I respect “brattymack.” It was an easy decision for me to rate what he has to say Five Stars, as a whole. If you haven’t read his posts, it’s because he’s more actively engaged on other Message Hubs than this one. Certainly, it’s well worth your time looking his messages up (as I have). When someone as conscientious and as bright as brattymack gets it 180 degrees wrong, there’s a lesson for the rest of us to learn from that.

My answer to this June 23rd message by brattymack comes late because I wasn’t aware of this Message Hub back then. He wrote as follows:

“....to wholly buy any junior stock at it’s [sic] present day market cap - it would be this one.
I can’t believe the SP on this one considering what it has.
Of course, I’m not buying it because this one is in a league all on its own.
I check in from time to time and I can’t believe I see it at 33 cents.
How this company has not been broken into more valuable pieces bewilders me.
This company is reminding me of the old guy who lives in his shoddy old home which rests on a key piece of valuable real estate. He’d rather pinch his pennies and slowly watch the value of his home go up, but will never actually sell it to anybody. So who wants to invest in that kind of property??
Sorry but stock price here seems really, really low and I think I know why.”

First of all, (when this was written), four months earlier FNC had announced it was spinning off Magpie (which it reiterated this week). Yet (what I deem) the key part of “brattymack’s” sentiment is his attitude toward how he considers management to be holding on tight: “How this company has not been broken into more valuable pieces bewilders me.”

A little misinformation goes a long way. Get a load of the following (again). It’s priceless.
“This company is reminding me of the old guy who lives in his shoddy old home which rests on a key piece of valuable real estate. He’d rather pinch his pennies and slowly watch the value of his home go up, but will never actually sell it to anybody.”

Of course, on this Message Hub, management has been mercilessly hammered, over and over again, for doing precisely the opposite, that is selling off too much. Besides being “broken into more valuable” pieces such as Magpie, obviously Argex (whatever you think of the transaction) is hardly an example of “never actually selling.” As a second example, Argex (besides Magpie and not to mention Champion), could also be cited, in a sense, as another of the “broken into more valuable” pieces, being that Fancamp retains a valuable 50% NSR option (as well as a seat on the Board of Directors and nine million shares).

What happens if we put aside the misinformation? After management’s major strategic decisions (whether they’re on the money or not on the money), what are we left with? As Brattymack himself put it, when he considered the market cap, “It would be this one” to buy of “any junior stock.” He couldn’t “believe the SP on this one [when it was 33 cents] considering what it has.”