We bought FUEL last November at $1.91 and sold it in March at an avg. price of $4.58 for a 140% gain. FUEL got a Buy-out offer today at $2.60. Timing is everything. Whew!

Well I was right and I was wrong. MRVC got a Buy-Out offer last night. I was happy for about 10 seconds when I read the headline. Then I read the press release and saw the price was $10 per share. I cashed out today with a 6% loss. Last time I owned MRVC back in 2015, I booked a 128% gain. 3rd Buy-Out this year, only it was a loser. Moving on.

Sorry for the table formatting. Word Press changed something several months and we  haven’t been able to figure out how to get it right again.

Of our closed out positions on the Blog, since inception, we have had 70 winners, 17 losers for an 80.5% win-rate with an average gain of 38%.

Since we have only 6 remaining stocks in our “portfolio” we will be discontinuing the portfolio performance metrics in 2017. We will continue to update on the remaining stock positions individually in 2017.

In June:

AVID’s CEO bought just over 275,000 shares in June at about $5.00 per share.

June 2017 Legacy Positions:

Well it is almost a year after we sold ARIS and they finally got a deal for $7.10 a share. I held it for 9 years, so I guess I was patient, just missed it by a little. 210% gain anyway, but hate that I missed the full deal.

The CEO bought another 136,000 shares on 6/14/17 at $4.99. This is on top of the 141,000 shares he bought on 6/13/17. Putting his money where his mouth is!

Lloyd Miller filed a 13D disclosing he now owns 20% of the company after buying 200,000 shares at around $2.55 a share in May and June.

AVID’s CEO bought 141,000 shares last week at $5. The three year turnaround plan is finished and we hope the growth leg is upon us.

Here is the list of private subscriptions positions I have bought and sold since December 2015. My overall gain is 54.9% on these positions.

Ceragon, 5% gain

Syneron Med. 46% gain on BUY-OUT

RocketFuel, 140% gain in 4 months

Lantronix, 135% gain

Undisclosed spinoff, 1% gain

HLIT, 78%

Ceragon, 48% gain

Imation, 31% gain

Mitel, 15% gain

SGI, 70% gain on BUY-OUT.

AVID, 55% gain (this was a trading position-in addition to our long-term BLOG holding)

UVE, 36% gain.

ATEC, 71% gain. (This was a trading position-in addition to our long-term BLOG holding)

United Online, 6% loss (take-under)

Niraj Gupta filed a 13G on Alphatec last week disclosing a 7.5% stake with 814,459 shares. I can’t pin down who this guy is. But at least someone else has been buying!

Alphatec announced Q1 earnings in May. Much better than Q4 thankfully. Revenues were $28 million ($34.2 million last year) with 60% gross margins and they increased their adjusted EBITDA to $500,000 from $71,000 last year. At least part of the revenue decline is due to their intentional realignment of their distribution channel. They reduced headcount from 195 at September 30, 2016 to 140. GAAP loss was $5.15 million compared to $6.6 million last year. Non-GAAP net loss was about $3.2 million compared to a loss of $6.6 million last year. They had $25.5 million of cash and net debt of just under $43 million. My valuation came in at $9.42 down from $16.50 pre-financing. ATEC looks like they have all new leadership (CEO, CFO and a bunch of others) that all come from highly regarded spinal companies (other than the CFO where it really doesn’t matter). I was impressed with the conference call (but there were no questions from anyone on the call) and am much more confident that this play can work. One statement by the CEO was impressive to me“ We are here because we view Alphatec as the most attractive opportunity in orthopedics. So much so that we wrote in with our checkbooks in our March financing, with the entire senior leadership team investing our personal assets as a demonstration of our belief in the opportunity and our commitment to our collective success”. From what I can tell, it looks like the management put in a bit over $2 million into the offering. I am hanging on to this one, it may take another year or two, but the risk/reward feels good here.