Dear fellow investors (past and present),
In the cold hard light of day there is a sad reality which by now almost all here have had to face. Management's reassuring estimates of timelines and fanciful suggestions about commercial interest at the conclusion of trials has so far produced a net value of SFA. The "we don't need a CR" and the "looking forward to getting the options money" turned into "here's an SPP at a 70% discount" and then after ASIC and ASX enquiries it became "please find any old 1c coins down the back of your lounges and we will give you a few new shares for each of them". There are now used cars with higher valuations than this entity despite over $70m of investment by shareholders and the Australian taxpayer.
I'm not here to state that this can't turnaround or that this is the end but I do believe in reflection so that we can all learn to identify how we are being mislead, tricked, deceived, misdirected or manipulated going forward. I believe it reasonable to assume that if the market was given the cold hard truth all along then some may have made different investment decisions and not just watched on as their losses multiplied. I think it reasonable to assume that most of us don't like losing money and we like being tricked into losing money even less.
I firmly believe that we all have to take responsibility for our own investment decisions however since most posters come to HC hoping to read, learn and get insights from other more experienced posters, I believe its reasonable to question all the information and claims which have shaped opinions here over recent years. We all know how mislead we feel by management and their shenanigans but when shareholders consider how and why they sat on this mess and took such huge percentage losses we should also consider who influenced this and how. Was it only management statements?
Now is a perfect time for all posters here to look back and consider what they have been told by other posters here in recent years. Lets all ask ourselves who was honest with us and who made statements which deceived us? Who laced conversations with falsehoods, injected fanciful claims, tried to hide red flags, shut down difficult conversations, attack critics who raised concerns, made constant claims of manipulation of the stock price and labeled other posters as "advocates for BP who were secretly trying to trick shareholders into selling cheap"?
In the absence of a miracle I reasonably expect that most here want to walk away from this experience having learned a lesson so as to minimize their chances of being sucked in to something like this again and suffering not only the financial losses but also the emotional drain of prolonged carrot dangling and manipulation of our hopes and fears.
Ask yourselves what wild claims, and misinformation have you seen on this board which influenced you at the time? What was the objective of the poster? Were they really buying options at 6c at the top of the market when they claimed they were or were they trying to get others to buy so they could maximise the price of the options or shares that they were trying to sell at the time? Who made up the claim about BIT225 "every soldier should carry it in case of a WW3 event"? Who told you that the trial delays were good and falsely claimed that this proved that there were no dropouts? Who spun you the yarn about NDAs and inferred the silence was because of some secret bidding war? Who constantly tried to point the finger for the dropping share price at those who could actually see what was really going on? Who repeatedly told you there we no need for a CR or that the options would all be exercised early? Who repeatedly said buy as the price dropped more than 95%?
Sometimes the biggest and most horrible manipulation is pretending to be a shareholder and a champion for a stock, or even an expert, with the sole intent of talking up a stock and dumping it on an average Joe who is merely seeking to invest for his/her family's future.
I'm not here to give you all the answers because I think deep down most of you can now see the red flags, the false claims, the tricks, and the manipulation. Non-holders aren't usually your enemy and people who claim to be fellow holders are not necessarily your friends. This assumption is in my opinion the single biggest mistake most users of HC make. The trick is to fight the natural biases that we all have which encourage us to accept information that we like, even if ridiculous and implausible, and to reject those who harbor bad news.
Consider this. For every shorter in the market who wants to talk down a stock to make a buck there are more than 99 shareholders who are long and want to talk it up to make a bigger profit. Most non-holders aren't shorters so assuming that the concerns that they express on a stock is in some way profitable to them is 99% nonsense. Manipulators prey on fear. First they use the fear of missing out in order to get you to put your coin in, then the fear that somebody else is trying to steal your shares cheap in order to make you look the other way when the red flags start to become obvious. They demonize anybody who delivers bad news in order to encourage the group chase them away.
I wish somebody had told me all of this 20 years ago. My lessons were learned the hard way over a long period of time. Learning to spot the BS isn't a magic solution to picking winners but it does help to minimize the losses. This isn't advice but I do how that the questions I raise help some here going forward.
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