ThomInAtor

And now a word from our bouncer . . .

2008-10-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

ThomWatch

The call from Wall Street came

TIBURON, Calif. -- I am still incubating. We all are.

In April, I got lucky. I got to ask a campaigning Sen. Barack Obama a question. The query came at a price. I had to pay to get into the fundraiser, which was just up the California freeway from our home. Our son, all of 12, got in for free and ate most of the early season strawberries dipped in dark chocolate.

No worries. The sweets were good and the day was bright after a brief drizzle. The home was a Kentfield mansion. The crowd was pumped, about 350 of them, maybe more. The two of us did not get bounced, and the boy got to sit on the lawn, snapping shots of the Senator with a throwaway instant camera. One of those photos is here. Others are elsewhere.

I do not mind paying the price when I have tough choices to make. I no longer carry a press badge, you see, so unlike the several times I got to ask then-retired President Gerald Ford a question, or a campaigning Rev. Jesse Jackson, or a stumping Walter Mondale, or Arizona's Bruce Babbitt, I had to pay for admission.

Fair enough.

Sen. Obama addressed the crowd for about 40 minutes, maybe a bit more. Everyone there probably wanted to ask a question. This was when he was going head-to-head with Sen. Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. Sen. Obama could only take four or five questions at most.

On the way in, the boy, Skylar, had asked me whether I was going to try to ask a question or shake hands with the candidate. At the time, I said I did not think so. Those days of thrusting a hand in the air, hopping on toes to get the attention of the guy or gal on stage, on deadline, dreadline more like it, those days were over.

But something came over me toward the end. This was when the press, if you recall way back to the primaries, the press were making a big deal about the candidate, as potential commmander-in-chief, taking an early morning call from an admiral or a general.

Stupid, but the press has to run with something I suppose.

Anyways, time for one last question. I hit the bid, shot hand in air, jumped, waved and got The Call. By the way, this was not to impress our boy, whose front-wn seat was on the grass a foot or two from the podium. I am not even sure Skylar, the boy, even could see me through the crowd. Let alone hear my question.

"Senator, Senator, what kind of answer are you going to give when the call from Wall Street comes?" was what I got out, in the nick of time. "Given the mortgages unraveling all over the place and the fact very few businesses can get a loan?"

Something like that. Want to see how I put it the next day? Go here.

Sen. Obama spent 10 or more minutes answering the question, and in the process took the audience to Asia, to Connecticut, to Washington, London, Korea and back to Kentfield, Calif.

He was reflective. He did not jump the gun and say -- remember, this was April 2008, way back when the Federal Reserve and the USA Treasury and Capitol Hill all said they would propose reforms of the banking system in about 100 days -- Sen. Obama did not say he would sack Ben Bernanke or our Treasury Secretary, Mr. Paulson.

He did not rail about the flood of overseas money that ignited cheap mortgages in the USA and Canada. Mexico even in The Day (five years ago, three years ago, 18 months ago).

Nope. Instead, he referenced the New Haven and Bishopsgate quants who triple-dip and quad-dip their money sticks into weird and funkaholic debt pools.

He did not pretend to understand it all. Them boots would be too deep to fill for even the know-it-all quants that worked their pox on paper. And Sen. Obama did not, to his (extending the pun) credit, reference the discussion he had begun a month previously, March 2008 I think it was, about the USA economy and the gargantuan IOUs we were racking up as a government and as a people. Sen. Obama understands just how devastating current account deficits and working government deficits and living off the (VISA) card can be to a nation where productivity is slowing markedly, even as we work more and more hours than ever, and jobless stats are lining up around the block.

So he reflected on that sunny April day. We could see it in his face, for real. He showed us, with his sense of being as perplexed as the next fellow, Sen. Barack Obama showed us why his law students in Chicago gave him decent to high grades. At the blackboard, he is willing to study the angles, first off the mountain of debt the USA has piled up toward the sky as the nation attempts to keep The Dream alive. Maybe late into the night this guy is at the boards. After the girls are in bed. Maybe that is why he looks so gaunt all the time ... not enough sleep, not enough chicken soup, too many docs to review on-screen in the middle of those suburban Chicago nights.

Maybe he's a Mets fan. (Oh yeh, Cubbies.)

At the close of the Senator's chat with his audience, Skylar and I more or less toasted the remaining fried won tons sitting across the loan, I mean lawn, on the buffet table. Maybe not worth the price of admission, but then, what is these days? No oversized prawns pinned to an ice sculpture.

Yet I had gotten, if not a definitive answer to the Wall Street-plea question, at least a sense that this economy, this Wall Street I had reported on for so many years, is a sore spot that requires a jug of Ibuproferen.

USA President George W. Bush, I believe, and his cabinet, are giving the economy (and the war and Social Security and health insurance and terrrorism and ...), the White House is giving all this as much of their predawn hours as they can. Of that I am sure. The current White House has devoted days of discussion, months maybe all told during 8 years of office, to the nation's headaches. But its time is up, and the number of folks out of work or facing a deflation of their assets, well, let me put it like so: I think any great candidate, and Sens. Obama and McCain are both worthy, any great candidate will give the matters before them more thought than you and I and our boy can imagine.

I rarely write about elections and politics, mostly because as you see here, I have little, so so little, to add to any of the public policy gestalt that wangles its way across our desks during big election years. I tend to stick to my corduroys, which include outstanding food, fair value in money markets and my backstroke at the Strawberry Pool. Eternal life is up there, too, which is why I swim.

Still, Sen. Obama clearly has demonstrated he is willing to study the complexity of debt markets, and derivatives ... and sovereign funds ... and Big Oil. Maybe, just maybe, he is the president who will unplug the currency exchange system that is almost bound to unravel if America's dollar, and other nations' currencies, command far less buying power than one can imagine in coming years.

Maybe that means a return to a gold standard. Gold as money. I don't know.

I do know the fried won tons were good, the chocolate strawberries were good, and I look forward to hearing more back-and-forth about the global economy in coming debates.

I am still incubating, and so are we all, I guess. And hey, the White Sox are still in the mix. (No longer; next year, Junior!)

-- Thom in Tiburon

For more ThomWatch, please go to Thom's library: click it.

ThomWatch: Coin of realm WANTED!

2008-09-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

ThomWatch
Public bids for coins of realm

By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

TIBURON, Calif. -- Ordinary folks' demand for sovereign gold coins is creating a chain-supply demand for mintable gold strip and large ingots, making it possible that gold exploration companies' fortunes are on the verge of turning positive.

Gold coin dealers in Canada and the USA say they are seeing an uptick in demand for the coins, which many governments mint and sell to the public as legal currency. So are folks such as James Turk, an economist who owns and operates GoldMoney, an Internet service that uses gold and silver grams as spending currencies. "Our business has been growing since inception, but we have noticed an uptick recently," Turk told me Monday morning. "July and August are normally slow months, but they were near records this year." Turk says.

The quantity of the company's gold grams on deposit and stored as LBMA bars in London and Zurich increased 34 percent at the end of August vs. a year ago. Silver ounces rose 101 percent in the same time span.

The USA Mint suspended sales of its America Buffalo one-ouncer, whose sales are up 53 percent from a year ago, because of demand that put the screws to its supply of gold strip. Some nations' mints, such as Canada's, are faring better because they manaufacture their own gold strip and do not rely on outside suppliers.

More first-hand reports Monday from ThomWatch, all first hand:

"Demand for gold coins has risen hugely," Kilu Capital Management's Nathan Lewis in Connecticut tells me. Lewis's latest book, GOLD: THE ONCE AND FUTURE MONEY, makes a case for gold as a replacement for soverign currencies. "I note that Dennis Gartman (a popular mainstream market commentator) said he recently bought gold coins for his own possession. Probably not one or two either. I think that Jeremy Grantham -- certainly not a gold guy -- recently said he started buying, too."
Van Simmons, a friend who runs David Hall Rare Coins in Newport Beach, Calif., tells me Monday: "I haven't seen an uptick per-say due to the shortage, I have seen an uptick due to the price of gold being so volatile, If gold goes down everyone decides to wait, If it has a big day I get tons of calls." Simmons also says, "The main shortage has been in the supplies of silver and platinum."
Bart Kitner, who is president of Canada's gold processor and sales company Kitco Inc., tells me, "The demand for coins is unprecedented. Its hard to say by how much, but I've never seen this situation before. One-ounce gold coins are not hard to come by, but all the one-ounce silvers that are being made are all being shipped to fill back orders from weeks ago."

Lewis, the author and money manager, says large buyers of bullion are boosting prices for precious metals and the premiums that gold and silver coins can command in a rising market. "The London market is the world's most important market for institution-size gold bullion ingots. There is an AM fix and a PM fix. Basically, all the buyers and sellers get together twice a day. The PM fix is the more important one. Recently, there have been big spikes on the PM fix, suggesting major demand for 400-ounce ingots."

My ingot basket just got in. Rising demand for coins and manufactured bars of gold (and silver) will boost prospects for actual suppliers of the product as well as verifiable miners. The cream of the crop almost surely will benefit first. Virginia Mines (VGQ in Toronto and VGMNF in USA) is one of them. I find the Quebec company's leadership and operations impressive. I have interviewed André Gaumond several times. Whilst I do not own shares of Virginia Mines, I know several investors who have sizeable stakes. The company, whose shares like most speculative gold miners are suffering of late, probably deserves a look.

The growing audience for coin of the realm is set against a landscape of broken lenders, rising jobless rates and the media-labeled "credit crisis" among banks, insurers and Wall Street/London derivatives developers. My friend Chris Kitze, one of the mid-1990s Internet pioneers who actually made and saved a buck, tells me Monday: "The Chinese are pissed because they sold us all the cool consumer gear and we paid for it with wampum. Now they hold almost $2 trillion worth of U.S. Treasuries and other equities and they will get crushed along with everyone else. They are too big to move into gold. The smaller guys definitely have an advantage here. Hey, I just found a slug of unused traveler's checks. I'm heading for the bank to cash them all."

THOM CALANDRA REPORT: For many investors who profited from a meteoric rise of commodities, mining, and life sciences companies, Thom Calandra acted as a beacon. Thom helped his followers find value in a quagmire of investment choices. Yet he is not a titled investment adviser. He is, more than anything, a scribe who goes where the action is. Thom co-founded CBS MarketWatch and MarketWatch.com. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom beat bushes for prospects. He fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited numerous biomedical companies, metals mines, and even a haberdashery or two, not to mention thin-crust pizza joints across the planet in his search for profit, fashion and food. Thom's latest project, the novel PABLO BY NUMBERS, was completed in summer 2008. He and Stockhouse.com this autumn will offer a subscription report with all the bells and whistles. The service is tentatively titled Thom Calandra Report. Please stay tuned AND PRUNED to Stockhouse.com and to ThomCalandra.com for more.

Everybody Must Get Hosed (These Daze)

2008-09-10T18:35:00.000-07:00

Extra, extra!

Pinhead wiz in miracle cure
... Shmackadabum report to debut!

TIBURON, Calif. -- Hello again, voldys.

Just a touch of type to say, several months after that wondrous visit to Colombia, that yes, I stand stubborn on El Marmato and its fab promise of gold dust. Und oy! ... as Londre's east ending tuffs lip before heaving bodies into that Thames' inky drink. Oy! I got news (at the bottom of this teeter totter pyramid).

Foist my voldys are the goldies we look to hook. Which means, morts of mine, that I (we) are getting hosed. Colombia Goldfields is getting run into the dust of its own drill holes. As the shares, like nearly all gold mining shares, like all small company shares, like all speculations these daze, lose their value in many stock markets (possible exception: Brazil), the tiny Canadian company is denied its chance at rounding up the $20 million or $25 million it desires to secure part of our storied Latin American mountain, El Marmato, crawling it be with campesinos hauling sacks of mineral-laden boulders on their worthy busted backsides.

Big breath!

Finance 202 I guess: Paper no longer accepted ... we are shtupped. Unless someone saves the day. One of Colombia Goldfields' London-based directors,Edward Flood of Haywood Securities, tells me the company is still in talks with several potential backers. Flood hopes the company can come to terms with a lender or an investor interested in warrants without severely diluting current shareholders.

We (my family and I) have held onto all of the shares of Colombia Goldfields (CGDF on NAZ) that we own. The company's equity has lost about four-fifths of its value in the past six months. Welcome to the clobbered club. Am I in the outhouse or what?

I believe, though. I believe because I have seen El Ma ma Ma yo Ma! El Marmato, zee mountain some three hours' rough and ready drive from ciudad Medellin (Please see previous articles below.) That does not mean YOU need or have to believe. We here at Chez Thom still own the 60,000 shares that cost us about $50,000 oil-ier this year.

If it be any consolation, I noticed something today (actually Wednesday of this week) that I have not seen in many a day. Or year. The metal known as gold, dense and heavy element it is, fell in price, a double dollar amount, yet the gold miners' shares somehow rose. Perhaps the redemptions in mutual and hedge funds have slowed, thus putting the brakes on liquidation of natural resources companies?

Transphat: Zee companies are leading the way, not zee metal? We shall see next week.

So two updates from my Tiburon neck of the woods:

The novel, PABLO BY NUMBERS for les innocents among us, is complete. Please see thomcalandra.com for more. Or not. We are taking names of those who want to read the book, which awaits publication. Simply jag me at thom.calandra (at) gmail dot com. Or thom.calandra (at) yahoo dot com. Visit this page -- PABLO BY NUMBERS: The Excerpts -- to get a gourmand's taste for the SHMACKADABUM hilarity of newsletters, beady-pied stock promoters and some of the best thin-crust pizza (con gorgonzola topping) this side of Bensonhurst.

Beloved voldy morts oy! The udder nooze is this: I am preparing to christen a report, to be published and distributed to subscribers under the benevolent stewardship of Stockhouse.com. The idea, after ... what has it been almost five years of sabbatical? ... the idea is to paint a landscape of the globe's finest, most delectable investment/friendship/noi mangiamo opps. We'll try to produce, with delightful fanfare, what I was doing for THE CALANDRA REPORT, and I promise strict shmacka-da-bum compliance with any and all laws regarding my scrip. I also promise plenty of opportunity for everyone, including those who love fine cuisine, lots of belly laughs, yeh, und money too, always coin in the delivery I know, and I wonder more than sometimes just why. Anyway, yes, it all shall be there, and the best part (in my bookie), the first-hand reports from fields of broken corporate dreams.

