INVESTOR UPDATE JUNE 2020, page-84

Do not get me wrong, I like NEA and I have relatively recently invested $76K in the stock. I bought too early, and I soon had a large paper loss, but I am now back to where I started, and expect the SP to rise in coming months. However, I have recently posted on the positives, and now for balance, I want to cover negatives that spring from my stolid and abstemious personality, and which I do not expect others to share. I have seen signs that Management has shifted focus in a way that I like, so I am in no mood to skip out now and break even – the potential is there for NEA to be a long-term winner.

On the growth of share numbers, my main concern was the ethics of Management giving themselves options. All my investing disasters were caused by what I regard as lapses of managerial ethics, so I try to understand the CEO's personality when I invest. Ethics is one characteristic I look for, plus the absence or presence of egotism, profligacy, mendacity, arrogance and more. Mendacity has many shades, those who are good at it do not tell lies, they may, for instance, clutter the communication with irrelevancies, and ignore inconvenient truths.

Increased kilobytes of recent Annual Reports alludes to the clutter of irrelevant pictures at a time when the font size has been dramatically shrunk. My real interest is to understand the mindset behind that change in format. The font size reminds me of many “small print” contracts on which I worked. The definition of “small print” is, inconspicuous details or conditions printed in an agreement or contract, especially ones that may prove unfavourable.