Let's pick on Shawn Ambrosino's M3 Profit Accelerator again. He likes to send me mailers for so-called hot stocks that have done very poorly of late for investors. One mailer he sent me touted Clicker (CLKZ) for its ownership of multiple advertising domains that were just poised to take off for the moon. It's too bad this stock is in the basement.
Clicker traded at $0.00 today. That's right. You read that correctly. I've never in my life seen a stock that traded at zero value. The header on its corporate web page is hilarious: "Where one plus one equals . . . " This is the first company I've ever seen that proves a mathematical impossibility, that "one plus one" can equal zero.
I can't resist checking out management. CEO Lloyd Lapidus has a pretty sparse LinkedIn profile (assuming that's him) for a guy who's supposedly a serial entrepreneur. Maybe he can point me to his correct profile, or flesh this one out some more. His previous claim to fame, an online shopping portal for handbags called Bag Borrow or Steal (a.k.a. Avelle Inc.), has a confusing business model. Do they make money by renting designer handbags (seriously?) or by getting affiliates to place ordering widgets on their sites and blogs? I don't get it.
What I do get is that Clicker has traded at zero (despite millions in trade volume on some days!) since this summer. It enjoyed a brief run up to over a buck in August 2010 and then spiralled down hard. Revenue declined the last three years while annual losses got worse. Retained earnings is massively negative.
As far as I can tell, the company's business model has something to do with buying domain names with zero traffic and a tangential relation to online advertising. That is suicidal in the face of competition from Google and Craigslist. The stock is at zero because the business model adds up to zero. Anyone who bought stock in Clicker when Shawn Ambrosino's tout mailing came out has now lost everything they invested.
Full disclosure: No position in CLKZ, ever.
Clicker traded at $0.00 today. That's right. You read that correctly. I've never in my life seen a stock that traded at zero value. The header on its corporate web page is hilarious: "Where one plus one equals . . . " This is the first company I've ever seen that proves a mathematical impossibility, that "one plus one" can equal zero.
I can't resist checking out management. CEO Lloyd Lapidus has a pretty sparse LinkedIn profile (assuming that's him) for a guy who's supposedly a serial entrepreneur. Maybe he can point me to his correct profile, or flesh this one out some more. His previous claim to fame, an online shopping portal for handbags called Bag Borrow or Steal (a.k.a. Avelle Inc.), has a confusing business model. Do they make money by renting designer handbags (seriously?) or by getting affiliates to place ordering widgets on their sites and blogs? I don't get it.
What I do get is that Clicker has traded at zero (despite millions in trade volume on some days!) since this summer. It enjoyed a brief run up to over a buck in August 2010 and then spiralled down hard. Revenue declined the last three years while annual losses got worse. Retained earnings is massively negative.
As far as I can tell, the company's business model has something to do with buying domain names with zero traffic and a tangential relation to online advertising. That is suicidal in the face of competition from Google and Craigslist. The stock is at zero because the business model adds up to zero. Anyone who bought stock in Clicker when Shawn Ambrosino's tout mailing came out has now lost everything they invested.
Full disclosure: No position in CLKZ, ever.