Especially (I can add bullets anytime I want on this dangy blogger), this new thing is for those who appreciate the verve and vigor of selecting what we believe will be choices that shall make a small band of subscribers more coin than those closing scenes from "The Italian Job." Oh pray it be so! We also intend to stage a series of cozy dinners and other rendenzvous with the voldy morts who have pledged to straddle the latitude of all the longitudes we hurdle in our search for what is, err, well, what is. I hope to unveil several preview issues of the as yet unnamed report on Stockhouse.com, my glorious partner and publisher with a northern exposure (offices in New York, Toronto and Vancouver, Canada). That would be later this month and early in October. The new report in its subscription glory (as in, costs money) likely will debut in very early November. Gee, just in time for the hols! And no, I have no idea yet how much it will cost, but I do intend to lobby for a price that in the first month or two will reward voldy morts who have stuck with me through thick and thin -- and I know there are almost 620 of you loyal voldys out there clanging the bell. Any ideas for a name, besides THE CALANDRA REPORT, please ring my bell, send me a note. Take the naming load off me and those fine execs up north who are paying the bills.

Nothing more to say, for now. Good morning, beloved voldy morts.

-- Thom in Tiburon (www.thomcalandra,com) ... and river rafting/fishing/spelunker doodling with zee kids this summer '08 across historic mining tracts on Northern California's American River. South Fork? Middle Fork? Oh for the fork of it I just cannot remember.

Marmato Gold: El Finale!

2008-05-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

MEDELLIN, Colombia -- In this final chapter of our quest for Marmato gold, we learn that every story sells a picture. I was lucky. I had several of 'em, thanks to a photographer who snapped up a storm on that old mountain in the Colombian Andes.

I think Jim Marx's shots of our visit to EL Marmato, some three hours' humpy drive from the vivid city of Medellin, are remarkable. His photos show the mountain, the miners and the villagers just as anyone sees them day to day. (Photos by Jim Marx except where noted.)

There are no enhanced images, no staged shots. Not even the signature shot of the battered boots just below. The wildcat mills and the rock-hauling vaqueros and the careful mujer weighing the gold dust that scores of families sift and water-sluice off the mountain each and every day, these photos testify to the potency of El Marmato and the surrounding properties that a tinny (and tiny) Canadian/Panamian/Nicaraguan company and its Medellin affiliate are steadily acquiring in their quest for 10 million-plus ounces of gold.

Colombia Goldfields and its chief geologist, Jeffrey Brooks, are cobbling together a resource that just might ignite, once again and after decades of violence and poverty and apathy and narcotics, a run on the mountains and valleys of inland Colombia.

Our first three parts of this "Au Get Off Of My Mountain" series are available here at thomcalandra.blogspot.com and http://www.thomcalandra.com/. They describe the joys and pains of searching for gold in a dusty, renegade yet lovely spot just off the equator. (The mangoes, by the way, are to die for. Ditto the platanos y frijoles with sour cream.)

I need not describe in this finale the landslides that buried the town square. Or the resource estimates and geology this upstart company, resurrected from failed predecessors, is presenting in its appeal to investors for support. But please do read the earlier sections of this story for the details.

As many of you might know from my years and years of reporting for MarketWatch (the news pioneer I helped to start and where I dedicated 8 years of my working life as chief editor, chief commentator and chief gold nut) and The Calandra Report and even Bloomberg, The San Francisco Examiner and more than a few Gannett newspapers, I'm a color guy. I'm a teller of tales, all of them true, with the exception of my just completed novel, PABLO BY NUMBERS. (See www.thomcalandra.com for more on that baby.)

Numbers, even the numbers in that solitary work of fiction, while relevant to all of us, especially investors who work their bums off each day just to make it to tomorrow, the numbers hold my interest for moments, not hours or days.

The stories and colors and the food, the people and the flowers (orchids in the case of beautiful Colombia) and the fresh air, these are the essences that hold me and touch me and move me.

Colombia moves me.

The city of Medellin, a place of about 3 million, not counting the squatters from the countryside, is where once I taught English many years ago. The billboards proclaim: "Medellin el tiene todo," and it's true. Medellin does have it all. The orchids and the beautiful men and women. The luscious fruit and the sidestreets abundant with oak and pine and eucalyptus and ... well, cosmetic surgery clinics. Medellin has it all: the Antioquian
restaurants, clappy with courtyards and wicker, and the Botero swollen art; the dawn-to-dusk work ethic that sets this city apart from many of its sister cities across Latin America and the wide and spotless boulevards that resemble those in Madrid or Buenos Aires.

Medellin has it all. It has the traffic, for sure. The Poblado and other lush neighborhoods. The lore of that other Pablo, Señor Escobar the narco who for all of the myths out there deserves supreme credit for giving the world one of the great and years-long chase scenes in the annals of crime and commerce.

Medellin also has plenty of fresh air these days. The air is well scrubbed, a lot fresher than I remember it from the early 1980s. Cleansed I suppose by the afternoon thundershowers. Being up in the mountains helps, for sure. So do the cleaner fuels Latin America is using these days as compared with 20 years ago.

As for cowboys on motorbikes, well, this city has ALWAYS been safe. Unless you're a narco or the son/daughter of a narco. Or a politician. Next time someone says, when you're headed down to Medellin or Cartagena or Bogota via Miami way, next time someone says, "Well, be safe down there, Thommy boy," and I hear this all the time, you go ahead and tell 'em, "Well, and you be safe next time yer head to Rio D. (current murder capital of the galaxy), or to East Oakland or Detroit. Or to certain sections of Mumbai."

So enough with zee words. This final part, this ringing endorsement of Colombia and the small company hoping to make it big on EL Marmato, is about images. For those, I give thanks to Mr. Marx. He came. He saw. He didn't snore at night. He drank the water. We sucked on passion fruit. What a guy, verdad?

-- Oy! That's Jim (photo just above and right) in Marmato's ruined town square: one of the few photos I snapped with my own little picture box. You can see in the background a documentary shoot of the square, buried by various landslides in the past two years as wildcat miners water-sluiced the hill, then cherry-picked what looks (to me) like abundant ore on Marmato.

-- C3PO (here at left ) never worked this hard. Marmato miners and villagers fashioned him from bronze 20 or more years ago, and he still looks current there in the lonely town square.

-- OK I confess, for someone who says he is in no way superstitious (writing on the wall), I have this thing about snapping license plates. I dunno what it means. So
the buseta with the Marmato peak behind it is my shot. It's pretty country, even after three hours of humping and bumping behind big-rigs and waiting at public works traffic stops along the (very) busy road to the mountain.

-- Santiago J. Correa Ocampo is one of the environmental engineers in Jeff Brooks' concentrated camp of Colombian kids looking for a paycheck as mineral data processors and Indiana Jones wanna-be's. That's Santiago standing next to me (photo left below/the punk in red tee is me) at one of the Marmato mills that process rock and boulder with cyanide. The result: grams of Au dust that pay the rent, and put mangos, papaya and fresh apples on the table for the villagers who either have rights to parts of the mountain or those who don't but still heave rocks and claw at the dirt.

One day, after marching across the mountain, Santiago, protege of the senior geo, Mr. Brooks, told me something along the lines of, "You know, in the end, it's up to local government. If they don't care about what happens here (800 or so folks on the mountain), none of this will ever get developed. But if they care, and do something about relocating the village, then this is maybe the beginning of something very big." (Santiago, whose entire five word and 20-syllable name is available on request, didn't really say it like that. He said it like dees: "Joo no, in dee end, eez up to los hombres politicos ...")

Santiago told me the other day -- here in July as I add to this posting -- that the company is awaiting decisions from local government about how to handle the folks living on Marmato. He feels pretty good about the situation, he says, acknowledging this is his first experience on a property where land owners and villagers hold so much sway they can harvest their own gold dust legally and illegally - as they have for decades.

So that's about it, volditos mios. Hope you don't think I'm a mule-headed pinhead for following my dream back to a country that most Norte Americanos don't even consider for a beach vacation these days, let alone a mountain hike. If I'm right about this region's glaze of ore, I'll be able to buy my own Escobar-style finca in the Andes, girded by coffee bean trees and banana leaf. Dang that traffic, though.

-- Thom Calandra
Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.

Photos by Jim Marx, except where noted.

Do not use our images without our permission, por favor!

* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. (Umm, that would be today, May 19, 2008.) Thom (that's me) paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher (that would be Jim) have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.

Au (Hey You!): Marmato Gold Part III

2008-05-12T18:36:00.001-07:00

By Thom Calandra
thomcalandra.com

Photos by Jim Marx

CAMP MARMATO, Colombia (TC) -- The mujer in this photograph is Omaya. She is weighing grams of gold dust brought to her by one of many wildcat miners on this mountain in Colombia.

Omaya works at one of several mills, legal and illegal, that dot the upper and lower halves of El Marmato, a mountain some three hours' drive from the striking city of Medellin. When a campesino brings his load of rock into the mill for the old cyanide treatment, Omaya can guess fairly well just how much gold will wind up in the bottom of the pan.

"Empirico," she says, meaning I think that she has plenty of experience. Omaya knows where the stooped and grizzled rock diggers work their part of the mountain. In a way, she is an empirical geologist, grading each peasant miner by their geography.

As the world of numbers and Canadian resource filings go, today, a week or so after we met Omaya at Colombia Goldfields' budding project in Latin America, I got to read the first official resource report from the mountain. The Toronto company* grading this mountain and adjacent properties just published its so-called 43-101 resource report, a legal (in Canada) sizing up of the number of ounces, the richness of the rocks, so to speak, and other geological assay criteria that are critical to making a gold mine a success these days.

The inference in the independent (independent of the company, that is) report figures 2.6 million ounces of gold for the mountain's upper half. The evidence comes from nine diamond-tipped drills boring into 12,000 meters of the upper mountain.

But I won't bother you with the stats. You can see them for yourself at the Colombia Goldfields home on the Internet. You see, I found Omaya's tipping of the scales much more interesting than the published report.

She had real gold running through her fingers, the old gal did. Hers was an exercise that many of the breadwinners on this mountain of 800 or so Colombians practice each day, heaving their canvas sacks of rock across the fire roads of the mountain. Degrading the steepest parts of EL Marmato with water. Crawling through makeshift holes in the ground looking for the rocks that will yield a decent amount of gold when the poor sods reach the mills.

Slicing and sluicing and eventually, causing landslides that bury the local hospital, the town hall and who knows, maybe a fellow countryman or two. All of that is in Part II of this series, in which I probe what is really going on at EL Marmato, in this Andean patch of gorgeous terrain not far from the city of Medellin, where I taught English a long time ago at Centro Colombo Americano.

I guess I was lucky in that I connected personally with the company's chief geologist, Jeffrey Brooks. He's been around the block in Latin America. Señor Jeff holds a doctorate from Washington State University. He seems to care about the mountain, about his small band of 30 or so mostly kids working the data on site ... and about the villagers who ultimately will need to vamoose from the mountain if what the company sees in this Marmato project comes to pass.

Brooks, updating me with his own interpretation of the independent resource estimate today (Monday May 12, 2008), was quite candid. Just as he was about the quality of the mango and papaya and platano at the roadside stands dotting the 3-hour drive to Marmato a week or so ago.

"Well, it looks like this," Brooks says. "At a 0.3 cutoff grade (minimum grade necessary to be considered economic), we actually lost tons from the previous resource estimate (1.5% fewer tons) but the grade is higher (1.05 versus 0.88 – 19.3% increase) and accordingly there was an increase in contained ounces (2.55 Moz versus 2.18 Moz – 17.2% increase). Things look pretty good to me."

I'm not going to travel the several iterations of Colombia Goldfields that go back to 1998, via Conquistadore Gold and other entities. It's all in the company's press releases. But I will say this, as I have before: several companies have sifted the dirt here in Colombia, a country known for its orchids, emeralds, coal and empanadas (my favorite). The country, before the violence that has consumed millions of lives during the past 80 or 90 years, and before the drug trade and the kidnappings and the political weirdness, the motorcycle assassins and Pablo E. and on and on, this country led Latin America in ounces of gold pulled from the ground.

Take that and sip it with your Coca Tea.

Still, the story of Colombia Goldfields and its small roster of Canadian executives, along with the London and Geneva bankers who tell the stories that raise the money for these mining endeavors, this tale is only as good as the heart you have to believe.

See, it's somewhat easier for me to believe than for you, volditos mios, to believe. I've seen and touched and scoured much of the mountain and the back office and the front office with my pen, my only prospecting tool. I've traced Señor Jeff's surveys in the gravel of the fire roads.

The company Colombia Goldfields, its young geos, senior geo Señor Brooks and the drillers and even the Toronto and Medellin and Panama City execs connected to the nuevo gold explorer, they all mostly having behaved in a responsible fashion, working with local government, hiring local talent, sheperding the young folks who one day want American and Canadian dollars in their ATM accounts, shuddering when landslides bury parts of the mountain's cottages, this company -- big sigh here! -- must once again turn to shareholders to raise the money it will need to purchase surrounding properties and keep drilling into some 60,000 meters of mountain.

You'd think that would be easy in a 2008 world of almost $1,000-an-ounce gold. But it's not. There's a ton of competition for the capital that yields Au resources. I guess that makes sense: companies such as Colombia Goldfields wanting to identify a deep-hole, or not-so-deep-hole, of mineral that it then can assign a dollar value to. And then sell to some vast mining company that wants to make a go of Colombia.

Even the company's bankers are frank about raising money via private placement, an exercise that already has happened twice in the past six or so months: raising several million Canadian dollars but also diluting current shareholders (did someone say moi?)

Says R. Edward Flood, a managing director of investment banking at Haywood Securities' London office and a Nevada-trained geologist whom I know fairly well: "We will have to do a financing to raise money for the Mineros transaction (purchasing a Colombia company with properties on the mountain). Since it is cash flowing we will probably employ some sort of hybrid debt, like a bond with warrants. That way the company doesn't take on so much dilution ... and frankly the mine is not being purchased for its production but for the potential resource it represents at the bottom of the pit."

For my money, I like Omaya's approach in her cubbyhole office. Omaya la mujer at the creaky old mill with the conveyor belts going round and round and round. That is, she weighs the gold dust, pays for it, collects the Au in a small cannister that looks like a film capsule. Hands it off to the owner of the mill,who happens to be mayor of the village.

