Trump the ability of an insider to buy or not buy would be dependent on a few things. First the willingness to buy. That is the motivation for insiders to buy. They may see the share price as very cheap and want to buy or they may be satisfied that they hold a lot of options which of course are hugely out of the money right now. There has never been a move to reduce the pricing of those options and apparently (from what I was told) there is absolutely no intention to do so. Ergo there is a belief in the management camp that those options are going to hold a large payout in the future.
Chris Chu commented probably a year ago when we were talking up the need for management to get some skin in the game (to demonstrate confidence) that this would be a kind of BS move to prop up the share price and he did not expect management would play that card as a means to attempt to increase the share price. As it turns out there were some small buys that did follow in an attempt to send the confidence signal. It had mixed success at the time. Chris Chu also pointed out that so much of the management teams future is tied to the performance of POET that from an investment advisory position it would make no sense at all to tie their complete financial future to the success of POET.
The company does have NDA's in place and I believe they are with the biggest companies in the industry. Those are the companies that they report to and I expect those are the companies that they have discussions around NRE with. The successful conclusion of NRE is dependent upon the successful completion of I expect an alpha prototype. The further along the development of the POET devices the more derisking is the stage of the technology platform and the greater is the NRE for POET to design a product for the customer and of course the customer gets a license for that product in return for that payment.
So depending on how far advanced those discussions for NRE are it would be considered insider trading if there was knowledge that POET was “close” in terms of having an alpha prototype demonstration. If the VCSEL is completed and they are working now on getting the mode right plus optimization of the electronics (the transistor for modulation) then that would no doubt be shared with customers and the discussions around what the terms are for an NRE could in fact already be in place.
We simply don’t know and they are clearly not going to tell us.
the company is currently focused on evaluating multiple paths to improving VCSEL functionality and optimizing the transistor.
I think they have the VCSEL but will not report success until they have the mode stabilized to the range required. That means adjustment of the epi layers.
