Thursday, August 25, 2016

FRMO On Increasing Difficulty in Trading OTC Listed Companies

In the most recent shareholder letter:

Indeed, the valuation disparities are not always caused by margin-related issues. For example, the Polestar Fund owns shares in a successful company that trades at 40% of book value with a very liquid balance sheet of considerable size. Recently, as an experiment, one of us tried to buy $600 worth for a personal account held at a major brokerage firm. This transaction could not be processed since it was asserted that the company did not disclose audited financials. Naturally, we objected that audited financials did exist and were available on the company website. The financial results are audited by one of the biggest, internationally recognized accounting firms. Unfortunately, we did not reckon with the definition of “available” in the modern cloud-based universe. Available means available on a certain database. Thus, to “protect us from ourselves” and to control risk, the purchase was prohibited.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I had the same issue and that's why I quit Fidelity. No individual should have his account at this firm run by incompetent lawyers who think that they are smarter than the people that they are serving!