General Discussion, page-653

Agreed. Not only a completely different industry (DRO has a lot of competitors) but also very different management.

I sold out of DRO because of the extreme greed of the management and poor capital management. DRO's management has no skin in the game, they give themselves millions of "options" with an exercise price of zero (everyone else calls them shares - so they're not the most transparent people in the world). Because DRO's management has no skin in the game it has gone through a series of massive CRs to raise cash they didn't need and massively diluted shareholdings. I get the filling that Oleg (the CEO) is more interested in empire building and lining his own pockets than building the wealth of shareholders. After years of losses and finally turning in a profit is suddenly burning piles of cash again. It is a brilliant business that's performance has been hindered by self-interested management that seems to model themselves on Elon Musk and Tesla.

AL3 is very different. It's management have a much bigger percentage of the company, receive much lower salaries, and don't pay out tens of millions of dollars in free shares to management that has not turned a profit (except fleetingly last year). They're pretty well aligned with the interests of shareholders. If the actual business turns out to be anywhere near as strong as DRO's they should do better for shareholders over the long term.

I personally rode DRO up the first leg, but trust in management was ultimately the dealbreaker. It went a lot further, but I don't like the downside risks, particularly given poor capital management and greedy executives.