Hello Tony T

The 200,000 OTC purchase that you’ve referenced today brings up subjects—watchfulness and vigilance—that have been on my mind lately. First off, take someone who already has a fair number of shares—say a million or so—that person already has a good chance to get rich from those shares. Let’s also say that person is not rich at the present time. Does it make sense to continue buying, even after having already bought enough?

I can think of one simple and very practical reason to do so. Say the owner of the large position wants to hold on to it for the long haul. That’s the logical thing to do, being that the length of time—before The Big Payoff—is not presently known and is not likely to be tomorrow. Adding a few superfluous shares to the large position serves the purpose of having them available for sale—at a range of midpoint places—before The Big Payoff, just in case the wait for The Final Leg of the long journey uphill turns out to be an intolerably long period of time.

Being that the 200,000 shares were purchased OTC, right off we know, it’s likely that this was not a Canadian transaction. I’ll go further; I know the Buyer lives on my street (in New York). There are only two houses on my tiny street. I never talked to the family in the other house about Fancamp; so I have no way of measuring their degree of interest. So far as determining in which one of the two houses the Buyer resides—even if we were to take a wild guess and were right—how much benefit would come to us from knowing that?

Even when the transaction sizes are ten times larger, how much do we actually benefit from getting to the bottom of each and every one of them? The information we dig up sometimes makes for riveting reading. That can only be good. I thank the intrepid hunters for every tidbit they dig up. Unfortunately, however, if we were ever to think these are “Eureka!” discoveries; almost every time we’d be disappointed.

I’ll name one example, where I did good, but not much good. I posted messages discussing, at length, the stupidity of the flow-through-share offerings we financed through Marquest.

Oddly, everybody here, including myself, has been silent about Secutor, the source of our most recent financing. So far as myself (and, I suppose, so far as others) one reason stands out; the Secutor website does not publically disclose the Marquest website’s kind self-revelatory (and self-damning) information about the structure of its offerings. Of course, that doesn’t mean the flow-through-share partnerships that Secutor finances are squeaky-clean; nor does it mean the opposite. I could give reasons why one or the other possibly could be the case. But speculating about a black hole of unknowns, ultimately, will get us nowhere.

Even when we know as much as we do about the mischievous ways Marquest causes more harm than good (by its dedication to undisciplined selling); we should not overestimate the amount of knowledge we acquired, nor overestimate what we can infer by it, nor overestimate how useful that knowledge really is. After all, it doesn’t really add up to much, when you compare it to all the private demands in people’s lives and all the private discussions they have and all the private deals they’re liable to cook up.

Looking into the stupidity of our financial management—as a whole—tells us a great deal about how our share price got disconnected from the reality of our resources, in the first place. But it tells us little about how many shares this person or that person will be buying or selling from day to day. When it comes to outsmarting the immediate dynamics of the market, the number of known pieces of information is never sufficient. The number of unknown pieces of information is always vast and always has no limits and always increases over time.