Callouts & quotes from 37,061+ activist slides

""I think the biggest risks are that, one, there are competitors coming down the pipe pretty quickly. So, they're not going to have the monopoly anymore... I don't see any advantage in using their pump anymore." — Chief of transplant surgery at a major transplant center; high-volume TransMedics user"

"The paper never mentions “pitolisant” but acknowledges that it contradicts the Bioprojet clinical trials already conducted, and further admits that the results negate their starting “hypothesis” that “CSF HA [histamine] and t-MHA [histamine metabolite] were...interesting biological markers of EDS.”"

"Yundong is a company that Ding Shizhong and Wu Yonghua invested in, it is responsible for the 24 subsidiaries. Basically, the big shareholders of these twenty something companies if it's not held by Ding Shizhong and Wu Yonghua they are held through Yundong. Yundong manages the retail side. — Mr. A"

""the strong market demand for IonQ's innovative quantum computing and networking products," — IonQ; "IonQ's trailblazing technology has grown quantum into a substantial global business." — IonQ; "We've got double the GAAP revenue in 2024 of everybody else combined." — de Masi (Fox Business Network)"

"“No, that was most of it. Now it's N3 and N2 if they want to go; N5 is in production. For the main ones, yeah, they were N3 PO's. They're delaying those PO's for N3, and those PO's will be delayed. That's my projection.” — Former KLA executive in a leadership role in their EUV mask inspection group"

"Why did Nuvei buy both Base Commerce and Vantage Payments? Both businesses had relationships with each other (and with Nuvei), and both executives facilitated business between TelexFree (Ponzi Scheme) and Allied Wallet (charged with fraud for abetting business among multiple fraudulent companies)."

"Spruce Point believes Ballard investors should be cautioned by its history of partnership failures in China, notably Azure in 2013-15. Our on the ground due diligence strongly suggests this time around with Synergy/Broad Ocean will result in disappointment and a significant stock price correction."

"HIMS frequently references 85-88% “long-term retention”. Not only does HIMS often fail to clearly define this as retention between years end 2 and 3 (a non-standard metric that cannot be easily compared to others), but it also over-emphasizes the potential usefulness and materiality of the metric."

"The dairy side before the merger was doing well, but now the cheese guys were getting excited because they were getting bonuses they hadn't in a while. If you are a dairy sales guy, you've been replaced by a cheese guy from the top, down. Is this for better or worse? To me, it seems for the worse."

"If Monster were valued in a range of 4x – 5x sales and 15x – 18x EBITDA consistent with its peers and closer to recent industry M&A transactions of faster growing companies such Celsius acquiring Alani Nu and Keurig Dr. Pepper acquiring GHOST Energy, we could see 25% - 40% long-term downside risk."

"Although the buildings are not pledged as security, they will revert to the landowner upon a ground lease default. As such, illustratively, we define TIP REIT’s “Lease Security” as the value of the land and unencumbered buildings. Based on replacement cost, this “Lease Security” is valued at $39bn"

"Starboard believes these seemingly self-serving actions demonstrate a complete disregard for proper corporate governance and fiscal discipline by members of management and the Board and suggest that these transactions were not entered into with the best interest of the common stockholders in mind."

"Before we present evidence of growing accounting and financial strain at Aerojet, it’s worth considering that in the most recent past, the Company acknowledged material weaknesses tied to every single key income statement and balance sheet account...... but of course the problems have been solved!"

"If you look carefully at the recent proxy statement filed March 2019, management hit all its short-term incentive targets, but it appears a loosely defined Adj. EBITDAP, which now nets recoverable costs from US gov't contracts and includes unspecified “Board approved modifications”, is the driver."

"With shareholder's and sell-side analyst's constant focus on 1) real estate and 2) share price, we believe the Board's approval of executive package with no relationship to these two inputs demonstrates a complete breakdown of Director accountability to shareholders, the true owners of the Company"

"We conclude, based on extensive research, that TransMedics is engaging in a sinister scheme whereby organs are illegally steered to centers under the implicit or explicit quid pro quo that a) they accept the organ on its device and b) that it is transported via its NOP service on its private jets."

