Midas Letter

Midas Letter

By James West and Ed MilewskiBusinessInvesting
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Midas Letter episodes

  • Province Brands CEO Dooma Wendschuh and the Cannabis “Alcohol Killer”

    Province Brands is the brainchild of former Assasin’s Creed developer Dooma Wendschuh. These are a range of alcohol-free, cannabinoid-charged adult beverages that can be consumed instead of alcholic beverages but without the detrimental side effects of alcohol. And better still, the “dose curve” of these novel creations will emulate that of alcohol, meaning consumers won’t need an hour for the effect to come on, and 4-6 hours for the effects to wear off. The company is in the process of capitalizing its business plan, and anticipates becoming a publicly traded company in due course.

    Transcript:

    James West:    Dooma, thanks for joining us today.

    Dooma Wendschuh:     Thank you.

    James West:    Dooma, let’s start with an overview: what’s the value proposition for investors in Province Brands?

    Dooma Wendschuh:     It is a tremendous value proposition and a chance not just to be involved in what looks like the future of the cannabis industry, but also to be involved in a business that will fundamentally change the world, and change the way that people think of psychoactives.

    James West:    Interesting. And how will you do that?

    Dooma Wendschuh:     At Province, we make beer and spirits, but our beer does not contain alcohol, and our spirits do not contain alcohol. These products instead intoxicate you using marijuana, or marijuana’s cannabinoids, and they’re designed to really be what we call an ‘alcohol killer’ – basically, a true competitor to alcohol in every sense of the word.

    So, think about timing. When you consume a marijuana beverage, the effect won’t hit you for an hour or an hour and a half. It’s crazy, it’s like, you go to your business drinks, you don’t feel it till you’re driving home; it’s pointless. Our products don’t have that problem. Our products are going to hit you in ten minutes or less, just like alcohol.

    And what about how long you stay intoxicated? With marijuana edibles, you’re often intoxicated for six hours or more; that’s a big commitment, you know? Nobody would buy a $45 cocktail at the start of dinner that would get them drunk all night long, but buying three $15 cocktails over the course of an evening, that’s totally normal because we’re used to self-titration. We’re used to having a short duration of effect and limiting – because we know how long it’s going to stay in our system, we’re able to consume multiple iterations of the product.

    So we’re actually developing a product to shorten the duration of effect of edible cannabis, so that between the ability to shorten the onset time and then shorten the duration of effect, we can create a dose-response curve for edible cannabis which is almost identical to the dose-response curve of alcohol.

    And lastly, we can actually create a sensation – and this is not something that we have right now, this is an R&D project for t

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  • PODCAST: Myomo Inc. CEO Paul Gudonis on becoming the First Reg A+ IPO to list on NYSE MKT

    Myomo Inc is a medical robotics company based in Cambridge, MT is a developer of next-generation orthotics that include “powered braces” that support impaired hands and arms. The company has raised over US$20 million via Regulation A+, which, for those who don’t know, enables companies like Myomo to raise millions of dollars from individual investors without giving away the company to an investment bank. They will become the first company to list on the NYSE MKT via IPO using Regulation A+ as its primary financing mechanism.

    Related:

    1. Myomo Research Report (PDF)
    2. Regulation A+ Primer (SEC)
    3. Myomo’s SEC Filings
    4. Transcript:

      James West:    Paul, thanks for joining us today.

      Paul Gudonis:  Well, thanks for the opportunity to speak with you.

      James West:    Paul, could we start with an overview? What’s the value proposition for investors in Myomo?

      Paul Gudonis:  Myomo is an opportunity for investors to participate in the IPO of a growth company that is addressing a large, unmet need. We’re the only company that is providing these powered-arm braces called myoelectric orthotics, that enable paralyzed individuals to regain use of their arms and hands. So we’ve had a controlled introduction successfully for the past few years, and now we’re doing this IPO to raise capital to really scale the business, not only in the US but globally.

      James West:    Sure. We’ll touch on the IPO and your method of financing in a moment, but first of all, what is it about your orthotics that makes them different from the existing options?

      Paul Gudonis:  Our company spun out of MIT and is the only devices for the arms and hands that’s driven off of the body’s own neurological signals, called the myoelectric orthosis. It’s the only one of its type in the marketplace. It’s patent-protected, it’s been demonstrated to work on hundreds of individuals, and so really it’s a proprietary technology with 70 percent gross margins that offers investors a very good upside opportunity here.

      James West:    What’s the size of the market, both in America and g

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    5. PODCAST: MGX Minerals Chairman Marc Bruner is Excited about the Paradox Basin

      Sponsored Content

      MGX Minerals (CNSX:XMG) (OTCMKTS:MGXMF) (FRA:1MG) Chairman Marc Bruner, a third generation oil and gas executive who was Chairman and CEO of Falcon Oil & Gas Ltd. and served as Ultra Petroleum’s founding Chairman where he was involved in developing the Pinedale Anticline in Wyoming, is excited about the Paradox Basin. He joins James to discuss the region’s potential as a producer of lithium and oil and gas.

      Transcript:

      James West:    Marc, welcome back to the show.

      Marc Bruner:   Thanks, James. Glad to be here.

      James West:    So let’s talk a bit about the Paradox Basin, where it seems that MGX Minerals has staked quite a bit of its future. What is it about the Paradox Basin that we should be so interested in as lithium investors?

