Shocked. Shocked, I am, to see that I haven’t bought or sold any stock in the recent six months. Oh, wait. I’m not shocked at all. My hold time for my stocks tends to be years, and in some cases, decades. 2024 was the abnormal time as I sold my home, bought a tiny house, and reinvested much of the proceeds. But for the first half of 2025, the main abnormality has been politics. Oy, aka ‘woe is me.’ And I suspect the next six months will be the future showing off a ‘hold my beer’ moment as new abnormalities are delivered.
But skip the political and focus on the personal. This blog is about personal finance, not political finance.
My personal finances have been fine. My emotional preparedness for flight or fight has become practiced since 2010, and the world is in chaos; but on a personal level I should react to my personal life. It may be selfish and self-centered, but maybe I’m due for a bit of that.
Sure, LUNR was up 200% and QBTS was up 1,100%, but that was over the previous twelve months. Things spiked around the election, but that was 2024, not 2025. In 2025 the range has been narrower, QBTS up 39%, LUNR down 40%, less volatile than before, but far above the market’s historical single-digit annual expectations. The biggest percentage gain was 95% for LCTX and the largest drop was 55% for GERN. Both are innovative biotechs, which are prone to stock volatility. GERN is entering its market. LCTX has had some advances to celebrate. Biotechs dealing with unmet needs are difficult for the market to value, hence a lot of bouncing going on.
My innovative battery stocks, GMGMF and SLDP, are starting to act like they’re waking up. I don’t expect much immediate movement, but they will see orders before their eventual end-products are launched. If a company is going to get away from a product using conventional lithium-ion batteries, then they’ll be contracting for sub-components before they begin production.
And then there’s MVIS. Having held it since 1999, maybe it will eventually pay as a lottery ticket stock. Sometimes, I feel that I trust the technology and market potential more than management does.
The biggest personal finance adjustment has been becoming further from worry, as I mentioned in a previous post. Selling my home meant losing the best place I’ve ever lived, but it also means being debt-free. The proceeds from selling my home allowed me to buy my tiny house (MyTinyExperiment.com), reinvest in stocks and diversify the portfolio, and maintain a cash cushion as I undefer deferred maintenance of stuff and my health. I’m further from worry, but my body’s recovery from being poor looks like it will take years. I feel sorry for my various doctors who have to deal with a tangled mess of interwoven causes and consequences.
I’m feeling better, I’m glad to say (and write); but it could be a long road from the depths to get even back up to ‘normal’.
My main concern for the near future is the acceleration of change. I wrote a sci-fi novel, Firewatcher, based on the premise that AIs might wake up. One reason I wrote it was because conventional wisdom was that AIs might wake up by 2100, if at all. I suspected the AIs would get there sooner, like in 2040. As I finished writing it in 2020, some of the early indicators showed my guess was too slow, too. A recent estimate places the earliest date for not just AI but a super-intelligent AI as possibly arriving in 2027. Change is accelerating.
The pace of political change needs no more commentary.
Climate change is accelerating as the interconnectedness of the planet exceeds our expectations.
Social injustice is becoming increasingly hard to hide, but that necessary fight is necessarily disruptive.
War and ignorance are in fashion.
Eep.
An optimist can suggest that our society will grow through this and become a mature civilization. Simply be patient. Long Term Buy and Hold.
A pessimist can skip all of that, find a place to live on a good piece of land far from a population center, disconnect the electronics, plug into gardening and self-sufficiency, maybe with some help from the neighbors.
Guessing the future is foolish, and here comes that word again: necessary. I intend to remain invested in stocks, and hope to move this house I own to land I own rather than the land I rent. Stay tuned, great variability in the possibilities persists. One aspect of singularities is that the situations that created them can be poor models for what comes after them. Guessing at the outcome is less important than being prepared for adapting to the new change. Maybe things will stay the same. Maybe the changes will wait until 2027, or 2040, or 2010, or 21,000. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, celebrate being debt-free, finish my books, connect with nature and my community, and get ready for the next dance.
And, I still buy lottery tickets.
Read on for my stock synopses. And good luck.
