Thanks to Gumbo & others for dialogue re term of patents. No question that date is critical, not mumbo-jumbo, IMHO.

BECAUSE, at a date certain (however it is correctly determined, and whenever it may be), cash flows for PTSC end. No discernible operating business other than those patents. Doesn't mean there cannot be one ... but there isn't one now, or in forseeable future.

So PTSC has one asset (neither the Board nor management, IMO): the patent portfolio, terminating at a determinable future time. That makes PTSC like an option or warrant, despite the fact it is organized as a corporation, and, in theory, has infinite life. Other such finite-life financial entities abound. My favorite is GNI, traded on NYSE. Review its history since it first began trading, assume intelligent sheltering of its variable dividends, and you have the stock with the greatest total return over the last 105 years.

Finite-life entities can be valued using any of several accepted methodologies such as Black-Scholes. Valuation requires a series of assumptions (guesses) about several other key variables in addition to "termination of cash flow" date. Those assumptions include: future cash flows generated, future interest rates, future risk-free rate of return, future corporate taxes, etc., etc..

I have never bothered to go to the trouble of calculating a theoretical value for PTSC. It is a rank penny stock for goodness' sakes, the very definition of speculation, or gambling if you prefer. But since I have owned the shares, on five occasions, its price rose, for whatever reason, to a level that quintupled of better my overall basis.

So why do I own the shares? I'm holding for another go mainly because Otteson and Agility are working on contingency. If folks of their calibre see future value, and thereby are implicitly betting their capital on PTSC, that is better than a theoretical value from my way of thinking.

GLTA