"Note the insertion of “n=17” – in other words, the study had 22 patients, but Bioprojet excluded the five with plasma levels >150 ng/mL in the calculation, making it impossible to deduce how high it went – as absurd as a fund manager reporting average returns but excluding the five biggest losers."

"Another paper highlighted how these issues plague non-imidazole-based compounds specifically, such as pitolisant: “poor pharmacokinetic characteristics,” “poor blood-brain penetration,” “genotoxicity” (DNA damage), as well as the problems such as cardiotoxicity already described on previous pages."

"No cardiovascular exclusion criteria is listed in the pilot study, and we believe that the decision to then exclude such patients is an admission of the cardiotoxicity signal in the pilot study – as well as a reckless attempt to cherry-pick patients not reflective of a real-world clinical setting."

"BR management has consistently touted Closed Sales as a key performance indicator (KPI), and it influences management's short-term cash compensation. But as we'll illustrate, it is fraught with holes and should not be relied upon as a firm measure of revenue that will materialize in the near-term."

"“Margins will be the same because that is how they are managing the business. Net profit on legacy business may slowly shrink because as their costs come down, the total dollar or margin might shrink. 40% of a penny versus two pennies is just less money.” — Former Avery Dennison RFID Sales Manager"

"[It's] sad: a (formerly iconic) US company selling control to a Japanese company.... But there is a Joint Venture Agreement...which made it practically impossible for Xerox to sell to anyone else.... A really amazing problem” — Charles Prince (Xerox director), in a personal email, February 1, 2018"

"Our coal reserve and resource estimates are updated periodically to reflect coal production, acquisitions and dispositions of mineral interests, new drilling, mine or geological data, and changes in regulations, market conditions or other economic factors. — Alpha Metallurgical Resources 2021 10-K"

"China Times: The day after the report exposing NetQin and Feiliu Jiu Tian of jointly harming consumers, they declared there were serious discrepancies with your facts. Yin Wen: the content of Feiliu JiuTian's statement really has no substance, they did not state what specific points were mistaken."

"“...over the last few years, platforms like Square, Toast and Shopify became the hubs where SMBs run their businesses. These platforms have built deep relationships with those customers, and as a result, increasingly help them manage all of their day to day operations.” — Tech Crunch Story 5/15/24"

"“I have a lot of thoughts on this one. That purchase was challenging and is challenging... Content IQ's core is a media arb product. They have a strong monetization to bring traffic into their content. But, I don't think that's what Undertone advertisers are looking for.” — Former Perion Executive"

"The Italian Court, established in April 2021, that Leonardo Spa's Chief Executive Officer in his prior post, was the author of a "criminal plan" carried out with the "predictable intention to deceive shareholders or the public"(3) — Tribunal of Milan - Sentence MPS Case RGNR 955/205 - 7 April 2021"

"“That's technologically challenging because the light cages that they've developed for the penning as part of their opto-electronic positioning approach have to be tweaked pretty heavily to pen smaller things that don't have the same charge profile.” — Leading academic institution/ex-BLI scientist"

"In accomplishing its intended purpose, the Order in effect encourages all prime contractors to simply choose SRMs from Northrop’s new Orbital subsidiary (which Northrop has named Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems “NGIS”) and not conduct a competitive bidding process. — AJRD Public Comment Letter"

"sitting on top of each other in their office right now. They'll be able to spread out, put a bunch of tables out there and just get a production line that's mapped out. And then it will look like a real factory like the Teal factory, hopefully, in about 2 months. — Unattributed (likely management)"

"We said this Zillow Offers business, the Homes segment, we'd anticipate could be $20 billion in revenue a year, okay. And that $20 billion in revenue would represent 5,000 homes sold a month, which would represent only about 1% of the overall transactions in the market. — RBC Conference 11/20/2019"

"“I’ve had a lot of organs that were refused by the initial center that called in the request for service. This happened a lot where they were like, ‘We actually don’t want it.’ But that usually boiled down to withdrawal time as a DCD - or the pathology results.” — Former TransMedics OCS specialist"

""There’s a piece of information. I know more than I’m telling you...I knew they had cardiovascular issues...that compound had issues...the main issue is it had a cardiovascular signal...I’m sure it was known as soon as people profiled it." — Senior scientist from Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, or GSK."