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
Geron
GERN (market cap is $0.870B was $2.14B)
Geron, whose name is short enough that I don’t have to use its symbol, is a leading-edge biotech that has a treatment for (pardon the copy and paste from their site) “low- to intermediate-1 risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) in adults”, aka certain blood cancers. They continue to develop treatments based on telomeres, the molecules which regulate chromosomal death, hence other cancers (and possibly auto-immune disorders?).
While Geron is considered leading-edge and is to be congratulated on their first FDA approval, their process has been long, which enables competition, and despite commercialization, has not become profitable. (2024 revenue of ~$77M but with expenses of ~$146M) Their financial situation looks much better than the previous decades of R&D, but the investing community has not been impressed. At least patients are finally being treated. Hopefully, the company becomes profitable, and the stock will reflect that.
I expected more. Geron’s original goals were grander, basically being able to control many aspects of aging through telomeres, stem cells, and nuclear transfer, as I recall. They commissioned panels for actual wisdom and boldly embraced debate. I know they sold off some of the technologies (which is why I bought shares of LCTX) as a survival strategy. I get the impression that those first managers, founders, and officers have been replaced by lowered expectations. I expected a more aggressive introduction of their first product, more publicity for the success of an innovative technology, and a re-invigoration of that original mindset.
I see Geron from two perspectives. One: I shouldn’t buy more if this is all there is after holding the stock since 1999/2000. Two: Finally, they may succeed thanks to the technology despite management.
I bought more after selling my house. I guess I’m a cautious optimist.
DISCLOSURE LTBH since 1999 and continuing to hold.
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog. https://trimbathcreative.net/
& from my One Company One Story series on YouTube
https://youtu.be/su1AMjPEkLI )
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
Graphene Manufacturing Group
GMGMF (market cap is $0.064B was $0.062B)
Graphene Manufacturing Group, which I will shorten to GMG, is innovating within a variety of markets: lubricants, coatings, batteries, etc. Diversification is admirable. I am invested in the company because of their work in batteries. GMG’s defining technology is in its name, Graphene. Graphene is a ‘wonder material’, an ideally never-ending one-atom-thick sheet of carbon that excels at strength, heat conduction, and electrical conductivity. Their battery technology has the potential for safer, more efficient, and cheaper batteries, which makes that potential enormous.
I am investing in battery technologies because I think the now-conventional Lithium-ion batteries represent a matured generation within that technology. There is enough demand for electrical devices and vehicles that I expect the newer technologies to supersede Li-ion. Considering the safety problems of liquid Li-ion batteries, safer batteries may be a sufficient incentive to incorporate the new tech.
I also like the decreased dependence on certain rare elements.
GMG is lightly traded, has several competitors, and is based in Australia. No judgment, just facts. I suspect the trading volumes are affected by being a non-US company (though some would see that as a positive), and the competition. Their small size also makes them a buyout candidate. I hope they remain independent and become profitable, sustainable, and successful.
DISCLOSURE I tend to LTBH, and have held shares since 2024.
Circa 2023, I produced a video about the company on my One Company One Story YouTube channel.
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog. https://trimbathcreative.net/)
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
Lineage Cell Therapeutics
LCTX (market cap is $0.210B was $0.110B)
Lineage Cell Therapeutics (which is a long enough and complicated enough name that I’ll shorten to its trading symbol, LCTX) is a leading-edge biotech advancing treatments based on stem cells. Within their pipeline, I am most intrigued by their work for improving eyesight in patients with macular degeneration by repairing their retinas, and regrowing nerves like spinal cords severed in accidents. Both are in trials. Neither has been approved, but both conditions have few treatment options available to patients.
LCTX is a spin-off of sorts from technology originally advanced by Geron, another of my investments. It seems the contentious days of stem cell treatments have abated. LCTX’s recent anecdotal successes and preliminary clinical data are encouraging. It is almost as if the treatments are taken for granted even though no company has been able to gain FDA approval, yet.
IF (and note the capital I and F as if it was an old-school programming command), IF the FDA approves LCTX’s stem cell treatments, LCTX should become a headline company as their progress will prove an important new phase in medicine.
I am cautious about being optimistic about the FDA’s response to innovative treatments because they are very cautious about unconventional treatments. Of course, hand-washing was considered radical when it was introduced.
Their potential is significant. They haven’t cleared all of their hurdles, but several are behind them. There are no guarantees.