As for the appetite for Colombian gold, investors today were almost surely nonchalant about the results from the resource estimate. The company's stock barely moved in Toronto and on Nasdaq and in Germany.

I could quote the CEO up there in Toronto, Randall Martin, but you know, he's much too driven to provide any perspective. I mean, like almost all top execs, he's out to raise his money and stitch together the surrounding properties and pay millions of dollars for other parts of the mountain. And then, he hopes, sell the lot to one of the big three gold companies who are desperate to land a foot or three and a heap of drill rigs in Colombia.

The laser-focus of a CEO in search of money ... well, put it like this: expect a one-sided tale that resembles a fable. That's his job. You'd have more luck ruminating on the bronze C-3PO the villagers have fashioned in the abandoned town square than you would taking lunch with most CEOs in search of financing.

Brooks, the middle-aged geologist and gracious host who hems and haws and as I said, seems to care about the stability of the mountain, seems to care about the 800 or so folks who live on it and really seems to care about the fruits and veggies his small band of planners and young folks eat each day at the company camp, put it to me thusly today: "We suffered from a lack of arial coverage in the drilling in the resource estimate. By this I mean that wherever we drilled we found Au (hey you!); however, for various reasons, logistics and time being the most important, we were not able to cover more of the license area. The drilling completed to date since the cutoff for inclusion in the resource estimate has been the same as the previous drilling – where we have drilled we have found Au."

From this, Brooks says in a bit of insight that is his own on-site opinion, the conclusion is "inescapable: we will add more ounces in the next iteration of the resource estimate. "

Oh Lord, let it be so -- this is what I want to say, pray/shout inside the little chapel the mostly Catholic villagers go to on Sunday mornings. But I don't say it or pray it. I've already seen Omaya's turnstile weighing of the gold that is peppered all over the place here. That and the sluices and the surrounding parcels and the 25,000 ounces of Au that already come out of this mountain each year in Barney Rubble fashion -- eso, es verdad! -- already have me looking forward to my next platano and refried bean with sour cream breakfast. Campesino style.

-- Thom Calandra in Medellin
Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.

* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. Thom paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.

Au (Get Off Of My Cloud): Marmato Gold Part II

2008-05-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

By Thom Calandra
ThomCalandra.com

MEDELLIN, Colombia (TC) -- El Campo Marmato, three hours' jeeping it from this emerald city toward the muddy Rio Cauca , is where our report continues.

When our story starts, when our search for answers to why Colombia no longer tops the heap as leading gold producer in Latin America begins, is open to interpretation. As is the rough-and-ready Spanish the artisan miners in El Campamento Marmato speak to negotiate their day's loot.

Perhaps this luscious country, 80 kilometers south of gorgeous Medellin, lost its oro mojo many decades ago, when the historically named La Violencia period of political killings began.

Or maybe Colombia lost the will to explore and exploit its thick veins of gold and silver, its disseminated mineralization, when drug processors and distributors turned coca and marijuana leaves into their own kind of gold.

This account of gold and one perfectly insane mountain just might have started a geologically recent 7 million years ago, when the Andean land mass and its mineral deposits began to bubble and boil. But who but a scientist wants to go back that far in time?

Jeffrey W. Brooks, Ph.D. geologist, tells me the lore of El Marmato as we drive out of wonderful Medellin, where once I taught English as a young man to the city's proud and dignified Antioqueños. Señor Jeff as he is known among the young geos working with him on the mountain, says EL Marmato's baggage includes the reality and myth of Señor Pablo. How the late Mr. Escobar of the Medellin Cartel once used El Marmato's barracks, half hidden beneath magnolia, Colombian pine and hibiscus, as both hiding place and meet-and-greet point for the campesinos who would come to pay their respects.

"That he came in by helicopter to play Godfather and shovel out the cash, the urban myth goes," says Brooks.

Jeff Brooks seems a considerate man. The 54-year-old American prefers to call the wildcat miners and millers scraping the mountain, the parched and sinewy Colombians heaving thick canvas sacks of rock from their shallow alluvial mines, Señor Jeff prefers the term "artisan" miners and millers to the more widely used banditos, or poachers. Or ladrones. Or even vaqueros -- buckaroos.

Brooks's nature resembles more than a few of the geologists I have met at mining sites over the years. He is friendly. Gregarious even. Casual. Possessing an easy way with his in-country comrades who report to him as senior geologist.

Still, after about a year watching events unfold on this mountain that stands some 2,000 meters in altitude, even someone as low key as this geologist, the gringo with the mustache who has worked for large Canadian mining companies his entire life, up until now, that is, Brooks lets slip a bit of his irritation.

Now that Señor Jeff is in charge of a team of 30 at a craggy outpost of some 800 very poor people, on a mountain three hours away from one of Latin America's most attractive and productive cities, he would like to see a few things besides geology click into place.

The camp chef, he says, might think about buying more local produce instead of trucking it in from Medellin. The kitchen staff, after making the lunchtime ensalada for the crew at 9 in the morning, really should refrigerate the salad until they serve it, he says. The young geos and a line-up inside the company barracks of a half-dozen 20-somethings mapping data points on computer screens "absolutely crave mentoring."

Yet this geologist, like most looking for world-class mineral deposits, does not even have time to map out surrounding parcels on his company's 5-by-15 kilometer patch of Marmato and the village of Enchandia, let alone act as teacher to a band of 30 or so young folk. Brooks is still scrambling on deadline, a badass corporate deadline, to render a clean database that then can merge with an existing database of drill holes and high-content mineral zones of Marmato and four adjacent properties.

He and his predecessors have drilled 27 holes into 8,000 meters of depth. His masters, his bosses, are probably muy smart. One is a geophysicist based in Medellin but hailing from, where else, Canada. Another, in charge of exploration, is based in Panama City, an up and coming city and meeting place du jour for deal makers with a foot in Latin America.

The company Brooks works for, Colombia Goldfields Ltd., is based in Toronto, with executives who have ties to properties in Nicaragua and elsewhere. Colombia Goldfields *, a public company, is at the mercy of shareholders and Geneva boutique banks when it comes to raising money for its diamond-bit drills, its salaries, its heavy equipment and the maintenance of the 30 employees living on the mountain.

Pretty soon, if what appears to be happening at El Marmato is real and not some logistic or political delirium, there will be a land grab, a scrum by even more peasants and silk-suited executives seeking their piece of these potently mineralized slopes and caves. And Colombia Goldfields will have to raise even more money, a lot more money, for mergers and property rights and relocations and mapping. For decent local fruit that is ripe but not rotten and ridden with worm carcasses, like some of the stuff from the Medellin produce wholesalers.

To raise that money efficiently, the company's execs need a share price that is high enough to keep current shareholders satisfied. Because if the stock's price is not high enough, those current shareholders will get diluted. Leached out like the rocks and dirt the mills around here process with cyanide solution. And then, they'll get MUY pissed off.

"There's real pressure here," he says, leading me and my photographer out the barracks door and onto what will become an impressive tour of Marmato. One of the first stops is what used to be the town square. To hear Brooks and his assistant, Santiago Jose Correa Ocambo, tell the story is to shudder and shake.

For decades, wildcat miners - the artisans -- have been running their own water sluices across the mountain. The disseminated mineral content of the mountain is high, and the gold dust seems sprinkled across the rocks and boulders. (Later visits to one of the independent mills (photo above), where the wildcatters take their rocks and dust to be crushed, sifted and separated with cyanide and other chemicals, confirmed for me that scores, if not hundreds, of families, have been feeding off the gold of this mountain for a long time.)

The water-flows across the mountain, which has the Rio Cauca running nearby, are degrading much of its structural integrity. "One night, I'm in bed," says Brooks, "and I hear what sounds like a sonic boom. Loud. Explosive. And then nothing." As it has done several times in the past three years, the steepest part of the mountain had let loose in a landslide. This one buried the town square, destroying City Hall and the Village Hospital in the process.

It's a wonder no one died in that slide. Or perhaps someone did and remains buried beneath the rubble. As far as the folks on the mountain know, everyone is still accounted for, even the banditos hauling their canvas sacks full of rock to the mills each day. Mongrels, as Sir Elton and Bernie Taupin phrase it, who ain't got a penny/sniffing for tidbits.

We stand now in the town square, buried by boulders and dirt not six months after the most recent major landslide. (This was just last week, my return to Colombia.) A lone donkey stands on one side of an adobe wall, pooping onto the chalky stone.

Oh yeh, and like some bats out of hell, there again are the "artisan" miners above us, splashing and running and funneling their water across and into the mountain, looking for their piece of the rock on this yellow-brick and manure road. Even as beneath them, there are people, their people, their paisan, living in homes, lean-tos, shacks. There are fellow Colombians working in the mills around them. Relatives. Cousins and cousins of cousins for sure. Even the company barracks with the cute little pool and the camp chef and the ping-pong tables that serve double duty as mapping desks, even that building is filled with their countrymen and countrywomen.

Except for senior geo Brooks, who hails from Pullman, Wash.

"The idiots," says Brooks. "They set up their sluice boxes, and they must be making money 'cause they keep coming back. But the landslides are weakening the road and burying their own homes. And they're still loading and dumping."

The largest legal owner of property in the state, or department, of Caldas, Colombia, is a so-called legacy company, an empresa that is domiciled in the country. Brooks estimates the legal haul from the mountain alone, Marmato that is, is about 25,000 ounces of gold a year, most of it from the mountain's lower half.

But oy, this is one beautiful piece of land here in western Colombia. Sitting near the equator, sprayed by sunshine and temperate climate and lots of water from the clouds, this mountain, in fact, most of Colombia, is a gardener's paradise. The first day I got here, I ate 14 separate fruits ... just for breakfast. The usual suspects and more: papaya, mango, starfruit, passion fruit, banana, melons, tomato (a fruit), kiwi, coffee beans and on and on. Es verdad, volditos mios.

The shade of a non-native eucalyptus, or a very native Colombian pine tree, or a magnolia, removes the sting from the sun's rays. And the orchids, they're everywhere.

So besides the water pressure in the company showers and the regular landslides that one day will kill people, aside from the kids working for a barely living wage and the mountain's registry of local poachers who swear by Dio that the mountain and its abundance of mineral belong to them by birthright, what other challenges could a middle-aged, toiling geologist who doctored in porphyrys possibly face in paradise?

"I've always worked for big companies, Barrack, Echo Bay, others," Brooks says," and I always have wanted to work for something small in search of something big. I think I have it; history, all of this rock and soil tell me I have it, something potentially world class in the way of a deposit, multiple deposits even at our surrounding sites."

What's to worry then? As the natives say, tranquillo, yes? "I guess you could say that, 'to relax,' but you get to leave here," Brooks says, not unkindly. "I am here, in 6 weeks and out 2, or in 8 and out 3. But we are under pressure. Local government requires convincing that this mountain requires serious attention if the roads are to maintain their structural integrity. There are relocation issues for the people who live here. The kitchen and the camp need better fruit. Local fruit. God knows these kids here need mentoring. I need a clean database. Our executives are ambitious. Gold is almost $1,000 an ounce, and they want numbers, resource numbers, mineralization numbers for a press release."

On top of all this, Brooks is concerned that one of the many labs cross-checking his assays and examining the gold content of his rock chips, a lab in the USA, somehow appears to have messed up a Quality Assurance Quality Control report, which is necessary if the company is to file its required Canadian 43-101 resource estimate for the mountain. The QAQC statement is delayed because of the lab snafu.

A quantifiable number of mineralized grade and size -- How much gold is in the mountan, hombres, and how easy is it to open-pit mine or drill out or both? -- a big number is what the financiers in Toronto and London and Switzerland and Vancouver need if they are to raise more dinero without watering down the stock price. Sadly, the delay in filing a 43-101 resource estimate is coinciding with a viscious drop in the stock prices of all junor exploration companies such as Colombia Goldfields.

Entonces, low stock price leads to less money for the company when it returns to the capital market for cash. That leads to lots more shares to raise that money, which leads to muy pissed-off current shareholders. Few execs, whether they run gold miners or semiconductor factories, want to mess with the good will they share with shareholders.

Brooks stops on this quite steep dirt path on the side of this mountain, halfway to heaven and halfway to hell (OK, so I like images attached to the word-flow once in a while ... but it all seems so true). We are both sweating like pigs, or is it donkeys that sweat like pigs? So is my photographer (and amigo), Jim Marx.

"Look, we have five active projects going here, we have nine core drill son site and another four or five on the way. We have very active rock chip sampling. This mountain and its property rights are sliced like a cake, a lower zone and an upper zone. If you have rights, and we've been buying them up as fast as we can, you can go lateral into the mountain hundreds of meters, but someone else owns the vertical rights above you and below you; first time I've ever seen that."

Next: Part III -- Alluvial dreams/hard rock facts en El Marmato

All photos but one by Jim Marx; Jeffrey W. Brooks profile snapped by Thom Calandra.
-- Thom Calandra is of service at ThomCalandra.com.

* Thom and his family own $45,000 worth of Colombia Goldfields shares at current prices. The Toronto company's stock trades in Canada, Germany and on Nasdaq in the USA. Thom and family have no intention of buying or selling any current or additional shares of the company until at least three months after this series on El Marmato is completed. Thom paid about $60,000 for the shares several months ago. He and his photograher have received no fee or compensation from Colombia Goldfields, unless you count some empanadas, some platanos and frijoles and three-hour jeep rides into the countryside.

EL MARMATO, Colombia: Going Underground PART I

2008-05-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

By Thom Calandra
(ThomCalandra.com)

MEDELLIN, Colombia (TC) -- The words are music to my ears, from the geologist who would take me and my photographer to a pock-marked mountain some three hours' jeep jaunt from this world-class city of orchids and emeralds. The words are: "When we get there, do you want to go underground?"

I was in Antioquia, fresh from Miami, for the first time in more than 20 years. I was back in Colombia, where I taught English as a lad. I was back in Medellin for a reason: to see a patchwork of gold mines in EL Marmato, a stunning countryside decked with the fincas of the rich and the shacks of the poor.

I was headed underground, 2,000-plus meters high. What I learned this week stirred me.

