Strange’s Second Life Blog

In an attempt to explain and justify a few things, I figured I would explain, here. Sadly, I realize that the readership of this blog is not as high as some places that I could get this information to more of the people who need to know. There has been some talk and there have been some accusations since I decided to leave SL Reports, and I just wanted to try and clear things up, a bit.

Most of the talk has been in the SLCapEx forums, in this, this, and this thread. Most of the contention has come from one person, although others have also made it clear that they feel like what I did was wrong.

First, I will say that I know that what I’ve done might not have been completely right and there was probably better ways that I could have done it. I’m not trying to “clear my name” or anything… just simply explain. Some may still think that what I did was wrong.

Over the past few months, there were various times that I had talked with Xavier and he brought up his intention of leaving SL Reports. For various reasons, each time, he decided to stay. On the morning of November 21st, he brought it up, again. During our conversation, I brought up that I had been thinking about leaving, as well. I asked him about the 400,000 locked SLR shares that I had, and what would be done with those, if I decided to leave SLR. He said that they would be unlocked and I would be free to do with them what I wanted.

About an hour later, that morning, we talked again. At that time, for reasons that I totally understood at the time, he had decided to stay, again. After our conversation, I went to bed (since I work nights in RL). When I woke up, I was still thinking that I needed to leave, so I decided to write the previous post on this blog. I posted it at 8:30pm SLT on the night of November 21st. I sent an IM to Xavier, making him aware of the post, which he received.

After arriving at work, Xavier and I talked for a while via IM. He seemed to understand my decision. At about 2:00 SLT, he asked if I would proof-read something, which he sent to my email address. I was actually surprised by what I read, considering the reason he decided to stay, just 18 hours earlier. The overall text and tone of what he wrote sounded good to me.

Then, he “pressed the button” to post it to the SLCapEx web site… about 6 hours after my announcement.

Six hours after that, after getting home from work, I decided that I would sell enough shares to reduce my holdings below 5%, getting my name off of the public stock ownership page. As I was doing that, I noticed that there were some pretty large buy orders being placed at amounts that would be high enough for me to consider selling at. Knowing that the news of Xavier leaving SLR had been posted for the past six hours, I knew that people had seen it, and that I didn’t have any type of unfair advantage that would be considered “insider trading”.

As long as buy orders were being placed, I continued to sell. SLR opened at .45 that day and closed at .47. Selling that many shares to a person that was willing to buy them, essentially had no effect on the overall share price. In the back of my mind, I did think that since I only “announced” that I would be leaving and hadn’t actually “left”, that selling them at that time might have been wrong. My departure is inevitable, though, so it was either 6 or a half-a-dozen, in my mind.

That’s really all of the explaining that I wanted to do. I know it’s nothing that’s overly important, since it’s said and done, now, and the current price is up at .53. The people that ended up buying shares from me got a great deal as well, since they are all worth more, right now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Posted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.