I recently purchased additional shares from cash from a real estate sale. I’ve considered buying more with the price near or under a dollar, but cheap stocks can be addictive. I’ll continue to watch LCTX as I do with all of my stocks, but good news for LCTX could mean this is the last time to buy it so cheaply – or not.
DISCLOSURE LTBH by habit, but having to remember that my LCTX/BTX holdings came from AST (2014), which was spun off from GERN (which I’ve held since 1999). I hear patience pays, but it is easy to have doubts after twenty years of waiting.
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog https://trimbathcreative.net/
& from my One Company One Story series on YouTube
https://youtu.be/xQ5Q4uWoQ4o )
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
Intuitive Machines
LUNR (market cap is $1.94B was $2.77B)
Intuitive Machines is the company. LUNR is the trading symbol. I’ll use the trading symbol to mention the company because it is fewer letters. LUNR is enabling the development of lunar exploration and infrastructure. They don’t launch the rockets, but they ride them to deliver satellites and rovers to the Moon.
Lunar commerce is a speculative business because we’ve never had to estimate an industry a quarter of a million miles away. Optimists can see similarities to other commercial space ventures like SpaceX. Pessimists point out that the commercial market will necessarily be smaller than the commercial space market closer to Earth. The company’s two successful arrivals at the Moon’s surface is encouraging. The fact that both landers fell over is discouraging.
The public readily understands things that fall over, but the company makes money by selling other products and services, too. They have competitors, but there should be more than enough market if the industry grows as estimated. Investors who don’t want to miss out may drive up the price even if they don’t fully understand the technology or business model. A successful landing would help.
I bought recently and intend to hold as the industry advances.
DISCLOSURE LTBH since 2024.
(One Company One Video on YouTube – https://youtu.be/fzVaEu7mty0)
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog. https://trimbathcreative.net/)
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
MicroVision
MVIS (market cap is $0.283B was $0.287B)
I’ve been Holding and watching MVIS for over two decades. Pardon me as a copy&paste yet again since 2022. That seems most efficient. (Some edits added, but nothing signficant because nothing seems to have changed except details.) Another era of MVIS doldrums. Very little new news relative to the previous years/decades.
“Oh, MicroVision; will it be yet again another 6-9 months, or 9-18 months, or longer?” Well, it hasn’t been any of the previous hoped-for periods for the last twenty years – though there was that time of flirting with hope…” (circa 2021).
MicroVision is a electronics component manufacturer developing, and to some extent selling, elecro-optical units based on a chip-sized oscillating mirror. It is a simple and ingenious design defended by a long list of patents. Currently the greatest public hope for the company are the LiDAR sensors targeted at the autonomous vehicle market. MicroVision’s advantage is based on the chip’s scalability, the lack of pixel-sized constraints (as compared to LEDs), lower power requirements, and small package.
Before LiDAR, the company targeted short-throw projectors, projectors embedded in smartphones, augmented reality eyewear (see Hololens and more), as well as game controllers, bar code scanners, and orthoscopes. And probably more. The company has always operated under constraints from NDAs, the need to protect competition sensitive product developments, and some exclusive contracts that were ill-suited for the company, in retrospect.
It is easy to imagine that the company wasn’t persistent enough in pursuing some of those products as they were first movers in those fields. Now, competition has caught up. Also, corporate hopes pinned on singular products languished if the product or customer failed to deliver. Each CEO also resteers the company to distinguish their era from the previous one. The effect has been for the company to be seen as a tech test bench play shop that is dependent on demos and customers rather than faith in the company’s products to lead to financial success.
I remember when… Once upon a time, profitability was described as a possibility for 2003. (Previous notes had a note also suggesting 2023. Irony?)
As stated above; “Oh, MicroVision; will it be yet again another 6-9 months, or 9-18 months, or longer?”
If it succeeds, its rise may be magnificent, which is one reason to own shares now. My shares are now old enough to have graduated college, worked for a few years, then gone back for a Masters, started a family, had kids, and watch them enter school. How much longer will it take for something positive, significant, and quantifiable to finally happen?
