Thoughts on POET?
posted on
Nov 07, 2016 06:49PM
I thought I would share this, for what it is worth. A golfing buddy of mine knows about POET from me. He works for an Investment firm. He can't buy POET for his accounts, but is thinking of buying some for himself.
His question to me "From my read way oversold, but am I missing something? I honestly can't figure anything out from any of the filings"
Yes, way oversold. Management shot themselves by doing the recent financing and got taken advantage of by the investors. The stock price was double what it is now before they announced the financing, and when it was double, it had already lost a lot. The management is great with technology but are lacking in experience with the markets, which has killed the stock price, much to my dismay. They do have a brand new CFO (post financing) and a new IR firm, so hopefully that helps with the market smarts.
I think at this price, it is a great investment (likely longer term), but the unknown is how long it will take them to get the technology to market. They are having some unexpected hurdles to overcome, which I think they will get done, but when is the question. The delays are more optimization and engineering, not "the technology does not work period", although that is always a risk. It does work in the Lab, now need to get it working with mass production in the Fab. The delays right now seem to be that they need to modify things a bit, then retest, but this is taking a long time as they wait in line for the wafers (new recipe) to be made and tested (POET is small compared to other customers and the foundry does not give them any priority). They might have to wait a month for each iteration, and this is taking too long.
I think they are using some of the money from the financing to buy some equipment to do the wafers in house (for testing, not mass production), which will speed up the process, but might take a bit of time to set up etc. There may be something else up why they needed the money now, so might be a nice surprise coming, but who knows. They still had money in the bank, and it was not going to run out real soon, so hard to say for sure why they did the financing. It may have just been for comfort to be able to operate longer and not risk running out.
So, from here it should go up quite a bit, but not sure if that is a week, a month, or a year away, etc. If you are thinking of getting some, I would say you should, and you are not missing anything that I am aware of, and I follow it closely. If you want to buy for a short term gain, and want out within a few months, I would say don't buy any. That could pay off, but I think you will be fine if you can wait a year if need be. A lot less risk that way. A lot of the risk is with timelines right now.
One thing about the financing, is it was mainly US institutional, and I am hoping they will start to pump the stock at some point, sooner rather than later. They also have warrants at $0.52, so I suspect it will at least get past there sooner rather than later, although honestly it should go to a couple of bucks at least next year, unless there are real issues, but even so, they should have a decent enough market for some products even without the "holy grail" if for some reason that does not pan out. If they pull it off (complete disruptive technology), should go way higher within a couple of years. Ideally buy some and sell half when it doubles, and keep the rest (long term) risk free - might be able to do that in short order (I hope), but don't count on that as far as your investment plan goes.
For all I know, it could go to 20 cents first (I hope not!!), but at some point should go a lot higher. Of course I wish I had a crystal ball. IMO, right now they are flushing out a lot of the existing retail, which is part of the normal process, and appears to be working. They are not flushing me out though.