Good morning, volditos mios! Over the next several weeks, I will be reporting as best I can what I saw on the mountain. And what I saw in the city. I think the images will help all of us see why Colombia, and the equatorial city of Medellin in particular, are ripe with charm and filled with beautiful people. Hard working folks. Some of the best platanos and mango and passion fruit that ever have passed through my lips. Terrific gorgonzola pizza, too, at 1969 Pizza in the luscious El Poblado neighborhood, plus blood-drenched tripe, chorizo and frijoles (over easy on zee lard, por favor), plumed wth streaks of Latino sour cream to die for.

Above all else, I was there to see how this poor country, fabulously rich in coal, emeralds, coffee beans and flowers, will deja-vu itself, transform back into the South American nation that once produced more gold than any other. More oro, that is, before the violence and the politics and the shadow of narcotics distributors allowed other countries, Argentina and Peru and Chile, to post yearly gold totals that leave Colombia in the dust.

As my voldy morts know, I was in Medellin and Andean points beyond to don the rubber boots and tramp in the mud and donkey poop, to rest my trekking rump for a moment on a vat or two of cyanide and see whether I was loco to have purchased a stock position ($45,000 USA or so at current Nasdaq prices; in my haste, I paid $65,000 for the shares several months ago) in the Canadian company that controls a Medellin subsidiary that is drilling holes into EL Marmato.

And yes, mis amigos y amigas, this junior explorer, like nearly all of the Canadian variety, hopes to launch numerized, mineralized, magnified press releases into orbit above its piece of the Colombian rock.

I hope you join me as I recover from voldy moldy jet lag and assemble the words and images of a region, and one mountain especially: El Marmato. The story, like Medellin's El Tiene Todo billboards, has it all. We have the wildcat campesino mills and the landslides. We see the river literally, Rio Cauca, the country's second in size, and figuratively in the torrents of brown sweat pouring from legal and illegal underground and above ground scavengers and miners, heaving potato sacks of stone to their chosen mill for pay day. Most of us can imagine the hopes and material dreams of the poorest paisans in this story, some having worked so long heaving and chipping and sifting stone, their backs are bent and their hands as spikey as a native Colombian pine tree.

Oh yeh, hombres ... and it goes with saying, in this story we sense, can almost smell in the mineralized dust at our feet the lust of silk suited executives several nations removed. This story of mine includes the harried geologist, a PhD. from America, who is building a team of young geos, and who s looking, he says, to mentor and improve the lives of 900 or so Colombians who live at EL Marmato.

Our story has sluices and huecos and especially, voldy morts, the lure of gold.

I think we'll see -- I know I have -- what it might take to rachet a promising string of properties in these Andes into a resource of millions, and perhaps tens of millions of ounces of gold. The almost impossible odds. The ridiculous hurdles thrown up by trade pacts and rocky one-lane roads, bureaucrats and public perception.

That's it for Part I, friends. Please refrain from any selling or buying regarding this project until you have viewed all of the pieces of the mountain, so to speak, all of the parts of this report to come ... and the images shot by my photographer and friend, Jim Marx. (And maybe one or two bodice-rippers by yours truly.*)

Finalmente, as a matter of disclosure, allow me to say I will not be buying or selling any more shares in the company whose rather grand and entirely true story will follow. Not even if my existing shares triple or quadruple in value. Which is entirely possible, given the scope of the Colombian project under way and the talent and experience level of the geology and executive team. At the same time, I won't be selling the shares, or buying any more, if the opposite happens: if the mine and related Colombian properties are as washed out as the wildcat landslides that already have wiped out the village's City Hall and Hospital.

Voldy morts have my word that any liquefying sale of my (and my family's) $45,000 worth of shares, which we paid for entirely, or additional purchases for this oro loco mio, will not happen at least for three months after this multi-part series on EL Marmato is completed.

Entonces ...

Later, mios volditos. 'Sta luego.

-- Thom Calandra in Medellin (and back to Tiburon prontissimo)

* Photos by Jim Marx, except where noted

Back to Antioquia

2008-04-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- Buenos dias, volditos mios! Where in el mundo is Tomas headed to?

DO WE REALLY WANT TO KNOW?

The last time TC hit the road (in a big way), I was kicking camels in the Mongol steppelands. Now, it looks like parts of that wunnerful country will be gilding yurts in gold and copper, if China keeps the faucets running, that is.

Holy frijoles, we're going down south. Get your prospector hats on, voldy morts. I see this road trip, albeit a brief one, as an opportunity to examine what happens when a mining company tries to put together a resource in a hot-button land of beans and beautiful Antioqueños. I want to know more than just the paper trails, the 43-101 reports and the endless geological surveys.

I want flesh and blood and sounds and sights and smells. Can you catch that in word and on film?

I'm taking a photographer with me, my grape-growing Paso Robles friend Jim. Jim, as some of you might know, often hits the marks when it comes to gorgeous art. Mr. Crazy Old Tree on this page is one of Jim's. Your assignment, Mr. Marx, as you, my beloved SOH*, have decided to accept it, is to give us some of the hot chiles aroma of roasting slope lands, EL Marmato to be specific.

We want to see the mineralized flecks in the whites of their eyes, señor. We want the landscape, the BBQ beasts on the summit of the mountain and the dusty day laborers, their hands and forearms as thick and scarred as anything Picasso ever painted.

Now, those of us who track this thomcalandra.com blogsplot/bogspot know I currently am on a grande losing streak. Even the sturdy and beautiful Mexican landscapers who do the lawn steer clear of mio poverito these days. I mean, brain stroke drugs? WiMax equipment makers? Sure, Tomas, what's a fledgling gold miner in your pitiful mix? You're sending us down the road of ruin.

Join my world, all of you in your garage lofts, flipping burgers at the In & Sin. So it's tough out there. So I'm a believer in cheap. So my version of Actionable these days plays like a bad dream in Spanish subtitles. Peccato mio, hombres.

Stay tuned. We all just watched that "Ladron Que Roba ... " flick on DVD, the one where the subtitling and honorable thieves, the ones with stinky armpits and a foxy daughter, rob the subtitling fiendish meds thief in Los Angeles. Put me in the Latino mood. Loved it.

There's beauty in cheap, I just know there is. More to come, and no names for now. I'm already in the hole on this one, and I don't want to put anyone else there. Nos vemos!

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon

See: ThomCalandra.com (please)

* SOH meaning Son of Harpo and a mystic artist in his own right, Jim's motto being The Sins Of The Fool Linger/The Zins Of The Cool Mingle.

Senator Obama Sets New Mark

2008-04-07T06:21:00.000-07:00

By Thom Calandra

KENTFIELD -- Fantasy days and dizzy girls, I'm coming back.

On Sunday, the California mist evaporated. The sun, storybook suburb for gosh-sake, it shone on an enormous yellow mansion in Marin County, California. Oh yeh, and I was one of six in the crowd, at this garden reception for Sen. Barack Obama, I was one of the several fortunate enough to pop The Candidate a question.

Oh yes: good morning, voldy morts!

I am, we all know, no longer a cheeky journalist, but I had a question that needed asking. Und besides, our boy, Skylar, invited by the senator's staff to sit on immaculate lawn just inches away from the senator, well, at least we got a double-take out of the 12-year-old ... and one hopes, a civics lesson from this elegant, barry-toned speaker and professor of law.

So the mist clears and wham, the senator is actually early, his staffers told us all. Barack Obama's chat to a crowd of 300 ran about 35 minutes, and the answer he gave me -- I asked him, given those hypothetical 3 a.m. phone calls to commanders-in -chief, well, shoot, I asked the senator how prepared he was to take the 9 a.m. phone calls from Wall Street as the nation's chief accountant -- his answer/his answers ran 5 minutes. I swear, he looked me in the eye 80 percent of the time. Good answer, too.

"We're what, 16th or 20th in broadband speeds? Hey nothing against South Korea, they're OK. But we can do better than South Korea," he said. He says. He saith.

Sen. Obama in his Wall Street mini-muse had the what, the courage, the verve to suggest that NOT ALL KIDS should be expected to attend university. Bravo for him. The senator from Illinois also understands upside and downside risk and, presumably, the screen-pocked world of those money-seeking missiles at Broad & Wall: zee quants.

Sen. Obama and hired guns are Internet savvy, as we all know from BO.com. More than 90 percent of the $55 million the BO campaign raised in March (or its most recent 30-day period, I am not sure which) came via zee Internet. Sen. Obama, in a Washington of group money hugs aka PACs, had the 20-20 almost two years ago to assemble an Internet-ready team that embraced, and is still embracing and validating, the crowd.

In a way, the senator, thin as a rail here in Kentfield, Calif., as rays of sunshine mixed with nearby shoots of lavender to lend his crumpled suit and scuffed clodhopper shoes a hint of velvet (OK so I'm no Hemingway!), the senator understood the wisdom of the crowd. (Mr. Surwoecki, yes!) Back then in February 2007 when BO decided to run for high office, I mean. He knew to work the franchise. About half of that $55 million, the senator pointed out from his slight podium, about half came from donors of $50 or less. Sounds like the wonder of micropayments, delivered via broadband. Nearly all of it to BarackObama.com. Take that, SOUTH KOREA!

The eight or 10 kids at his feet on this Sunday afternoon in Northern California were actually listening, some of them, one or two of them, as Sen. Obama noticed, not even having been born when he made his choice to run for USA Prez 14 months ago. I think the kids were tuned in because Barack Obama has a gift, the gift of gab: neither preachy nor speechy. He's a bit like the Mr. Rogers of speakers. Even when he is quoting MLK's "the fierce urgency of now."

(By the way, how come no one, or hardly anyone, quotes my Bob anymore? "This is the story of the Hurricane/The man the authorities came to blame ... for something that he never DONE ...")*

Even when Sen. Obama is conveying anguish, he is so Mr. Rogers. Mellow? Maybe. Or spooning out empathy. Or joking around. No prepared script. ''Heya," he seems to be saying sotto voce, ''It's just me, man. Í didn't like plan this, you know.'' Perhaps the funniest moment came when he addressed the sticky ickiness of The Party, you know, the D-question, as in: how does one unify the Party after all those delegates choose their candidate? "Well," he said, and one here can imagine Barack Obama shifting a toothpick around his mouth with his tongue, "I'm not certain, but I think I can give a pretty good speech at that there convention."

The senator, as we are learning, knows his business. What would you expect from a professor of constitutional law? For example, when I asked him about Wall Street and the credit crisis, he telegraphed straight off how the Federal Reserve's missing piece of the rescue package several weeks ago was ensuring the world, and the many investment bankers in this SF-Marin County crowd certainly were listening keenly, ENSURING that banks still face downside risk. "Otherwise," he said, "it's all upside and no downside, right? If you're going to be the lender of last resort ... " Well, darn tootin' someone in this age of exuberance has to make some DC patches to high-stakes lending practices -- is what the man is saying.

The senator, by the way, thinks interest rates are going up over the long term; so this is one 46-year-old who knows his 100-year cycles. Most of all, in everything he says, as the crowd snacks on its fried wontons on this vast lawn in the land of privilege, in most everything, Sen. Obama delivers some smatter of historical sauce. Perspective, I suppose you call it. Like the fact that some 42 presidents worked up, what, $5 trillion of national debt. Und zee 43rd, he is I-racking up what, close to $3-plus trillion?

Nothing against our present president. TP The President believes fiercely in what he's doing, I just know it. And I mean no sarcasm -- come on, this is me speaking, voldy morts. But facts are facts. Money talks. You know who taught me that: Michael Bloomberg, Mayor Mike, when I helped run his European news desk in London and before I triple-handedly kick-started the news arm of CBS MarketWatch and MarketWatch.com. Money is facts.

Michael Bloomberg and his Number One, his editor, Matt Winkler, they knew way back then in 1994 or 1995 that $ numbers speak volumes. They knew Gov. Bill was going to become President Bill because they were charting GDP and the jobs numbers and income levels on their Bloomberg screens. Mayor Mike in NYC, he lives on stats, feeds on them. Give me all the stats, all the info you can, and we'll make some informed decisions, decisions that might help us negotiate crime and poverty and infrastructure and the economy and education, Mayor Mike is saying in his little oval there on Canal Street.

Only Sen. Obama, with his facts, he has I don't know, I guess it was the sun, he has this glow, you know? Warmth. His classmate from Honolulu, Pam Hamamoto, our little girl's chief administrator at the Tiburon Girls Softball League, Pam has that glow, too. Pam was there at the reception/fundraiser. Maybe it's Hawaii, I dunno where the glow comes from. (I get mine from the Strawberry Rec District pool. Backstroke does wonders.) And like I said, no, I'm not star struck. Back in my day (I'm safely retired now at age 51), back in my day I got to meet and interview former Presidents (Gerald Ford), current candidates (Jesse Jackson, Walter Mondale, etc.) and a ton of senators and reps and guvs, including my faves: Bruce Babbitt, Bill Richardson and Pete Domenici and Paul Simon. And some mayors, too, my favorites locally being Art Agnos and Dianne Feinstein of SF.

The fried wontons were terrific, according to my boy. (OK, so I don't do snacks between 2 and 5 in the afternoon. I'm thin as a rail, too. But I wasn't just off the plane from Montana.) And Sen. Obama has a great sense of humor; he calls Hillary's crowd the sisterhood, but in a way that is not at all sarcastic. "Look, they think," he stammered (and I paraphrase here from the notes I scribbled on Skylar's wonton-greased napkin, "the sisters think," he said, trying to share HOW HE FEELS about running against Sen. Clinton, "these women who feel I'm cutting in line here, they think ... they think I'm a ... I don't know ... they think I'm a ... MAN."

Good one, Senator. (Yes I am/and I can't help/but love you so.) Come swim with me and our small band of gals and guys some morning at the Strawberry Pool here in Tiburon, Senator.

That's all for now, voldy morts. Maybe some of Skylar's photos of the candidate in a day or less, right here and via ThomCalandra.com. Please excuse the politicking. Yes, I'm a lifelong Democrat, but little secret: please don't tell my wife, I voted for Governor Arnold last time around. And if Mayor Mike were one day to run for HO HO (high office), I'd probably give him my nod.

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon (and Kentfield) (Photos courtesy of Skylar Calandra & Dad)

* Oh yeh, more Bob: 'Coz one day, he would have been champion of the world.' Hurricane Carter, that is.

Emperor's New Suit (I Guarantee It!)

2008-03-26T05:51:00.001-07:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- Good Morning, Voldy Morts.

