At Equity.Guru, engaged as we are in market awareness programs for public companies, we often see competing entities that are more promotional than journalistic, banging out borderline insanity regarding their client companies and how they’re all the best thing ever.
And when we see something egregious, we’re often the first ones to point it out.
- “If you don’t buy this, you’re going to miss 2000% profits!”
- “The richest billionaires are all over this stock!”
- “Guaranteed to go up!”
This sort of dreck comes out all the time from disposable websites with names like cannawealthtips.com or fastactionstocks.ca or tothemoonstocktipsnewsletterpunchmeinthedick.org, or on Instagram accounts run by women focusing the camera on their cleavage as they talk about their investing strategies, or Facebook investor groups with 30,000 fake users and an endless string of posts about one company…
What we don’t see so often are long, detailed, multi-sourced articles that end in entirely defensible statements like, “there’s no doubt in my mind that the time and effort you spend learning more about DELIC will be especially worthwhile,” and “I believe DELIC Holdings is positioned to address this growing market demand,” and “I recommend you add DELIC to your watchlist immediately, and begin your due diligence right away!”
On May 6, 2021, OTC Markets Group sent the Company a copy of a newsletter article published by Financial News Now.com on March 16, 2021 and email distribution between May 6-7 and requested comment from the Company. The article and email discuss recent mental health research, current events in the psychedelics industry, a description of the Company’s business plan, board of directors, state of the current market, and matters relating to investment in the Company. The website is owned by IDR Marketing, Inc., which was retained by the Company to assist with financial marketing efforts in order to increase investor awareness within North America
Delic was asked by the OTC Markets to explain its relationship to Financial-News-Now.com which, let’s be clear, isn’t the Wall Street Journal. But as far as ‘pumps’ go, frankly, this is one wouldn’t be out of place in the pages of a newspaper business section.
..newly acquired DELIC Labs has been granted a “Section 56 exemption” by Health Canada, giving legal authority to perform research and analysis of psilocybin metabolites.[35] This Federal exemption allows DELIC Labs to focus on developing a robust intellectual property portfolio of psilocybin and cannabis compounds to tackle the multiple mental health issues facing North America.
ou think?
That’s hardly the usual kind of German pumphackery, don’t you think?
The author of most penny stock hype pieces is usually left unsaid, or they use a pen name, because the dirty reality of most stock market promo word is it’s generally produced by first-year journalism students who know less about the subject matter they’re writing about than your mom, work for $50 a throw, and they’ll base their writing off a supplied investor deck.
In contrast, FinancialNewsNow.com is the work of Blake Desaulniers, who has been doing this sort of marketing work for the last several decades and knows his reputation is important to his continued success. I’ve bumped into Blake many times on the investor conference circuit and have always known him to be an above board good guy who doesn’t feel like he needs to take every dollar tossed his way, and understands how to really dig in on the research side.
The fact a guy has been at it for a while isn’t a defense in and of itself; indeed, sometimes cats go rogue for a fat cheque, just as in any other business.
But when I hit the article in question, expecting to find less Desaulniers and more Leslaurier Twin, I was pleased to find no evidence of wrongdoing, other than maybe a few more exclamation points than I’d personally feel comfortable tossing out there.
DELIC already has a head start on market development, with a robust outreach program that is rapidly building a database of likely customers/patients, already reaching hundreds of thousands of people per month. As DELIC continues to release positive news on new and up-and-coming acquisitions, investors are likely to continue to pour into the stock.
The company appears to agree:
IDR’s engagement is to factually tell the Company’s story in an accretive and transparent manner. Statements made in the promotional materials are not materially false and/or misleading. The factual information provided in the promotional material, which was extracted from the Company’s public disclosure, website and press releases, is accurate
I should mention that Equity.Guru has also been engaged by Delic to talk about them when relevant, and we’ve done so may times over the last six months. We’ve enjoyed that relationship, though the stock has underperformed as of late, in line with the rest of the psychedelics sector.
A struggle for Delic has been, as much as they have a business plan, they can only discuss so much of it while the psychedelics world is evolving, and local laws are liberalizing. Like cannabis in 2013, investors need to do a lot of reading between the lines, and gauging who are the real players and who are not.
We feel Desaulniers’ article is fair if a touch happy, the OTC questions about it are fair but their hitlist misdirected, and that the company response to those questions was measured and accurate.
If the OTC is concerned about hype in psychedelics, Delic Holdings is way down the list.
If the OTC is concerned promoters need to better disclose their positions, Desaulniers does as one would expect, unlike almost everyone talking about #stocks on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok.
And it the OTC is concerned about companies experiencing a sell-off in recent months, they’ll need to hire a load more investigators because most sectors have sold off.
Here’s what’s happening out there in the world right now:
@gmoney_97##tesla##stocks##genz##foryou##money##market##broke go invest cause it’s poppin off♬ original sound – JustcallmeG
Regulators are having a hard time keeping up with the bullshit flying around on social media, telling people Dogecoin is going to $1. But the response to that deluge of pumpery shouldn’t be to go unnecessarily beat on the guys who actually do it right.
— Chris Parry
FULL DISCLOSURE: Delic Holdings is an Equity.Guru marketing client and we hold stock in the company and we think it’s a pretty good deal at this price.
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