Thanks for your input Bryron M, welcome to the board.
I agree with many of your points. As for the US Patent, I do not think it is a simple matter as is generically outlined by some. What we must realize is that there is a factor which can speed up the process and a factor which lessens its likely success. Mr Wang of Hong Kong originally invented the design and Thomas S owned via SFIO corporate the patent application. SFIO the company does own the Euro patent for the design and so when the US application was created the US Patent office "fast-tracked" the application. So that is the positive factor. I think so long as the patent application's design is totally unique and "not obvious" from existing designs then the US Patent would eventually be granted but you can see that so far those particular specs have been denied by the US Patent office. Basically according to their examiner, the SFIO design is an "obvious" extension of a decades old technology which directly heats a substrate. The US Patent office does not see any innovation in passing heated air over the substrate to heat it and then moving in to a seperate chamber for inhalation. This is all just a play on words, really. A patent is nice to have but only if there is a product selling; to ward-off competition in the marketplace. The negative factor for the patent is indeed this stubborness by the US Patent office in not allowing such a new design to be considered unique enough. Also SFIO has no money for operations so at this point cannot move forward with applications or other documentation which typically requires legal fees and other costs. I agree though that if the stock was unlocked, the company could then have access to the capital markets, like most companies have the freedom to enjoy in the great capitalist nation of the USA, and therefore be able to raise funds for operations to get the business going. The problem with the arguments claiming that the DTCC has SFIO locked because they think its a scam, is that with a small enough micro cap start up (development stage) company, if the stock is locked so that management can not raise funds for operations then there will be no operations and then it is apparant that the business has no operations and so can be called a scam company (empty corp shell); so it's a catch-22 and the global lock allows this circular logic to exist. They have a hunch about something so they take action (to some degree over-stepping their authority) and then that action has consequences such that eventually change things for the company so as to arrive in a situation whereby their original hunch is proven true. Its nothing more than a man made and legal way to crush a company and its shareholders, and IMO its the biggest hole in the market (system) today along with NSS (naked short selling).
I agree ACTION is required and the sooner the better, however I do not subscribe to the notion that there is a boat to catch or miss or a train leaving the station in regard to the smokeless industry of devices. I think there is plenty of time and plenty of potential for such ecigs into the future. The market is and will be big enough for many many players to exist and thrive. Right now, big tobacco is not really even in the ecig market. Finally Blu cigs was bought out and I have seen it on shelves at small stores but it is just the beginning. Nicotine usage will not go away for centuries IMO and so as people become more health conscious, the real "no brainer" is that in the future, ALL nicotine users will move to healthier alternatives like ecigs and vaporizers. The action that is required for now though IMO is for management to communicate with shareholders. We have all been in the dark for almost two years now and IMO shareholders "deserve" better. We can all accept and already have accepted that we were screwed by the DTCC, we were screwed by the transgressions of previous management and its even possible that we were screwed by some crony market participants, but what we cannot accept is a total black out on all communication between the current CEO and shareholders. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders and I expect Mr Roth to give us an update as soon as possible, even if to tell us that nothing has changed with the situation. Sure, hiring a high powered team of lawyers would offer better odds for us but obviously the problem is lack of money, and frankly, the company and shareholders should not even legally be forced to be in this bind in the first place. What is the real reason for the global lock by the DTCC?!! They should be made to answer the SEC/FINRA and inform the company exactly what it needs to do to get unlocked and then our CEO should have the balls to announce to shareholder (generally) what is entailed and what he has planned to get it unlocked. That is the action that is needed now. I think over time, eventually, we need action on the business itself so to get some new products and get them selling at a few places or even online to start. It would not take much money to get one or two programmers to code a nice new looking website, buy a domain for $10 a month and launch a nice new site along with a few new products. The ordering system could be in-house so as not to be forced into paying e-processing fees to a third party (a mistake they all make which is just ignorant). Also they could offer PayPal on the website, etc. There are a bunch of actions which would turn the story around for the company but it seems that the current CEO is not up to the task or else unwilling for some reason. I don't get it. I guess I just do not have enough information to know why or what is going on. It is puzzling. With just a small cash investment SFIO could be given huge potential, it would indeed offer an extremely lucrative investment opportunity to any investor willing to allow SFIO short term access to their capital, probably giving huge returns.