Here ya go, ThomInAtor Bullets in short order, piping scrum-dilly-licious:

-- Papa (my wife's Papa) the other day at Le Boulange reminded us what one of the chairmen em-uh-red-eye at long-gone Homestake Mining in SF used to say about gold, harrumphing on stage, "An ounce should cost about the price of a good men's suit." The executive miner pronounced this metric before Men's Wearhouse came onto Main Street, I guarantee it. A good suit, in tribute to very good textiles from China and detailing from Singapore, these days runs much less than $1,000. I take the old man's gold measurement (the emmer-red-eye chairman being the old man here) to mean: an ounce of gold should run about the price of buying something you need to keep yourself in the game. Food. Clothing. A tank of petrol.

-- Voldies, my ETF friend around the corner here in good old Tibbie says the so-called GDX is worth a look-see. This fund tracks a basket of gold miner stocks, some of them the "junior" producers and explorers whose values have sunk even as the gold price has risen. Go figger. I do not own GDX, by the way. But I hope to start kicking some tires soon.

-- What else is there to say? Umm, the bank ETF idea seems to have worked well. What was it, the UYG? (See previous posts please.) It was selling for $26 or so last week and now it's $33. I have no idea if Bear Stearns is in the UYG basket, but hey, the banks were almost destined to spark any decent rebound in stock markets, their shares getting bloodied so the past month or so. And so the bank shares did.

-- What's to look forward to? Well, my new TT, for one (in the picture above). I get to play with Tommy Toys once in a while, you know. Something else on the horizon: baseball, my beloved A's just evened their Tokyo series against those very fine Botox Red Sox overnight. My little guy and I are going to see the A's & the Giants play one of their traditional exhibition games (the third one in SF) this coming weekend.

Anything else, Voldy morts? Please let me know. Email me at thom.calandra@gmail.com. See you at ThomCalandra.com!

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon

Nobody feels any pain

2008-03-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

By Thom Calandra
ThomCalandra.com

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- Nobody. Feels any pain. I picked up Bob's latest and recycled greatest this morning at SBux and must say, they all hold up, even "Hurricane," nudging me toward a kind thought for Mr. Spitzer, of all folks.

Was the line that Bobby D. just wails, "But one day he coulda been the champion of the WORLD."

Enough said about this champion of the people, someone who, had he mellowed a bit, mended gutted fences on Wall Street and a few on Main Street, coulda been in the Oval Office. NY state makes way for someone who looks like an able governor: a man, like SF's Willie Brown, who is black and almost blind and perhaps wise and savvy.

Later in this story, who knows, maybe it's Mayor Mike for Guv. I don't live in NY but I still care.

Nobody feels any pain. In the market that holds true this week. That UYG purchase -- the banks basket -- is working out. How-la-sweet-loo-ya! I/we are making money! (See previous entry for UYG.)

No ThomInAtor Bullets today. Just a note to say I believe this is the worst stretch that small and tiny company shares have traveled in 20 or so years. The big stocks roared earlier this week. Not so the small ones. The oncology stocks especially got their shmacka-da-bum. And gosh knows, I own enough of the life-science stocks.

See you later -- here and at ThomCalandra.com? (Please feel free to leave comments!)

-- Thom in Tiburon

For believers only ... (ouchie!)

2008-03-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- Good morning,voldy morts. ThomInAtor Bullets for all who believe we should be practicing the principles of Cracking The Buyside Code during this market mayhem in stocks, credits, comps and cotton candy:

Financial stocks are getting hammered. Those who bet against banks are raking it in right now. I rarely touch banks or other money institutions, as I believe most bankers are just doing their jobs and little more. Still, a big shmacka-da-bum bounceback is in the works, me thinks. The so-called UYG, says my ETF master around the corner here in my neck of the woods, is one way to BELIEVE IN BANKS. The fund acts something on the order of double the gains and losses of the Dow Jones U.S. Financials basket. The UYG sells now for below $29 an ETF share. I own a tiny bit of the basket and already am losing money. We all pay for our beliefs. I believe the world is a good place -- yet that is one belief that pays me! So there, voldies~ ...

Uranium is still 'working,' as they say. I have just begun buying shares of Western Uranium, a Canadian company that hopes to spin off a lithium unit in coming weeks. The symbol is WUC in Canada and WURNF in Schwab-land here in the USA. (Schwab, by the way, just started real-time Canada stock quotes, though priced in USA dollars.) An acquaintance of mine, Edward Flood, who now lives in London, helped to start the uranium company. Ed, a geologist by education and trade and now, oopsie, a banker at Haywood Securities, tells me ce jour from Toronto, where he is attending the PDAC gathering of miners and other hard rockers: "Thom, the Western Uranium is planning to spin out the lithium assets (24 billion pounds of lithium carbonate currently priced at $3.70 per pound) to shareholders of record." The date of record, when one receives lithium shares for each Western Uranium share, has yet to be set. (Und no, I have received no compensation or discounted shares, not even a bottle of wine or a soy burger, for my admission of purchase! So please do not Lynch me. * Also, if Western Uranium shares happen to rise in the time between now and the one-for-one lithium spinoff, I might consider selling my stake if I am in the money.) By the way, I have never owned shares of a uranium exploration or production company. So this is a first. Oy! As I said, if Western Uranium were to gain some ground here in the next week or two, I personally would think about selling it and buying some swimming goggles for my laps at Strawberry Pool up the block.

Finally, if you believe in my new nonfiction project, Cracking The Buyside Code, now is the time to buy the next frontier in genomic tools. All of the DNA master equipment builders are getting their shmacka-da-bum. Pick one you believe in and hold it for a few years. Most of the world -- my former audience from The Calandra Report and those kind enough to check in once in a while -- know I am a believer in makers of genomic tools and medical diagnostics for cancer and other diseases. As Alan Greenspan says in his new book (worth a read for some terrific anecdotes about Washington), companies and technologies that displace other, older companies and technologies usually have staying power. Genomic tools are the building blocks for personalized medicine. That's the ThomInAtor prescription for today, I guess.

Hey, feel free to leave comments. Later, voldy morts! (That's a very young pic of my mom up there, circa who knows, 1945?)

* Heh, heh ... could not resist the pun. I interviewed Peter Lynch twice in my career as a journalist, and both times he was terrific. His colleagues speak highly of him, and I, for one, found and still find his enthusiasm for new ideas 'infectious.'

-- Thom Calandra at ThomCalandra.com

The Mice of Men: NTI & The Buck & The Drug

2008-03-03T06:54:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

Tiburon, Calif. (TC) -- Good morning, voldy morts. Where we live is just a Shrekian stone's throw up the freeway from the Buck Institute for Age Research.

The labs there in Novato, Calif., are just starting the process of licensing molecular compounds, peptides and other formulations to commercial interests. In exchange for cash, companies receive development and royalty rights for some of the new drugs, those that clear the early testing hurdles.

Treatments for Parkinson's, Huntington's and Alzheimer's some day might derive from the Buck Institute's age research in the hills of northern Marin County. (Not more than a mile or two from the factory where those Birkenstock sandals are made!) Or treatments for these obiterating diseases might not stem from the nonprofit Buck Instutite for Age Research. Few things are a lock in such laboratories where proteins and peptides are nurtured and injected into little critters in mazes.

When those compounds -- the audacity of hope on Pharma Planet -- apply to neurological regions of mammals, NOTHING is a lock. As any investor and scientist can tell you, neuro companies are deperate acts of faith, run by big-hearted desperadoes seeking to plant a small flag on the pharmacology map against the odds.

In the case of Neurobiological Technologies, whose shares I own and whose CEO and scientists I respect, vast amounts of wealth have been destroyed in the search for novel drugs that treat head trauma, ischemic stroke and other brain bonkers. Yet the company, based here in California, is one more tiny example of how investors can crack the BUYSIDE CODE and become actionable and LARGE. All whilst supporting an enterprise that might become a neuro powerhouse.

I have to be frank here. I feel as if I have lost more money in NTI, as the company is called, than that unfortunate trader in Paris who "bet the bank" on a soiree sadly gone south. Gone, baby, gone, the actor Casey Affleck might comment. On a percentage basis, since I started investing in NTI shares four years ago, I must be in the hole by 60 percent. I've been diluted down, reverse-split beaten down and just plain down downed. Gone, baby.

So the world does not care for a tiny company that is hoping to stake some markers inside the neural pathways of the brain? Apparently. Even were NTI to succeed in developing compounds to treat stroke, for example, in a six-hour patient window, the company still has to license the drug and promote the drug.

So what does the fellow, the writer (moi) whose current project is the nonfiction Actionable & Large: Stocks Guru Cracks Buyside Code, what does he do? Why, he goes out and cracks the code, buys even more at absurdly low prices. Naturally, he thinks he knows how the neuro story will turn out. Correct?

Actually, no. Not entirely correct. I have no idea how the story will turn out. I believe merely that NTI, and other small companies with vision, drive and the focus of a freaking laser beam, are worth the immense investment risk they pose. Even with all of my additional purchases of NTI shares over the years, the stock still, at post-reverse-split levels now, will have to hit $8 a share for my stake to become profitable.

At $8, tiny NTI becomes a $250 million market capitalization vs. its current $80 million or so. Still such a pittance for a company that might have the next great stroke clotbuster, for a company that owns the Alzheimer's treatment Memantine, that already has licensed its Xerecept head trauma drug to an independent company and that hopes to collaborate with a worthy institute, the Buck, in an effort to explore Huntington's and Alzheimer's solutions.

Neurobiological Technologies will back the Buck's Alzheimer's drug-dev for up to three years and be set back at least $1.2 million in Year One. Paul Freiman, the chief executive of the company, says he is looking to broaden NTI's exposure to research into central nervous system disorders.

There was a time when the relentless slide in NTI's share value had me in an extreme state of nervous system disorder. I mean, even doing my ethereal laps at Strawberry Pool up the road, in the water womb that keeps me and about 40 or 50 other members young and active beyond their years, even in my chlorinated haven, I was ruminating about the destruction of value that a biomedical firm can wreak on its supporters.

That was before I'd refined fully the principles of cracking the BUYSIDE CODE. Now that the book and my brain are on the same page, all is wonderful again with the world, and with my backstroke. It still might takes years, and perhaps never, but if the improbable becomes the probable, if NTI's viper-venom stroke candidate, Viprinex, survives Phase III human tests, and if Xerecept the head trauma peptide sails through its Phase III trials, and if the company continues to see a stream of income from the sales of Memantine for Alzheimer's relief, and if ... and if ... well, even if all of those matters resolve happily, and the Buck Institute's research proves to be more than mice in a cage, there is still the matter of marketing and licensing and royalties and the accounting details. Now that's a world that mystifies me.

NTI will have its first drug research day for interested parties this week in NYC. I will be doing laps in Strawberry, in my water womb. For more on all this, see these ThomInAtor Bullets:

The Buck starts here: http://www.buckinstitute.org.
NTI starts here: www.ntii.com.
For Actionable & Large: Stocks Guru Cracks Buyside Code: www.thomcalandra.com.

That's all for now voldy morts! See you in the lane.

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon

The Italian Cookbook

2008-02-27T09:31:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- My mom, no longer with us, had this tattered Italian cookbook by Maria Luisa Taglienti. It was hardcover and called The Italian Cookbook. The book had that serene Amalfi Coast view from a terrace, with da grape and da vino and da pasta on da tavola.

I still have the book, and my wife and I go to it once in a while for the basics: do you take the skins off da sausage when you make-a-da sausage pie? How mucha da rum you put in da savarin al rum? Ha capito?

What the heck is a macaroni pie and what type of pasta goes into it? (Da rigatoni, amici.)

So when a friend of mine, Jim down in Paso Robles, California, he asked me what do you do when you got da hot stock, and da hot stock is cooking hot in da sauce, I tell him I got to go to da book. Capito?

When do you sell da stock so you don't get da shmacka-da-bum da next day when da stock, it is still cooking hot in da sauce? So I open The Italian Cookbook, because, you know, my friend Jim's question is da good one. He likes-a-da stock when it go crazy. And so do I. Some da time, da shmacka-da-bum is good. It make the stock go higher.

Some of us, by the way, call this parabolic: When the stock goes higher and higher, hits new highs, comes back a little, hits more new highs, and so on. I have a couple doing this now: Illumina, God bless it, and Teva Pharmaceutical. Both we have held for many years, more than four years and five years, respectively for Illumina and Teva.

So I open the book and I turn to the page to the Veal Stew Casalinga. Benissimo!

You need da two things to get the Veal Stew Casalinga right. One is not to overdo the seasoning, keep it da simple with da salt and da pepper and just da one clove da garlic.
Da other thing: you got to simmer real low for long time. Maybe more than an hour. Maybe two hours. That there is your spezzatino di vitella, OK?

So I go back to my friend Jim and I tell him, 'Jim, you don't sell the stock until long-a-da-time. You let it da stock go higher. When the company ain't a da no more growing like shmacka-da-bum crazy (20 percent quarter to quarter, for da instance, or 50 percent on sales year to year), when da company needs to take da breather, then you finish with the simmer on the stove and you sell. Years and years. '

Especially if we are talking generic drugs and genomic tools for da savvy of da personalized medicine. Capito? I'm a da talking to you, da George Clooney, and to you, da Jim Marx, and to you, da Josefina in da garage da loft.

I hope a da so. Cosi, sta attenzione! That's The Italian Cookbook for you. Noi mangiamo ora.

Ciao, Voldy morts!

- ThomCalandra.com

I am obliged to add da postsript here, d'amico Jim Marx down there in Paso Robles, California. He da best, but he da believer in da chart first, then da company. Amico mio Jimmio he also da believer in da vino, esp. da zin.

Prego, tutto bene. This is da Jim:

ThomInAtor, zee market, she has to rise above about 12,800 to get some stability and lower the volatility and not drop below about 11,600. So right now, zee market, she is range bound with 800 points possible swing. Da range bound is 12,000 to 12800! ... I know for you this means very little, but a slip by any of the companies we own can result in more pain. Your mama's cookbook also says when it's done, take it off the fire, don't boil away the juices and great flavors and don't let it boil over. The boil over can come real fast, especially if you're da not watching da pots.

Ciao bene, da Jimbo. And you too, Bennie, and your jets. So shmacka-da-bum, voldies.

-- Thom Calandra

www.ThomCalandra.com

Email: thom.calandra@gmail.com

Good day, Voldy morts!

