim, California, with his family. "This is my shot at a billion-dollar company," Marc told me at a MicroCap conference down there, in the shadow of the Getty Museum -- which was when I walked away. From Marc, that is, not the hotel or the museum. (Okay, one of the guys from Gold Standard Ventures and I later took Mr. Fogassa out dinner to hear the rest of the story.)
Anyway,
Brazil Minerals (
OBB:BMIX,
Stock Forum) is selling stones straight to a Brazilian jeweler, and the stock is up to 14 cents USA from 7 cents in the space of a few weeks. One of the ones I let slip through my fingers. See:
Gems to High Street. I have yet to see the project but likely will at some point.
-- Stratex International -- Another London-traded entity. Stratex takes stakes in resources companies, largely via equity placements. It owns a stake in
Tembo Gold (
TSX:V.TEM,
Stock Forum), which operates in Tanzania and is on my short list for
2015 Prospectors of The Year. That is, if David Scott and his team validate their Lake Victoria-area hypothesis. It is not complicated, Tembo that is, and they have honest and ethical money from the World Bank's IFC unit.
I own Tembo, and as for Stratex, did you see the volume on that one today (Friday)? Just like Stellar-Diamonds. London's AIM market must be cooking with charged particles. See
Stratex International -- STI in London. This one also goes for a few pence.
-- LKA Gold: I am going to purchase this one as soon as our
TCR report goes out this minute. Not because I have been to the Colorado shipper of high-grade gold ore. And not because I like the chart. I had the chance to visit LKA (
OTO:LKAI,
Stock Forum) two years ago and turned down its CEO handily. Back then, I was in pain from a resource portfolio that had gone so far south, I didn't know if I had been transported to Buenos Aires in that hot-tub time machine or what. Not that resources have really levitated, although that appears to be happening.
Anyway, it's because I have looked at LKA's history. LKA Gold once was a tax-loss LP for flamboyant investors such as Skousen, the Blanchard family and
Doug Casey, all of whom are still in the thing. That was in the 1990s and early 2000s. Now, the tiny thing looks like it might have an elusive ore shoot within its reach. There is no resource at the Golden Wonder mine, but the grades of non-ore-shoot ore that the mine is shipping are near or surpass 2 ounces a metric ton in many cases. During the good old days of 2005 and prior, and even on the occasional charged stringer, that ounces per ton measure has been in the teens. We'll see. It is 48 cents USA. Much rides on what the quarter just closed in December brings to the SEC-compliant table.
Enough for now, except to say I bought a
biomedical stock that trades in Canada -- on the advice of
David Banister at
www.ActiveTradingPartners.com. I could have had
Stellar Biotechnologies (
TSX:V.KLH,
Stock Forum) at 30 cents lower than its $1.63 current price. "This is the kind of magic line test that precedes big moves," Mr. Banister tells me from New England in the eastern USA. See image here with squiggly lines.
Believe this: I had a chance at owning this in a private placement in 2010. I just HATED the story. Investor
Jeff Phillips in southern California was my source on it, and so far, he is spot on. Stellar is all about Keyhole Limpet Hemocya-nin, an immuno-stimulatory protein that is being used in conjugate therapeutic vaccines and other biomedical products. It comes originally from the ocean.
I thought this sounded too much like a simple commodity story with all of the pricing woes that go into creating a market for the obscure limpet. (Editor: Well, who's limpet now, bozo?)
OK, when David Banister told me the other day that Stellar was his biggest position, I finally bought in: as in today. David has a hot hand, and I have documented everything he has been doing, publicly and privately-- down to the last squiggly. Technicians -- I tell 'ya! See image attached.
Happy Birthday to TCR member Maura Thurman this weekend.
Your friendly,
Thom Calandra
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@thomcalandra for Twitter