Yet some still standing behind SA article??? Equity.Guru is a business news and stock analysis outlet powered by Chris Parry, award-winning journalist, directed content pioneer, former Director of Editorial at Stockhouse.com, former Manager of Digital Products at the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers, and long-time online feature writer and corporate communications professional. https://equity.guru/who-we-are/
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These are exact quotes from the journalists at equity guru. I know many of us have reviewed this but I post these because I Find it amusing some are still standing behind the seeking alpha release. It seems to me that the journalists at Equity.Guru felt this would not stand up to legal speculation, there for pulled their claims. This being the first story they have ever pulled. I read earlier someone claim they are promoters and that should discredit them. They have a history of putting companies in their place when false claims are made. In business It takes years to build a reputation, but credibility can be lost very quickly.
When this story came out, a few of us around the office had a good old chuckle that anyone still used SeekingAlpha for research, because the place is a shorters’ paradise. It’s renowned as a place where shortsellers do their trashing of companies they have a stake in.
There are other places as bad – newsletters run by folks who have to run multi-page disclosures warning they can’t be trusted, news sites run by people behind the deals they’re writing about, Twitter touts who’ll tell tens of thousands a lie and wait for tens of hundreds to retweet it.
We like to think we’re beyond that morass of bullshit. We’re better. It’s our brand. Honesty above all else, even if a marketing client gets caught in the crossfire. Trash those that need to be trashed, praise those that deserve praise, and verify before you brand someone one thing or another.
Over the last month or two, we’ve delivered some cracking destructions of companies we thought – justifiably – were doing bad things, and the writer of this piece was a part of both of all of them. We called Saint Jean Carbon (SJL.V) liars for claiming they had an offtake deal with Panasonic, drawing much heat from investors as the share price plummeted, but we were proved right when the company was told to tell the truth, and insiders were investigated by regulators for insider trading.
Then we tore into Imagination Park (IP.C) for throwing so much helium into their news releases that you could ride them to Montreal and, again, insider trading allegations. Again, this came with much annoyance from investors, and once again we were proved right when the company admitted it was taking a moment to let its insiders know exactly what insider selling was and that it’s a bad thing.
We can go deeper into a whole raft of companies we’ve lit on fire before that, and we’ve never yet been in a position where we weren’t prepared to stand in front of a corporate lawyer and dare them to sue us. When you’re equipped with the unassailable truth, your balls grow to a fine size.
Today, a few things happened. A story went up too early, the story wasn’t sourced the way it should have been, and from what we can see upon spending a day digging deeper, the story was based far too much on bad source material.
At first, we considered taking the story down, but as another short seller piece landed on SeekingAlpha shortly after, presumably noting our piece and deciding to capitalize on it, we realized that would be seen as ‘fishy’. While we wanted to correct the situation, we were cognizant of the fact that the perception from many would be that the company had got to us somehow, which would put the shorter sellers in an even better position to continue hurting their target.
So we edited the piece, doing some more due diligence and finding both positive and negative points to add to it. But then you’re faced with the ‘they’re changing the story’ crowd, which again read more into the changes and began feeding the conspiracy theorists.
So I called someone loosely connected to the company (the company proper had gone to radio silence, on legal advice) and had a chat. That discussion backed our suspicions – indeed, the company was being short-attacked, and not in a small way, and while we were told by this arms length party ‘there are things the company could tell you that would legitimize their tech, but they’re not public yet’, for mine, it was time to just yank the thing.
We’ve never mea culpaed on this site yet, because of our track record of getting it right, even when we’re punching downwards, even when we’re faced with a storm of abuse from true believers. We’re journalists. Our job is to put bums on seats, but with scandal we can stand behind, not manufactured bullshit.