2008-02-25T13:38:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- I am giving thanks these days for all things Illumina. The genomic tools company's shares reached, I believe, an all-time high, and for that, I and my family and my left foot give great thanks.

(This is a photo of a recent speaking spot in Phoenix. The fellow with the washed-out look is moi.)

My only ThomInAtor Bullet today is Illumina, which we have owned for four years, two months and five days; it sure is something, this business of personalizing medicine and cracking the genomic code. Makes one wonder whether Jay Flatley in San Diego is going to start thinking about using some of his company's $5 billion of market capitalization, thanks to rapidly accelerating sales of next-gen machines, on some bargain purchase: Affymetrix perhaps? Affy is a $1 billion company and used to be a lot bigger before Illumina started making bead-array genomic tools and gene sequencers and such.

I am buying Affymetrix shares because I believe the company, also in California, looks cheap on earnings and looks dirt-cheap compared with next generation Illumina. Affymetrix might according to some genomic and personalized medicine aficionados be yesterday's warehouse, but the company was a pioneer, and plenty of laboratories on this planet still need the so-called Affy solution for deciphering their respective genetic codes. I think both companies have fine scientists and products and what would seem to be another five or more years of market leadership, led mostly but not entirely by Illumina's technologists, developers and the company's executive suite and sales force.

Anyway, aside from the DNA-bead beat, we all watched the Academy Awards at Papa's house last night whilst eating angel hair pasta and shrimp. The kids loved the show and the shrimp. I think Tilda Swinton is terrific; now she is an actor worth acting up for!

Later, Voldies!

-- Thom Calandra of ThomCalandra.com

Cracking The Code: What Else Is Slammed, Thominator?

2008-02-20T08:19:00.000-08:00

By THOM CALANDRA

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- Good morning, Voldy Morts. Today's question, from the buyside book of books that is in the works, goes like this: What else, besides Airspan, is on your slammed list, TC?

If you're following Actionable & LARGE: Cracking The Buyside Code, you fathom that mega-returns almost always companion (I use that as a verb) with PAIN. As in the agony of being early on an idea, or more exuberant than most other investors, or temporarily misguided, or caught in a downdraft (or an updraft if you're one of those shorties, which I am not).

At any rate, give the Airspan story a glance in the previous entry; it's in the intro to Actionable & LARGE: Cracking The Buyside Code, my current book project and something I intend to serialize for downloading if a publisher does not come along soon and scoop it up. You'll see the intro in the previous entry and at ThomCalandra.com.

Most of us know if we bought a company at $5 a share, almost surely we will get a chance to get it at an even more actionable $4 and $3. That's the nature of sales and supplies and the Jamba flavor of the day. Few of us can indicate one precise buyside pivot point, one that stands for years and years. Am I correct? I mean, you'd have to be Lon Chaney, dancing with The Queen. Heck, Lon Chaney Junior, dancing with TQ.

All things good come to those who crack the BUYSIDE CODE. Airspan as we know was perhaps one of the most painful stocks stories I'd come across in 10 years (Did I ever tell you the story about MarketWatch? It's in Actionable & LARGE!)

As good friend Walter K. Lopez tells me from Santa Fe, New Mexico, gazing at the frozen surface of The Downs just outside town, "The only difference between the racetrack and the market is in the market, yer git ter wash 'em cum 'round 'gin."

To get actionable and LARGE requires dedication and knowledge of your chosen stock (or piece of land or collectible or metal). Three weeks ago, what happened with Airspan, the stock smacking against an all-time low and then rising 30 percent or so, happened to several others in the ThomInAtor family port(folio). In fact, the so-called bounceback happened to many of the names in life sciences, mining, new generation Internet and retail, nearly all in the market capitalization segment of $1 billion and lower.

One of them was Monogram Biosciences (MGRM), a diagnostics company that has been causing me PAIN for as far back as I can remember. See, the difference is this is PAIN with possible LARGE GAIN. I believe in cancer and HIV diagnostics, thus I believe in one of the technology leaders in the field, Monogram -- even if the company appears to put investors on the same track as the sanitation man who disposes of the used test tubes!

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon

Actionable & LARGE: Cracking The Buyside Code

2008-02-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

The only difference between the stock market and the race track is ... in the market, you get to watch 'em come 'round again.

-- My friend and fellow journalist, Walter K. Lopez

Years ago, when I was a freshly scrubbed newspaper reporter, a close friend showed me how deceit and greed work together to pull off a neat hat trick.

I think my pal's demonstration sets the stage for this book, an actionable bullet list of fiscal tricks favored by the planet's most cunning money merchants. One or two of the maneuvers barely, just barely, trace what's legal in financial markets. But that's OK. Trust me.

I'll get to my friend's demo, a cute little stunt actually, in a moment. But first, I'd like to pull the curtain back, so you can see whether you want to buy into Actionable & LARGE and the principles of the buyside code.

At the heart of this book is what I call the golden ticker: a buyside code of protocols that investors must crack if they are to swipe their chosen stock at the right price, and from the very laptops of the silk-suited money merchants who control large blocks of it. Those merchants are hedge fund managers, mutual fund chiefs and asset wizards of one type or another. They are geniuses at what I call Pump, Stump & Win, the art of talking up their own buyside book of dirt-cheap stocks, talking their own portfolios up BIG, whenever they have a podium, then stumping the Wall Street analysts, confounding the brokerages and doink, the dunce-capped experts and in-the-dark journalists as their anointed stocks levitate to the clouds ... and sometimes beyond.
But these market sorcerers make mistakes too: big blow-up boners. That's what makes the buyside code actionable, as we'll see in a moment.

I intend to show how many investors have no idea how to make money, especially big money, in markets. Few ordinary Joes and Josephines, working their bums off to make ends meet, can tell us what it means to master the buyside code and apply it to their holdings.

I'll do my best to illustrate these (entirely legal) concepts:

1. Pump (Promote), Stump (Confound the Experts) and Win
2. Secure "Inside" Information, Legally (Getting Your Phone Calls Answered)
3. Bet A Bunch When You've Got a Hunch (Actionable & LARGE!)
4. Do What the Executives Do, Not What They Say (Magic of Form 4s)
5. Use extended market trading to seize on the mistakes of the crowd
6. Reap EXTREME Gains from Reverse Transfers and Penny Stocks (EXTREME RISK!)
7. Profit from Dilution and Other Enemies of the Shareholder
8. Benefit Big from PIPEs (Private Placements) and SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Corporations)
9. Discover Who Else Holds Stock and What They Really Think
10. Steal The Stock: Buy LARGE When Everyone Else Is Selling (CRACKING THE BUYSIDE CODE!)

This nonfiction book will demonstrate as well why the financial press is practically worthless to the common folk. I'll examine, for instance, why fair disclosure rules and other recent re-toolings of the system are stock market sleights of hand that most garage investors interpret absolutely the wrong way.

Many of the maneuvers, such as year-end stock crosses between hedge and mutual funds, are not likely to be in the repertoire of my intended audience: ordinary folks in their garage lofts, using their laptops to add a unit or two to their net worth and retire in style, get the grand-kids some extra tuition cash, or maybe pay off their small slice of the national debt. I'll show how to execute your own fund-to-fund crosses to save on taxes and keep your portfolio dreams intact.

What's more, much of the buyside code is hidden behind curtains, shielded by secretive hedge funds and venture capitalists, or by mutual fund bureaucracy, and again left unreported by those, doink, those dunce-cap financial writers and beat reporters. Case in point: no one I know is reporting on the great advantages of using extended market trading to benefit from quarterly earnings blow-ups and other bad (and seemingly) positve corporate news.
There's drama, too. And sweet, sweet music. Maybe not on a Broadway scale, but who needs "Spring Awakening" when you're cracking a big-money code?

The other rainy day here, on the lip of Richardson Bay within wind-assisted spitting distance of the Golden Gate Bridge, I was dutifully dropping off our little girl at her grade school just north of our home in Tiburon, California. Once back home, what do I see on my little Queen of Toshiba computer screen, which sits cuddled into a corner of our family room? Shares of one of my absolute deadbeat stocks of this new century, Airspan Networks, were hitting the skids yet again.

Now, if I told you that from time to time, I had bought shares of this microscopic telecommunications company from Florida at $4.50 apiece ... and that over a couple of years' time, they had withered to $1 (rainy January 2008), would you bother continuing with this book? Well, guess what? The expert money merchants were buying the stock BIG at $2 a share (Autumn 2007), in what Wall Street calls a secondary stock offering of 15 million shares.

The reason why Airspan stock (AIRN on Nasdaq), on what Lemony Snicket might call this awful terrible wonderful day, was getting its stock market bum smacked was an unknown to 99 percent of the planet. The zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-one of the planet who actually cared about this little maker of so-called WiMAX Internet equipment, they were clueless about the stock's precipitous drop as well. And then there was me. I knew the reason Airspan shares yet again were under assault was because some vast and storied venture capital firm was breaking up the partnership and selling its shares -- "sloppy, like a pig," one of my hedge fund friends had told me when I called seeking the lowdown on the low down.

Translation: The bipolar stock had become paper origami and in no way represented a company that was providing the parts necessary for wireless broadband networks in the 3.65 gigahertz band.

The fund most likely ditching its Airspan shares, according to my research Sevin Rosen Funds in California's Silicon Valley, not far from where we live, was once part of a superstar venture firm. Sevin Rosen Funds famously sank money into Compaq Computer Corp. and Lotus Development Corp. more than 20 years ago, and that money gushed higher than an east Texas wild well. Now, Sevin Rosen's main honchos were packing their bags -- presumably dissolving the partnership after many profitable years. But at least two of the firm's venture funds had owned Airspan since at least as far back as Valentine's Day of 2001, and probably longer than that. The prices those funds paid for shares of the troubled company, A LOT of shares, almost 1.5 million shares as far as I could reckon, were a lot higher than my $4.50 a share. At least, back then.

On that wet January morning of 2008, I plunked down another $10,000 and change for yet another 10,000 shares of what I figured were Sevin Rosen's Airspan stock, just when the stock was sinking lower than Tijuana's poverty line, to $1. There was absolutely zero news under the Airspan ticker about some VC fund liquidating its position in the company.

As I had done numerous times before, I had cracked the buyside code and gotten actionable and LARGE. Cheap stock. Distressed seller. No news. Tell me these days who actually tries to discover the identity of their desired stock's SELLERS, and I'll show you a stock market Sherlock, worthy of their detective license.

To be sure, I was holding a dirt-cheap stock. I was still losing money on this, after a couple of years. My average price for 50,000 or so shares was still higher than $2, and the stock was selling for about $1. I had scooped up the 10,000 shares for $1.09 each.

But as my Dad used to say after he'd worked 18 hours straight driving an 18-wheeler, then come home and taken a steaming hot shower, "I feel like a million dollars." I didn't care if the stock went below $1. (Airspan shares the next day were trading at $1.27, but the story there is far from over, and I’m not going anywhere.) In fact, if the stock kept bailing, I'd probably buy more, knowing what I knew about Airspan's WiMAX telecom boxes, base stations and rigorous standards testing and certifications. I mean, for the sake of sweet Mother Mary, the Nasdaq-traded shares were selling for less than 75 percent of total revenue, and the company had just raised, what, $30 million?

I was practicing what I preached: stealing someone else's stock at giveaway prices, swiping it right from their fat-assed, money-losing portfolio.

My very, very good friend and best man at my wedding, Dave, who had just left his years-long position as a buyside banking analyst at a large San Francisco hedge fund, said to me over herbal tea the next day at our favorite Boulange, "Thom that's not stealing. That's Wall and Broad streets." Whatever. I went into the other room after the Airspan theft and dialed our family iPod to the soundtrack of the Broadway musical, "Spring Awakening." The song was "The Bitch of Living," and it was a rocker.

So I'll level with you. I still could be wrong about this one, this Airspan. Broadband WiMAX might turn into the washout of all time, the biggest boner since that little scooter that was supposed to eliminate cars from cities. All of these countries, such as Ghana and the Ukraine, adapting wide-area Internet broadband, installing their Airspan smart antenna systems and backhaul networks, just so they can avoid spending billions of dollars ripping up their roads and sewers, they might be dead wrong. But you know, I don't think so. I think I'm right. Otherwise I would not be writing this book.

In fact, some 10 days later, still January 2008, but sunny as California was made to be this day, Airspan stock was back to $1.10 or so a share in a terrible awful wonderful stock market bloodbath. So I bought another 10,000 shares, knowing that any Internet provider on a metropolitan/regional/countrywide scale had to make Airpsan its first choice for the innards of the broadband network it intended to erect. My friend Dave, who prefers chasing lofty dividends from massacred preferred-trust bank stocks, and who is very good at it, said to me a second time, over a cheese-melt croissant and some cauliflower soup at Boulange there in Strawberry Village, that this wasn't stealing, this buying stock at distressed levels, so please don't call it that.

Whatever.

For the record, it's not stealing when brokers, with a wink at the company, try to shake shares loose before a hugely positive news event? I knew one company that actually made calls to shareholders, looking for shares to "round up." The Canadian mining companies are especially good at this. I sometimes see a stock nose-dive before the filing of a 43-101 resource report, which by law must identify the geology of ore and mineral deposits at a site. Call the company and its execs won't say a thing, of course. But call an underwriter or a broker or what I call in this book a money merchant (promoters, financiers, investment bankers and so on) connected to the company and they'll say, 'Well, the 43-101 is due out.' Nothing else, just that.

The stock keeps falling, and those poor Bolsheviks out in the garage, living in some Indianapolis suburb that is about 11,000 miles from the prospective mine they've invested in, they're worried because the tuition money is going down the 43-101 drain pipe. When the company's resource report is finally released, it shows that 5 percent of all the planet's (pick one) gold/silver/platinum/copper is on the company property. The stock quadruples or does a quint in two days, and all those brokers and savvy folks who have actually visited the mine, they've bought all of the petrified garage-lofters' shares the previous day. That's not stealing?

The newspapers say the 43-101 mineral resource classification, which I consider a noble and necessary thing, was legislated after Canada's Bre-X Minerals scandal, when shareholders, many of them in North America, lost everything after the company's Indonesia mine proved to be an utter fraud. You see, to me that multi-billion-dollar swindle wasn't a scandal, what happened to gold investors in 1997. No. Bre-X was a scam, pure and simple, even ludicrous the way those corporate thieves and drunken geologists coated ore samples with cheap gold crumble from pilfered jewelry. What's a scandal in my book, in this book, is how knowledgeable and sometimes conniving money merchants steal my beloved garage-lofters' stock by playing coy or silent with what they know, or think they know.

