As I've said, he didn't quite break any laws by my reckoning, but you didn't need to be especially good at reading between the lines to see what was a barely tacit message.
Legally, there is no comparison between "the project is dead, you need to sell immediately, the project has failed" and "We are very frustrated at the lack of progress and results. We face a challenging outlook". One is outright illegal, the other is perfectly legal even if unusual for a director to say. However, from the perspective of an investor, the second message ís exactly the same as the first.
I'm not quoting anyone in the above examples, just illustrating the concept that you can deliver a message without breaking any laws.
Hey, if you think I'm lying, it's a pretty amazing fluke that I was absolutely going crazy jumping up and down about it right at the right time. I'd had an overall negative outlook for about six months but I had never before outright bluntly stated that I had no doubt a catastrophic announcement was coming very soon about a specific thing, I've never made any claims or predictions so extreme and absolute. I was outright repeatedly telling everyone not to take my word for it and to immediately email JZ themselves, and if you are any good at all at asking the right questions you'd have seen what I was saying.
If it was just a fluke and JZ was giving out his usual rose-coloured optimistic spiel, why would I be urging everyone to immediately email JZ? If I was lying everyone would have been able to see it. If you'd listened or even thought of it as calling my bluff you'd have done yourself a big favour. Heck, even if you were sure I was a liar, if you'd emailed him with the specific intention of being able to prove I was a liar, you'd have has a face slap from reality.
For comparable time and effort to posting to accuse me of being a liar, anyone could have emailed JZ to get the message directly, but strangely, the preference is to post and abuse me, laugh at me (while you lose money exactly as I said you would... good job, fellas), and call me a liar for correctly calling it and explaining why.
At this point the outlook is so simple that the risk:reward analysis takes less time than it would take to respond to this post, and if you do it without bias and delusion I'm sure you'll see the outlook is far worse now than ever before. It's virtually inconceivable that AGY could give a positive return to shareholders from here.
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