FIRST TITAN CORP (OTC:FTTN) and Stock Mister go Ballistic
Imagine the following scenario: you are given a vague description of a room full of obstacles and then you are let loose inside where you have to avoid all the obstacles and find a needle in a haystack situated in one corner of the room in pitch black while being chased by a hungry lion. You could say that the odds are pretty much against you. The same goes for investing in FIRST TITAN CORP (OTC:FTTN).
Let’s start with a bit of a background. FTTN advertise themselves as a company that develops new technology to make the exploration of oil and natural gas wells a lot easier. At the same time they also have some interests in oil fields in the US and they are pretty sure that they will be getting some money out of them really soon. If only we could be as optimistic…
FTTN have been all over the news in the past couple of weeks informing us about signatures being put under contracts for the exploration of new wells, changes in the management team and (now former) CEO, Robert Federowicz’s, promises of a successful 2013. Mr. Federowicz was so confident in the company’s bright future that he resigned a couple of days later.
There is nothing wrong about generating press releases, however, we would have liked to see some concrete financial statements filed with SEC. The last one was uploaded in August and it covers the second quarter of 2012. This means that while you are making your mind up whether to invest your hard-earned cash into FTTN you have nothing more to lean on than some outdated information and a lot of forward-looking statements to work with.
Of course we were curious what the company looked like about 7 months ago, so we read through the financial report. Needless to say, FTTN won’t be setting Wall Street on fire any time soon:
- cash: $2,142
- total assets: $282 thousand
- current liabilities: $551 thousand
- net loss for Q2 of 2012: $722 thousand
- net loss since inception: $950 thousand
At this point you just have to ask yourself: “How are they acquiring new oil and gas interests when they don’t have enough money in the bank to last them for a month (that’s what they said in the last 10-Q)?”. We decided to see if we will find the answer among the information about their older interests and sure enough, we did – the older wells were acquired at some pretty horrible conditions. Which means that FTTN still need to pay quite a lot of money before they can even start some sort of exploration.
Even their news releases seem a bit on the sloppy side. The latest one, for example, claims that they have secured funding for drilling in one of their wells. There is absolutely no information, however, on how they have obtained the financing and how they are going to return the money if it is a debt we are speaking of (which it probably is).
In another headline, we see that they have signed a contract with a company called Green Oil LLC for collaboration while exploring one of the wells. Having looked through the first three pages of results on Google (yes, we were that desperate), we managed to find no information whatsoever about Green Oil.
Stock Mister isn’t exactly the most successful promoter, either. Indeed, the email sounds extremely enthusiastic but then again so do all the promotions sent out by them. To get a better understanding of how misleading they can be, can check out SECURITY FIRST INT HL NEW (PINK:SCFR)’s chart on the right.