That's the scandal. I am on this planet to show Joseph and Josephine G. Loft how to steal stock tat-for-tit.

Some of the maneuvers in this book, like diving into the Airspan junk heap for yet more shares, are extremely HIGH-RISK. Or perhaps buying what looks like a worthless shell company trading at 20 cents a share and watching it sink to 10 cents or pence or pesos or centavos ... before it kicks into high-dollar gear, that is. One or two of my strategies might be seen by some as disingenuous, such as promoting a stock's virtues out the gazoo and then selling the rug out from under it at the -- no, not the first, but the -- second sign of trouble.

And yes, for sure and certainly, I still consider having the resolve to chase after your losers when they're spitting gravel into your face, and hoarding as much of their stock as you can bear emotionally and financially, knowing all the while that the sellers are the ones who are distressed, not the company, I still consider that stealing. Or at the very least, victimizing the sellers.

All of the bullets in the buyside code we're going to crack in this book are actionable, and all of them have made me money. All of these maneuvers, might I add, have swept me off my feet in fits of joy and despair since I first opened a brokerage account 24 years ago.

In other words: without the heartache that comes with winning LARGE, there is no action, and without the action, there is no actionable.

-- Thom Calandra in Tiburon (See ThomCalandra.com)

Good evening Voldy Morts!

2008-02-12T19:38:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- I rarely script in the evening, but this evening, our little girl is composing her V-day cards for school mates, M. is in the kitchen mixing pumpkin muffins for tomorrow's bake sale at the school ... and the boy is swimming with the Strawberry Team just down the road.

I can post something here in 10 minutes, I figure, even insert a photo from Phoenix, from where we have just returned, and refresh us all on some ThomInAtor Bullets. To wit:

It's time to think about poking the junk pile. Lots of the small fry are posting surprising profits, or decent sales gains, or losses that are far less than the experts had forecast. This evening it was Glu Networks (GLUU), a maker of mobile video games, that "came in" better than most analysts had figured. I don't own Glu, but plenty of companies that have tiny market worths are in turn starting to prove worthy on their real numbers. Those who were in Phoenix at the Cambrudge House investment gathering know the specific companies -- two to be exact -- that I believe are worthy of LARGE & Actionable code work.
Teva Pharmaceuticals (TEVA) is no small fry. The generic drug developer has sales in the billions, and this evening it made a small fortune for investors, in part due to a multiple sclerosis drug. I (we) own Teva because of an early investment three or four years ago in Ivax, a Miami maker of generic drugs that Teva purchased. If Teva's execs and scientists and salespeople truly start making good on their forecast of making more than $3 a year per share of profit in coming years, Teva shares easily will surpass $50. They trade now at $46 or so. Expect another dividend boost from the Israeli company.
What else is there to say, Voldys? This week, I have folks, ordinary Garage Loft Investors one and all, asking where to go to buy real gold, as in the coins and bars. I am NOT an investment adviser. I do believe (repeat after me) ... I do believe gold will become more of a currency in coming years, exchanged for all sorts of things thanks to the newfangled Paypals and GoldMoneys of the world. But I felt a lot more sure about bullion's UPside at $300 an ounce six or seven years ago. Will gold go to $2,000 an ounce? OF COURSE, VOLDIES! To $3,000? Well, doink! Yeah, YEAH YEAH ... but that's just me talking. And when? NOT KNOW!! As in: I know nothing about time frames. NOT KNOW WHEN! JUST KNOW!
It's always good to have some real gold in the box. Kitco.com is probably one of the more efficient ways to buy real gold, with REASONABLY FAIR premiums on the coins. The 24-carat coins out there in Sovereign Land (there are only a handful) are my favorites because they shine on like crazy diamonds. Like the buffed Buffalo. The Maple Leaf. And so on. As most of you know, the Kruggerands way down under have the thinnest premiums.

That's all my beloved Voldy Morts! For more, see ThomCalandra.com and this ThomCalandra Blogspot for more on my current book affair, Actionable & LARGE: Guru Cracks Buyside Code.

-- Thom in Tiburon

Special hello to Phoenix show-goers!

2008-02-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, Calif. (TC) -- Good morning, Voldy morts! And a very special welcome to those who attended the Phoenix Natural Resources Show this past weekend.

How good was it to be swimming laps beneath the face of that friendly desert sun? Yow! Just a few hundred yards from the Super Bowl, but without the crowds!

Joe Martin is the friendly chap from up north who puts on the shows. Mr. Martin's shows can be seen at CAMBRIDGE HOUSE on zee Web. It was good to see and break bread with him, and with the crowd from the Gold Antitrust Action Committee, especially Darth himself, Mr. Bill Murphy. Thanks for the lobster and beef, Bill!

I know the folks attending the show -- and there were loads of them for such a gorgeous Phoenix weekend -- will be waiting for the next word on my current book project, Actionable & Large: Cracking The Buyside Code.

In the meantime, don't be shy. Feel free to ping me. The email is the same as it ever was: thom-dot-calandra-at-gmail-dot-com. Thank you a hundred times for the ballroom hugs and smiles. With any luck, I can get back to my old Arizona stomping grounds (I went to university at UA in Tucson) next month for a spring-training baseball game or two.

Until then, get actionable and large, Voldy Morts. Nothing has changed in my world, except the hugs! I still love and have no intention of departing from the land of WiMAX, the next great broadband wireless remote standard for swaths of cities, states and nations. And I believe most of the world of the so-called junior resource companies, as you folks call them, are about as cheap as anything in any industry in this messed up, deflated landscape of small and mid-sized companies.

This is the best time to get actionable and crack the buyside code. BUY, don't trade. BUY as if you were stealing the stock from the fat-cat portfolios of the conniving money merchants and financiers who usually control the destiny of my beloved Joe and Josephine Garage Loft Investor. This is your moment, when the prices of all this stuff -- as long as it's an honorable and rapidly growing company -- are absolutely fuh-gazled. Voldy morts, that means cheap in my smacka-da-bum speak.

For more, see the previous entry on this thomcalandra ThomInAtor collection of essays. Or go to ThomCalandra.com.

Later,Voldys!

-- Thom in Tiburon

Cracking The Airspan Code: An Excerpt

2008-02-07T07:14:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

TIBURON, CALIFORNIA (TC) -- Good morning Voldy Morts!

If you're here to capture an advance glimpse of Actionable & LARGE: Stocks Guru Cracks Buyside Code, my current book project, you've come to zee right spot.

What follows happened, as described in the introduction of this new, nonfiction guide to staying whole on a planet of conniving money merchants and frisky financiers. It happened, exactly as written, about three weeks ago, and it is still happening. This is one example of how the Buyside Code works; the story of this stock -- and they say all stocks are stories -- is far from over. (For more on the timing of the book, see ThomCalandra.com or visit thomcalandra.blogspot.com.)

This is the excerpt:

The other rainy day here, on the lip of Richardson Bay within wind-assisted spitting distance of the Golden Gate Bridge, I was dutifully dropping off our little girl at her grade school just north of our home in Tiburon, California. Once back home, what do I see on my little Queen of Toshiba computer screen, which sits cuddled into a corner of our family room? Shares of one of my absolute deadbeat stocks of this new century, Airspan Networks, were hitting the skids yet again.

Now, if I told you that from time to time, I had bought shares of this microscopic telecommunications company from Florida at $4.50 apiece ... and that over a couple of years' time, they had withered to $1 (rainy January 2008), would you bother continuing with this Actionable & LARGE book? Well, guess what? The expert money merchants were buying the stock BIG at $2 a share (Autumn 2007), in what Wall Street calls a secondary stock offering of 15 million shares.

The reason why Airspan stock, on what Lemony Snicket might call this awful terrible wonderful day, was getting its stock market bum smacked on Nasdaq was an unknown to 99 percent of the planet. The zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-ONE of the planet who actually cared about this little maker of so-called WiMAX Internet equipment, they were clueless about the stock's precipitous drop as well. (It trades under the ticker AIRN, short in my addled lingo for "Air? Why yes, that's all we sell.")

And then there was me. I knew the reason Airspan shares yet again were under assault was because some vast and storied venture capital firm was breaking up the partnership and selling its shares -- "sloppy, like a pig," one of my hedge fund friends had told me when I called seeking the lowdown on the low down.

Translation: The bipolar stock of my investing career had become paper origami and in no way represented a company that was providing the parts necessary for wireless broadband networks in the 3.65 gigahertz band. Especially in emerging economies that don't want to dig beneath their deserts and pyramids.

The fund ditching its Airspan shares, out there in California's Silicon Valley, not far from where we live, was once part of a superstar venture firm. It had famously sank money into Compaq Computer Corp. and Lotus Development Corp. more than 20 years ago, and that money gushed higher than an east Texas wild well. Now, the firm's main honchos were packing their bags.

But at least two of the firm's venture funds had owned Airspan since at least as far back as Valentine's Day of 2001, and probably longer than that, according to SEC electronic filings in the USA. (The SEC stands for Securities & Exchange Commission.) The prices this venture firm paid for shares of Airspan, A LOT of shares, almost 1.5 million shares as far as I could reckon, were higher than my $4.50 a share. That's by my calculations.

On that wet January morning of 2008, I plunked down another $10,000 and change for yet another 10,000 shares of Airspan stock, just when the stock was sinking lower than America's poverty line, to $1. There was absolutely zero news under the Airspan ticker about some VC fund liquidating its position in the company.

As I had done numerous times before, I had cracked the buyside code and gotten actionable and LARGE. Cheap stock. Distressed seller. No news. To be sure, I was holding a dirt-cheap stock. I was still losing money on this WiMAX idea, after a couple of years. My average price for 50,000 or so shares was still higher than $2, and the stock was selling for about $1. I had scooped up the 10,000 shares for $1.09 each.

But as my Dad used to say after he'd worked 18 hours straight driving an 18-wheeler, then come home and taken a steaming hot shower, "I feel like a million dollars." I didn't care if the stock went below $1. (Airspan shares the next day were trading at $1.27, but the story there is far from over, and I’m not going anywhere.) In fact, if the stock kept bailing, I'd probably buy more, knowing what I knew about Airspan's WiMAX telecom boxes, base stations and rigorous standards testing and certifications. I mean, for the sake of sweet Mother Mary, the shares were selling for less than 75 percent of total revenue, and the company had just raised, what, $30 million?

I was practicing what I preached: snatching someone else's stock at giveaway prices, swiping it right from their fat-assed, presumably money-losing portfolio. All because I still believed in air-spanned rapid Internet networks criss-crossing cities, regions, canals, oceans and nations. My very very good friend and best man at my wedding, who had just left his years-long position as a buyside banking analyst at an excellent San Francisco hedge fund, said to me over herbal tea the next day at our favorite Boulange, "Thom that's not stealing or snatching or whatever you call it. That's Wall and Broad streets." Whatever. I went into the other room after the Airspan theft and dialed our family iPod to the soundtrack of the Broadway musical, "Spring Awakening." The song was "The Bitch of Living," and it was a rocker.

So I'll level with you. I still could be wrong about this one, this Airspan. Broadband WiMAX might turn into the washout of all time, the biggest boner since that little scooter that was supposed to eliminate cars from cities. All of these countries, such as Ghana and the Ukraine, adapting wide-area Internet broadband, installing their Airspan smart antenna systems and backhaul networks, just so they can avoid spending billions of dollars ripping up their roads and sewers, they might be dead wrong. But you know, I don't think so. I think I'm right. Otherwise I would not be writing this book.

In fact, some 10 days later, still January 2008, but sunny as California was made to be this day, Airspan stock was back to $1.10 or so a share in a terrible awful wonderful stock market bloodbath. So I bought another 10,000 shares, knowing that any Internet provider on a metropolitan/regional/countrywide scale had to make Airpsan its first choice for the innards of the broadband network it intended to erect. My friend, who prefers chasing lofty dividends from massacred preferred-trust bank stocks, and who is very good at it, said to me a second time, over a cheese-melt croissant and some cauliflower soup at Boulange there in Strawberry Village, that this wasn't stealing, this buying stock at distressed levels, so please don't call it that.

Whatever.

For the record, it's not stealing when brokers, with a wink at the company, try to shake shares loose before a hugely positive news event? I knew one company that actually made calls to shareholders, looking for shares to "round up." The Canadian mining companies are especially good at this. I sometimes see a stock nose-dive before the filing of a 43-101 resource report, which by law must identify the geology of ore and mineral deposits at a site. Call the company and its execs won't say a thing, of course. But call an underwriter or a broker or what I call in this book a money merchant (promoters, financiers, investment bankers and so on) connected to the company and they'll say, 'Well, the 43-101 is due out.' Nothing else, just that.
The stock keeps falling, and those poor Bolsheviks out in the garage, living in some Indianapolis suburb that is about 11,000 miles from the prospective mine they've invested in, they're worried because the tuition money is going down the 43-101 drain pipe.

When the company's resource report is finally released, it shows that 5 percent of all the planet's (pick one) gold/silver/platinum/copper is on the company property. The stock quadruples or does a quint in two days, and all those brokers and savvy folks who have actually visited the mine, they've bought all of the petrified garage-lofters' shares the previous day. That's not stealing?

Vot-ever Voldy Morts!

The newspapers say the 43-101 mineral resource classification, which I consider a noble and necessary thing, was legislated after Canada's Bre-X Minerals scandal, when shareholders, many of them in North America, lost everything after the company's Indonesia mine proved to be an utter fraud. You see, to me that multi-billion-dollar swindle wasn't a scandal, what happened to gold investors in 1997. No. Bre-X was a scam, pure and simple, even ludicrous the way those corporate thieves and drunken geologists coated ore samples with cheap gold crumble from pilfered jewelry. What's a scandal in my book, in this book I'm writing as we slog-a-bog, is how knowledgeable and sometimes conniving money merchants steal my beloved garage-lofters' stock by playing coy or silent with what they know, or think they know.

That's the scandal. I am presently on this planet to show Joseph and Josephine G. Loft how to steal stock tat-for-tit.