I did also happen by your post asking others about some of the mechanics going on in the stock right now and why certain of your orders were skipped and the like. What you must realize is that right now for SFIO stock the global lock effectively means that most brokerages are not allowing buys or sells. There are a very few non-DTC affiliated brokerages, mostly foreign and those firms can and do offer their own clients "liquidity" by way of becoming the counter-party of their own clients in order to execute a "trade". So what that means is that they will simply print that a "trade" occurred but in reality no real shares were bought by the broker in the open market and deposited into the (retail) customers account. The broker just simply wrote in the book a short sale and credited the clients account with "shares" but no real shares traded hands, all that happened was an electronic marker was instantiated between the broker and the client, it acts as an IOU share entitlement and it seems firms in Canada and a few other places are allowing their retail clients to "buy" SFIO "shares" in small amounts just to be nice and offer it but do not think for a second that after "buying" "shares" you "own" "shares" and that they are sitting in your account; sorry, not the case by a long shot. The liquidity for SFIO is essentially zero, there are no real buyers and there are no real sellers. The PPS was driven down so low after so many months and years possibly so that the questionable players in the market could always and for all time have the excuse of lack of liquidity to save them from properly covering short positions and/or delivering real shares to long accounts. Its a hole in the system. The DTCC was the key because by way of the global lock, they effectively told all brokers to no longer allow anyone to buy and most cannot sell either, therefore the number of buyers dropped down to only those MMs and brokers of whom may very well desired for the PPS to be down in the dumps, under par value, etc for years, for many reasons, not least of which a gambit engineered to try to coax the longs out of their shares; their assumptions being that eventually longs would need their capital back and just give up and sell. All of this is still very much in motion, nothing has changed since the lock. If you notice, the total number of shares traded since July 5 2011 has only been about 2% to 5% of the shares in the company, yet the PPS has fallen from $0.02 to $0.0002 so it is pretty obvious what is going on IMO. When you place a bid just under the ask at $0.0006, your brokerage is happy to offer you some more phony electronic markers (so long as you are not buying more than say 1M shares, then there are more technical problems that would arise) at the ask or maybe even higher and then as soon as they fill your order (maybe even only partially) then they quickly print a "trade" (just shuffling of more IOUs under their own bank and brokerage accounts, sometimes even with their own margin clients accounts, shame) which is always UNDER your "buy" so as to keep you in unrealized losses because they wish to offer services (for commision, looking good, etc) but only if you are losing money in the investment, should you become a massive buyer and keep averaging down, they cannot go much lower than $0.0001 and so say for example you began "buying" tens of millions of shares at $0.0001 then their own risk dept would chime in and tell the brokers that its not good to keep putting so many IOUs on their books, especially without really anymore room to keep moving the PPS down to stifle anymore "buying" versus the total size of the known float. Sorry if this is confusing but the dark side uses many tricks and tactics for which even the regulators are blind. Even if they are short say 10M shares at $0.0001 if the stock should get unlocked and buyers flood the market starting prices at say par value, which is $0.001, then that short position on their books is in unrealized losses to the tune of $10,000!!! Now imagine if they sold you 25% of the float, 100M, their losses just up to par would be $100,000, and so on, at 1 cent the liability would be $1M, etc. What's worse is this is just the complexities of the wonderful broker to customer relationship, which IMO is actually rare right now in SFIO, what is happening more often than retail "trades" IMO is simply shuffling of IOUs between various firms or even a firm with multiple accounts to print shares lower and lower and using smaller and smaller "trades" to do it. Their hope is that the company just finally goes bankrupt and the stock is delisted so that all those IOU and short positions just dissapear and they can scratch them out of their internal books or have a nice late night paper shredding session while they toast to all of their illicit proceeds from counterfeit stock sales they executed when they perhaps naked shorted the stock to the tune of about half the float worth of IOUs on July 1 2011, the day of the lock (after hours).
The whole situation is quite concerning for the average retail investor and BCIT is another good example of how the market is broken and has huge regulatory holes and processes which can be manipulated and gamed by the powers that be for their own advantage, leaving real shareholders out in the cold and in the gutter. Even many flippers got caught up in the SFIO fiasco, buying into the run on July 1 2011 and then after hours getting the sad news that the DTCC locked up the stock and still to this day cannot sell through TDAmeritrade, ScottTrade and ETrade accounts. Why? Probably because those online brokerages never actually bought real shares in the marketplace from real holders in order to deliver shares to their client accounts. They just quickly gave them electronic markers at their bid and laughed all the way to the bank, knowing possibly that the stock would be locked after hours and so they would never have to use those proceeds to buy-in to deliver the shares; just letting those FTDs sit forever. This would also explain why with historic volume trading in the stock on that day why very quickly in the morning it shot up from sub penny to $0.02 and then remained at exactly $0.02 for the whole rest of the day and never going higher even with all the volume that occurred all throughout the rest of the day. They were likely just sitting there dumping IOU counterfeits into the market shrugging their shoulders and keeping the PPS at reasonable levels for that time so as to maximize the buying from retail traders and investors, which maximized how much they stole from the market. If you read the last announcement by Mr Roth about the naked shorting and the global lock you will see much of this was explained directly from the company but since then we have not had any new information and nothing can be found out via the DTCC or SEC. Despite what is claimed on message boards, the fact is, the DTCC does not speak to retail investors and the SEC will just respond by way of a generic template auto-reponse email stating the already known fact that the stock is in a global lock and that there was litigation against the ex CEO or they will forward your email around for a few months to give you the run-around and nothing will ever come of it. That is the current sad state of affairs. Most of us true loyal longs have dealt with that fact and have moved on. What new buyers must realize is that they likely are not actually buying real shares so I would suggest not engaging in such activity until the stock is no longer on a global lock and trading freely. Just my opinions.
GLTY
$SFIO