Oddly enough, a cash infusion from another source and the depressed price made it easy and cheap to buy back in, not because I know anything new but because the market is exhibiting irrational exuberance which might include MVIS; and because some day, some day…
DISCLOSURE LTBH since 1999 (though the very first shares are gone). Dilution means that I no longer have more than enough if the company finally succeeds and the stock reaches the heights I think are possible. Oddly enough, a cash infusion from another source and the depressed price made it easy and cheap to buy back in, not because I know anything new but because the market is exhibiting irrational exuberance which might include MVIS; and because some day, some day…
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog https://trimbathcreative.net/
For even more details, follow my blog’s tags for MicroVision and MVIS, which reach back a decade.
& from my One Company One Story series on YouTube
https://youtu.be/NJRgHJBW3M8 )
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
D-Wave Quantum
QBTS (market cap is $4.56B was $2.44B)
D-Wave Quantum, which I think of as QBTS, is a leading-edge quantum computer company. Tell a bunch of investors that it relies on quantum mechanics, and lose at least half of the audience. The short version that may not explain enough is that a conventional computer works with ones and zeroes. (Actually, it works by voltage variances.) A quantum computer works with both at the same time. In a conventional computer, a bit is either a 1 or a 0. In a quantum computer, a bit can be both simultaneously. Seems simple, but one implication is that for a conventional computer to consider many possibilities, it must turn on and off each bit (oversimplified.) That takes time. Done right, a quantum computer can consider all possibilities simultaneously. Realistically, that means quantum computers can be tens of thousands of times faster. That estimate varies widely.
Within the technology world, few people understand quantum computing. There is a mix of optimism and pessimism. Within the investing community, there is even less understanding – but,… Within the investing community is an awareness that the upside potential is on the order of the introduction of the personal computer, or possibly the transistor. There is a fear of missing out. There is also a dearth of models for estimating the company’s and the stock’s value. QBTS is not the only company in the industry, but they are making verifiable progress, which encourages investors.
I understand just enough about quantum computers (geezer-geek) and the history of the computer industry (also helped run a museum about computers and education) that I am encouraged. And yet, I don’t know what the company is worth. As usual, I prefer my investments to remain with the original team, but they are probably being considered for an acquisition. I expect dynamic times for the company and the stock. The company may encounter a fundamental flaw to a business model, or not. The stock valuation may be ahead of itself, or not. I sold enough to recoup my initial investment so can feel more comfortable holding as is. Practical concerns in my personal life may encourage a partial sale, but I prefer to wait for a while as I do not think the investing market has worked through their emotional response.
DISCLOSURE LTBH since 2024, all long-term shares now,
(One Company One Video on YouTube – https://youtu.be/Un2k2JFm7fE)
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog. https://trimbathcreative.net/)
INTRO Here’s my semi-annual exercise to see if I remember why I own the stocks I own, and so I can check back and see if their stories have changed. I post in case it helps others too.
Solid Power
SLDP (market cap is $0.398B was $0.341B)
Solid Power is attractive to me because of the safety issues with liquid batteries. There are other performance and cost issues, but solid batteries are less prone to such failure modes – as I understand it.
Solid Power’s approach continues to use lithium-ion methods but does so with a solid layer between the parts that could short and cause a fire. (Which does happen in liquid batteries.) They are aiming for inclusion into the 2028 market.
My interest is partly speculative. I consider modern electric vehicles to be a mature technology that is due for the next generation of technology. I expect the next generation to be more efficient, cheaper, and safer. Solid Power’s approach is not the only entry in the market, but I can’t invest in them all. I think Solid Power is a reasonable competitor in an enormous market.
I intend to hold as the technology advances, hopefully to profitability, because this could enable greater sustainability in my estimation. I was about to buy more near the end of 2024, hesitated, and missed what looks like a good opportunity.
DISCLOSURE LTBH since 2024.
(One Company One Video on YouTube – https://youtu.be/Xs2kxJgHr0I)
(I’ve also collected links to the other discussion boards and my other stocks over on my blog. https://trimbathcreative.net/)
Trimbathcreative's Blog (Tom Trimbath) 
Hi Tom!I eddon’t ascribe to buy and hold. Too much baby sitting needed. What I’m going to do with this info is look for ETFs that might be holding them. Then I can add them to hot slies of my investment pie. I’ll do that sometime in September when I rebalance the pie. Some interesting stuff though!