The “Rapid Fire”
White Diamond Research published an excellent piece of short research back in April on $INTZ. I did a quick review and found a lack of published or issued Patents, which should have been a big personal red flag. I lost track of the company and never took a position. Big mistake. Intrusion this week released their preliminary Q2 2021 numbers which were not good, strategic actions, and the CEO departed. $26 to under $4.00 over 3 months. Well done White Diamond! I will file this in my memory bank to take a second and third look when another situation like this appears
Francine McKenna at “The Dig” published a very interesting piece on SPAC auditors, “Outtakes: Are the dominant SPAC auditors up to the job?” In my prior life I worked at one of these audit firms, which was a great experience and opened up a lot of different opportunities.
My take: I think we are going to see “adjustments” and restated financials across the SPAC space. When Big Four auditors eventually replace the smaller auditing firms they will find problems with the prior years audited financials. I don’t see it as an auditing problem though. I see it as the SPAC targets have a weak CFO, a poor accounting department, and audit committee board members who are underqualified to be on public company board. A lot of the accounting/financial problems might be able to be swept under the rug
I am looking at patent situations in $HDVY and $NLST to cover in a future edition.
Charts
There were 6,544 new patents issued at the US Patent Office for the week of July 20, 2021, not counting the Design and Reissue patents.
Below is the breakdown by states.
Some of the top Chinese entities that are issued new US patents almost every week.
Building on my comments last week, Chinese entities had 1,075 patent applications published this week out of 8,255 total. The leaders are:
Baidu - 46 ; Xiaomi - 14 ; BOE Technology Group - 199 ; Guangdong Oppo - 26 ; Huawei -65 ; DJI Tech - 16 ; Tencent - 12 ; Wuhan China Star Opto - 60.
The table below are some of the top Assignees of the week.
The top ten longest time to patent grant for the week. Comcast Cable comes in first place with a total of 6,559 days from filing to issuance. The patent is titled “User customization of user interfaces for interactive television”.
The top ten shortest time to patent grant for the week was between 91 and 117 days. Well done to the teams!
Blockchain patents with a down week at 17 patents issued. They continue to be lead by Advanced New Technologies with four this week.
There were just six new electric vehicle patents. Hyundai continues to add electric vehicle patents with two new ones this week. SF Motors also added another patent. I am curious if they will be a future SPAC target.
There were nine Lidar related patents issued this week. Santec Corporation a name I am not familiar with made it on the list.
I finally added a Semiconductor section. I am not sure if it works well with all of the companies that have zero patents for the week. The leaders this week are Intel, Micron, Qualcomm, TSM, and Texas Instruments.
I am on vacation next week (Finally!) and 50/50 if I will have time to get something published.