End of excerpt, Voldies! Except to say Airspan share today, some three or so weeks later, are $1.50 or so, and the story is still far from over. As a matter of pride and financial common CENTS, my family and I have no intention of selling Airspan until its sales of telecom equipment bestow upon this AIRN ticker a market size of at least $400 million. Currently, the 80-odd million shares of Airspan are worth about $120 million, and there is some convertible debt attached to the company.

That's all for now, and see some of you in Phoenix this weekend!

-- ThomCalandra.com

The Buyside Code

2008-02-06T14:18:00.000-08:00

TIBURON, California (TC) -- Good afternoon Voldy Morts. Today, the question is: What is this Buyside Code you're writing about in your new book, TC?

The book, Actionable & LARGE: Stocks Guru Cracks Buyside Code, is intended as a way -- 10 ways in fact -- to succeed in a world of conniving money merchants and feisty financiers. (More on this theme at ThomCalandra.com)

Now, I'm no Stephen King. Or N.N. Taleb. But after 25 years in the world of financial reporting, and my shmacka-da-bum comeuppance that I regard as the best thing ever to happen to me in my professional life (THE SEC), I have The Information (apologies to musician Beck).

The book is in process, as they say. It's a corker that it is consuming my free time. Say goodbye Strawberry Pool (oh say it ain't so!).

But I thought I would use today to say that I am going to give you Voldy Morts a sneak peek at 10 or so paragraphs toward the start of the book. It is a real-time and evolving example of how the Buyside Code works in the stock market. (It works in life too, I am told! Sweet Little 16 and all that.)

The real-time idea here is to show you one example that I have been following and developing for three or so years, a small maker of WiMAX equipment. In other words, a fledgling telecom that is dirt cheap and that I would have to see double to get even 75 percent of my money back.

The example, AIRN, or Airspan Networks, will show how to stick with a good company through bad times, and especially: HOW TO CRACK THE BUYSIDE CODE. It's right from the book, and as for full disclosure, yes I own it and I am not selling it if it goes down a buck or up two bucks.

More tomorrow on how to crack the code and get actionable & LARGE. And yes, I apologize in advance for sounding promotional. I get nothing out of this except the satisfaction of seeing us all learn something, and smile, and one hopes, prosper.

GOOD DAY, VOLDY MORTS.

-- THOMCALANDRA.COM

Sunday Before the Monday

2008-02-03T07:39:00.000-08:00

By Thom Calandra

Tiburon, Calif. -- Good morning, voldy morts! This is the Sunday before the Monday.

I happen to be headed to Phoenix next weekened for the resources show in Glendale, near the site of the Super Bowl. You can see the details at thomcalandra.com and cambridgehouse.ca. I expect empty popcorn containers and busted bottles of bourbon and tequila all over the place. (Hey, I got my Super Bowl laugh already: the Hitler video on YouTube; it probably has 3 million views by now.)

I have no interest in forecasting, and even less in predicting a winner for that Americana football game. But I would love to see the new Audi commercial -- as I am in the market for one of the new TTs, I think! After driving the same old car for eight years, I AM READY. And so are the kids. Of course, my wife will have something to say about that.

Here are the bullets for this week, Thominator style:

Happy Lunar New Year, you dirty rats. Hong Kong's market has off a day or two this week.
I am finishing up the new Wambaugh novel, and it is outstanding, "Hollywood Station." It has it all: plot, humor, characters, setting. Some real zip.
I am just starting the Barack Obama autobiography. In large print. It's genuine and warm. I love the fact that the senator went to prep school on the Big Island over there.
My beloved Illumina reports its quarter on Monday. As a good hedge fund friend of mine said, that's one amazing freaking company. Genomic tools. Freaking expensive stock, too, but the company is now doing vertical tools for agricultural segments. I would expect at some point the company buys a smaller diagnostics developer.
It is still pouring here in Northern California. The body of one of Wambaugh's tweakers just floated past the kitchen window. So it must be time to go.

See you in Phoenix in five or so days.

-- For more, see thomcalandra.com

Voldy morts of the ultra variety

2008-01-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

Good morning Voldy morts! I am safely old enough (51) to hope and pray my spam filter catches most of the EXPLICIT come-ons of a device-loving world.

Which is why I raise an eyebrow when I see some of the names of the latest tools for equities that track indexes, the ETFs of the world. I have a good friend around the corner here in sunny but rainy-this-month Tiburon who specializes in these Exchange-Traded Funds, which have extremely low expense ratios for investors and represent, or track, any number of items collectively.

Thus, there are branded ETFs for gold, bank stocks, emerging markets, China, Europe, oil companies, cattle I suppose, even bonds. There are ETFs for every degree of longitude and latitude on the globe. There might be, for all I know, ETFs that represent companies specifically in the business of manufacturing red ant farms.

My friend around the corner is a wizard about these funds. I have been sharing with him my amazement that the wonderful companies I try to follow and own are all getting, how shall I say in a way that does not trigger my musubi spam filter: HAMMERED!

I asked my friend if there were ways to invest in baskets that represented bigtime positions for believers; in short, a leveraged BUY on the stock market, and on real estate and other classes of STUFF. So that if and when the stock markets of the world, like our beloved Voldy morts, unite and shake off their January (heck, six-month) Blues, I might own something that is taking leaps and bounds through the forest, like a doe on a good day.

Yes, he said, and here they are:

The UWM (2x R2000) -- technically called the ProShares Ultra Russell 2000.
The URE (2x US RE Index) -- technically called the ProShares Ultra Real Estate.
The UYG (2x Financials) -- technically called the ProShares Ultra Financials.

Thus, you can be, thanks to the mathematics of leverage, ultra LONG the Russell 2000 Index, which represents small companies, and so on. Ultra LONG -- one has to like the way that sounds in an investment climate that thus far in 2008 has been as sopping wet as Northern California. I just hope, fellow Voldy morts, the spam filter deals with it in the correct fashion.

-- Your friendly neighborhood Thom in Tiburon (For more, ThomCalandra.com)

Cotton fields down home

2008-01-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

Happy weekend, Voldy morts! My good friend TK at the Strawberry Pool this morning reminded me how he'd divested all of his family's stocks some six months ago.

I remember the morning he'd 'thrown in the towel.' It was at the Pool, not a block or so from where we all live in Tiburon, California. It was June or July 2007, one of those days when the market was up a zillion points, then down a zillion, in the span of an hour or so.

This had been going on for several weeks. TK, heading into the sauna from the outdoor pool, said to no one in particular, "That's it. I'm selling it all. This is ridiculous!"

At the time, I thought, but did not say, that TK was being hasty. I figured - and still do -- that so-called 'volatility' in markets is good, healthy. It demonstrates diversity, breadth of opinions and the old give-and-take that makes a sound marketplace. I also believed at the time -- and still do -- that the crazy swings in prices are great for buying more of whatever I believe in. Bargain basement ghetto thinking on my part.

As it turns out, TK was absolutely CORRECT. A hedge fund pal of mine pointed out sometime in November, months later, that the fortunate stocks investors are the ones who sold three months ago, or three weeks or, or three days ago. Even three hours ago. The buyers, he said that day, were all waiting a week for prices to get cheaper. The following week, they were holding out for 'even cheaper,' and the week after that and week after that and ... .

The same holds now, I suppose I can say. The funds and the individuals are all waiting for next week, when stocks will get even cheaper. The best returns in 2007 (not counting complex derivative transactions and commodity funds) came from the hedge funds and others who sold more or less everything in the summer and put the rest in cash. And/or short-sold the small-cap and mid-cap stocks.

So TK was right. And if he continues to be right, well, stocks will keep falling in price. It is at this point that I remind myself once again that I am not a trader, and that I am still searching for ideas that work (besides gold, which we own in several forms). That's because I'm a believer in companies/products/specific managers/new market opportunities.

Sunday mornings are the only day I spend a half-hour or so browsing the newspapers, online and the two newspapers my wife pays to have thrown onto the lawn, which this past week has been soaked with torrential Northern California rains. The rest of the time, I don't bother. Too much good stuff out there to read without wasting bandwidth on (mostly) mediocre journalism.

I ran across one idea that I include in the ThomInAtor Bullets, which has become the usual way I conclude this column. Thus:

Pequot Capital's Byron Wien, who is an economist for those who think economists are mostly full of beeswax, which of course they are, likes cotton and cotton futures. This is an idea that interests me. Wien's take is that warm-weather economies are doing well, and the folks in those countries, such as Brazil, want creative lightweight cotton fabrics. Also, cotton fields are being turned into soybean fields and parking lots. I am not a futures investor. But as I said, I like the idea. I used to own an Argentine cattle ranch for the beef -- I mean stock in an Argentine ranch. That worked out well. If you know of an ETF or an equity vehicle with positions in cotton, I'd love to hear them. Please email me at thom.calandra (at) gmail (dot) com.
More of what I believe in, which is a euphemism for what I have been buying for three or four years that continues to fall, fall, fall in price, includes drug discovery companies, especially cancer; a neurobiological stroke treatment developer; WiMAX equipment makers; a DVD distributor. What has worked (for me) these past four years includes genomic tools, Hong Kong vitual networks and generic drugs. And of course, gold.
A few ideas that came across my lap in the hot tub: generic penicillin, ultra-long and ultra-short ETFs on U.S. stocks, diagnostic medical tool developers.

And that, my Voldy morts, is it! Ci vediamo dopo (see ya later) on ThomCalandra.com and here!

-- Your friendly Thom in Tiburon

Voulez-vous ideas? Follow these bullets . . .

2008-01-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

Good afternoon, Voldy morts!

You want ideas? Follow these bullets:

I just watched "Colma: The Musical" on DVD. The small-budget film is big on heart, and set in San Francisco. It's worth a ping on Netflix, especially if you are burning out on the big-dollar flicks financed by private equity and Westchester bankers with money to spurn.
Just finished "The Black Swan" and liked it a lot. It's all about information theory and how we all need to allow some space in our lives for a Black Swan event: something entirely random, rare and UNanticipated. (With apologies to author N.N. Taleb for attempting a definition!) One example: George W. Bush serving a third term. Another: Gold hitting $2,000 an ounce within the next three weeks. Or Michael Bloomberg teaming with John Edwards on the independent ticket. (Although that last one is not really a Black Swan.)
I have a friend here in Tiburon who is a smart trader. He figured I needed some downside portfolio protection -- kind of like a fiscal net -- and suggested I look at RWM, the electronic equity that represents a massive shortside bet against the Russell 2000 Index. I could have gotten it Friday (today) at $69 or so a share. It closed at $79 when stocks went south. I never got it. But then, I find it somewhat difficult to get into the shortside frame of mind. I imagine most people, being bright and freshly scrubbed, also find legalized pessimism somewhat jarring. This is why I will never be a good trader.
I do, however, pride myself on being a decent investor, after having made every boner a person can make in 25 years of throwing money at companies and securities and commodities. My nonfiction book, "Actionable & LARGE," will take a look at the scandalous world of conniving merchants and how I have learned to crack the buyside code ... in a LARGE way. More info is at ThomCalandra.com, the mother ship, so to speak.
Final idea: Today I added to a long-losing stake in a very small company working on neurobiological compounds. Brain drugs, such as those for stroke and other diseases and ailments, have lost more wealth for more people than perhaps any single class of investment on the planet. Yet I continue to buy, along with my family, shares of this company, which is working on a stroke drug that extends the treatment window. My thinking is that the clinical Phase III trials will show potent efficacy and much improved safety over the currently available stroke drug (from Genentech). We'll see.

That's all for now VMs. See you in Phoenix in a few weeks!

-- Your friendly Thom Calandra in Tiburon (ThomCalandra.com for more)

Good morning Voldy Morts! Jan. 24, 2008

2008-01-24T06:17:00.000-08:00

Good morning voldy morts!

My friend from Thinkequity here in SF says the quants were really unwinding this week, which might explain why the retailers and the banks, etc., had such sharp rebounds on Wednesday.

Bullet points for Thursday:

These huge funds, the so-called quants with their short sale techniques and blasts of barreled air, DROVE some of this stuff -- the small and mid cap specs mostly -- far below where it should have been trading these past six months, just by the sheer wall of constant selling and derivs and so on.
And so, if that is remotely possible, and the now flustered but still profitable quants are unloading their shorts and covering, especially on the easily moved small fry, but also including the Big Apple and others, might we not see some viscious upside moves? (I don't own Apple but it is a good stock to point to for purposes of activity and swings.)
As for specifics, allow me please to say yet again that I am not a trader but that I have cracked the buyside code after 24 or so years of mistakes. My new book project, Actionable & LARGE, will go into the blow by blow.
I believe we will see some rapid rises in small names, for various reasons -- some are valid takeout candidates at prices currently that reside below enterprise value. In this category, without naming names, I put WiMAX equipment companies and select disease diagnostic companies.

That's all for now Voldy Morts. Have a great day! For more: ThomCalandra.com.

-- Your friendly Tiburon writer at thomcalandra.com

Jan. 22, 2008

2008-01-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

If you're getting this today, and you care about The Market, you'll find bullet points. I'm not a trader, and as I lay out in my latest book project, Actionable & LARGE: Cracking the Buyside Code , I use times like these to BUY cheap, to STEAL the dickens out of the big money merchants' lard-assed portfolios.

Thus:

If you feel you must trade and are looking for ideas, then GO LONG. Everyone else is betting against this market. Take a look at a Europe turnaround (ticker: EFA), a computer chip rebound (USD) or a bank boost via preferred shares (PGF). I don't own any of these, but I believe we are way oversold on the overal stock market and way overbought on the Treasury bonds.
If you must own gold at these high prices (I do, but then, I always have), you might want to look at the "juniors." Very few of the small exploration companies have benefited from the rising gold price.
If you want to take a step toward cracking the buyside code and getting LARGE, read my new nonfiction book later this year, if ever I find a publisher. In the meantime, use these days and weeks to get tiny and small companies at some of the cheapest, most ridiculous prices I ever have seen. I still love life sciences, mostly genomic tools and drug discovery companies working on cancer and autoimmune diseases. The consumer companies, which I do not own, are probably ready to bounce higher after a half-year in the mud. These are food and restaurant companies, coffee, beverage and so on.
One more thing, get LARGE, make it worth your while, and try not to trade too much. Oh, and if Apple shares go any lower, give Forrest Gump a call.

-- Thom Calandra, your friendly Tiburon writer and friend