Look closer at the apparent fools wielding great blades, they're often just acting.

Have you ever seen or heard of something wonderful, but the behavior around it just makes you just shake your head?

For products surrounding ClearPoint Neuro, that group was CLS. Their behavior was always curious. You may be able to find it, but in the before times of that laser being approved in the US, you’d hear the occasional strange comment from them about ClearPoint Neuro. Prior work from Mike Lipka comes to mind.

For some reason a company like CLS.B can put together the best laser ablation system in the world, but they just can’t figure out a way to pencil operating expenses with a pre-established high margin and highly profitable supplier agreement in neurosurgery.

They can’t even understand what the FDA is saying to them.

It’s just so hard to add all those numbers together and make them positive.

The thing is when you’re cooking up something really good, the best way to keep something good for yourself when public is just to smash everyone and everything to pieces while you just wait for market condition to improve. An insider’s hand is one of control and power, and that power is routinely abused. Finding out why is often a challenge.

Something peculiar has been happening with CLS.B’s business while their common stock death spirals to dilution. ClearPoint is building up their install base. It’s going to be their fastest growing products for some time to come just because there’s all these conditions which already have reimbursement, it just got the requisite components approved for an OR, and it’s already cleared/outside the umbrella of science projects that everyone cooms over. The limited competition of that product category and the strength of the offering is cutting through market share like a light saber through butter. That’s also where CLS.B is going to make all their money because reimbursement terms are just way better.

They said they were going to change their focus and I’m still hoping they will…

but then you read that piece of highlighted text, and you realize that girl ain’t changing for nothing. If CLS doesn’t turn a dime when they say they will, it’s not misfortune- it’s because they don’t want to.

To be able to almost freely control the return series of a company’s common stock is an incredibly powerful sirens song that people can and will and do fall into. What’s unfortunate is that particular type of cruel rat race is actually impeding consumer access to their devices in the long run because they’re perpetually resource constrained.

Tranberg made that laser to see if the abscopal effect has a relationship to temperature that lives in a tight band. He already has research done on mammals that suggests this is the case. That’s to say he wanted to know if metastasized cancers can be better fought by a better laser where the ablative field is more controlled than existing devices.

Why on earth anyone would ever mess around with something like that for a pittance is beyond me.