      Marc Bruner:   Well, I think the significant thing is really two things: one, the lithium values are extremely high, and in some places as high as 1,700 parts per million, which is comparable to what some of the values down in Argentina are.

      Ordinary seawater is 35,000 parts per million; this is 450,000 parts per million. So there are a lot of heavy metals in this brine, other metals besides lithium, that I think will also be of value in MGX’s separation process.

      The thing I think is most exciting to me is that this is a very unusual area. It’s an area that has in these stacked, over-pressured pays, and I’ll describe what I mean in a moment. There’s up to 36 different clastic zones sandwiched between these impermeable salt layers, and virtually every single one of those has gas and oil or condensate in them. Some of the main pay zones are very, very thick, and they are three to four of those out of the 36.

      So virtually any place that you drill in here, you’re going to find oil and gas. The question is, how much oil and gas are you going to find in any particular zone. And what we’re really looking for out here are fractures in those clastic zones, and you either find them drilling vertical wells or horizontal wells. So whatever we drilled in here, we’re going to be drilling vertically into some of the best zones, and then we’ll be drilling horizontal.

      The exciting thing here is that, besides finding oil and gas and liquids, we’re going to be finding brines, and it’s my belief that once MGX tests these brines, I think that you’re going to see some very big values in the brines that, in all probability – at least

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    6. Xebec CEO Kurt Sorschak on Competing with Schlumberger, Honeywell

      Xebec Adsorption Inc (CVE:XBC) )(OTCMKTS:XEBEF) (FRA:XB6) CEO Kurt Sorschak explains how his recent multi-million dollar orders and renewed vitality in the oil and gas space is allowing him to compete with Schlumberger Limited (NYSE:SLB) and Honeywell International Inc (NYSE:HON).

      Transcript:

      James West:    Kurt, thanks for joining us today.

      Kurt Sorschak: You’re welcome, Jim.

      James West:    Kurt, let’s start with an overview of what is the value proposition for investors in Xebec?

      Kurt Sorschak: Well, at this point, Xebec, as you might know, is a gas purification company. We have some unique proprietary technology that will allow us to purify gases from basically a raw state into something more valuable that our customers can better monetize. So what does that mean? For example, you have a refinery off-gas stream, let’s say, hydrogen, and you want to further utilize that hydrogen stream. We can now purify it up to 99.999 percent pure hydrogen, which gives you a much higher value either in resale or reutilization.

      James West:    So basically, you create value added processes that improve a hydrocarbon stream?

      Kurt Sorschak: Yes, who might help, in this instance might help, in the petrochemical or refinery industry.

      James West:    Okay. So on March 6th, you released some news indicating that you’d received an order totalling $2.6 million for multiple purification systems, and they were spread out across Taiwan, France and Canada, all for 2017 delivery. Now this strikes me as quite a transformational sort of transaction for the company. Is it representative of a new phase of growth in the company?

      Kurt Sorschak: Yes. We’ve been on the public market for quite a while now, but we haven’t really gained a lot of traction, and I think one of the main reasons for that having been that we focused too early on our clean technology offering. In other words, back in 2009, 2010, we started to promote upgrading solutions for renewable natural gas, so taking a bio gas source and producing renewable natural gas. That was too early at that point in time. Consequently, the company didn’t really grow, and we were – it wasn’t very satisfying.

      Now over the last couple of years what we

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    7. PODCAST: Drone Delivery Canada CEO Tony Di Benedetto on Shooting Down Drones

      Drone Delivery Canada Corp (CNSX:FLT)(OTCMKTS:ASCRF)(FRA:ABB) CEO Tony Di Benedetto says people shooting down drones is the least of his concerns in this interview, and highlights the company’s path to profitability through deals with Staples, Napa Auto Parts, and various First Nations groups.

      Transcript:

      James West:    Tony, thanks for joining us today.

      Tony Di Benedetto:   Thank you for having me, James.

      James West:    Tony, it’s been about a year since we’ve had you on the show. Why don’t you give us an update on what has developed for Drone Delivery Canada in the last year?

      Tony Di Benedetto:   A lot of things. We’ve been executing our business plan, we’ve achieved a number of different things. The first that’s fairly significant is, last October we achieved our first test flight license from Transport Canada. We’re the first Canadian drone delivery company in the country to receive such a license to test commercial within southern Ontario, and we’ve also just completed a raise with GMP Securities, and we raised approximately $11 million, 10.94 million to be exact, which is a really good testament to what the market is perceiving about this space. It’s happening, the market is here, and there’s a lot of developments coming out.

      James West:    You bet. Okay, so then, what is the – I mean, in terms of the actual delivery of packages on behalf of companies like Staples, with whom I saw you had a press release, what is the timeline until we actually see drones showing up in our backyards?

      Tony Di Benedetto:   So we’re anticipating by the end of this year to have a level of what we call is a license to operate within Canada, and we’re looking at rolling out commercialization in Q1 of 2018. So we’re going to be starting in the remote communities, that’s where we believe is the right place to start, and working with all of our various stakeholders, including the Federal government and various regulators and our academics, to st

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    Midas Letter RAW is the irreverent, intelligent show about investing for the little guy. Ed Milewski, former stock broker and reformed accountant brings his cynical and off-beat chart observations…