"“It became a little more difficult to prescribe. It required a pre-auth. Usually, you filled out a form, and that was it. And now, there are things like, have you been on modafinil or armodafinil? You have to be on other generics first.” — Physician in private and academic practice in Philadelphia"

"It’s the recruiting, meaning bringing new distributors into our company, which is the most vital part of our bloodstream. We bring new distributors in – we grow. It’s that simple. It’s that simple. And the company has built its whole reputation, its whole life, on recruiting. — CEO Michael Johnson"

"Hill-Rom Holdings, Inc.'s ("Hill-Rom") Ba2 rating reflects the company's moderate financial leverage. The rating also reflects the risks associated with a growth strategy that is expected to rely on acquisitions, which could be debt financed and result in integration risks. — Moody's Credit Rating"

"According to an article by CryptoSlate which cites research from VanEck, app download data from Sensor Tower, and stablecoin data from Chainalysis, Western Union and MoneyGram are already seeing pressure from stablecoin through reduced app downloads and declining monthly active user (MAU) growth."

"Starboard believes Mr. Brown’s experience as a founder and senior executive of one of the world’s most successful semiconductor technology and licensing companies along with his strong operational experience and deep industry knowledge will enable him to provide invaluable oversight to the Board."

"Many of the innovations and improvements Mr. Blum and Mr. Mock made when they ran Olive Garden have been lost in the past 10 years – we want to bring back Olive Garden’s best-in-class, guest-first focus and culture of success, all while modernizing the concept to address today’s consumer needs..."

"CEO appears to mislead CNBC’s audience by saying no lockups have expired. The PIPE shares were not technically under a “lockup” but the company was required to register them for re-sale, which it did effective Dec 31, prior to which they couldn’t be sold – in reality identical to a lockup expiry."

"This man (Sali Berisha) has decided at the end of his term with these five concessions that we have to pay for the next 15 years. They are money that does not go to the state budget but in the pockets of the concessionaires, Sali Berisha and the ministers who signed these contracts, "he declared."

"Many of the innovations and improvements Mr. Blum and Mr. Mock made when they ran Olive Garden have been lost in the past 10 years – we want to bring back Olive Garden’s best-in-class, guest-first focus and culture of success, all while modernizing the concept to address today’s consumer needs..."

"We encourage Canadian Pacific to continue to test these new technologies with other Class 1's and manufacturing partners, and to increase your R&D and collaboration efforts to accelerate all viable biofuel, electrification, hydrogen fuel cell technologies and other de-carbonisation opportunities."

"It means that the provider, and anyone that is "sniffing" the network has the ability to track the users and obtain all browsing habits of the user, and even in some cases get information that is much more critical such as usernames and password and session ids if they are transferred in the URL."

"Without taking on any debt or implementing any additional operational improvements, Bristol-Myers will have the ability to use ~$37 billion of cumulative unlevered free cash flow over the next five years to execute a “String of Pearls” strategy (i.e. in-licenses, partnerships, small acquisitions)"

"Without taking on any debt or implementing any additional operational improvements, Bristol-Myers will have the ability to use ~$37 billion of cumulative unlevered free cash flow over the next five years to execute a “String of Pearls” strategy (i.e. in-licenses, partnerships, small acquisitions)"

"Without taking on any debt or implementing any additional operational improvements, Bristol-Myers will have the ability to use ~$37 billion of cumulative unlevered free cash flow over the next five years to execute a “String of Pearls” strategy (i.e. in-licenses, partnerships, small acquisitions)"

"Perion has perpetuated a biography that CEO Gerstel is a successful technology executive having been the CEO of numerous companies such as Panya, Nolio, Syneron Medical and Zend Technologies. His appointment press release focused on what he has done since 1999, but no mention of what came before."

"Spruce Point observes two conflicting stories around the departure of Mr. Glover from Blucora. The public press release says he resigned, which suggests his departure was voluntary. However, the proxy statement later described him as a terminated executive and having received a severance payment."

"Despite having created little to no value, in our opinion, as a public company (including missing financial targets and spending $110m on a revenue-less venture SecurityMatters with no clear evidence that it succeeded), Forescout insiders are in line for a hefty payday – cashing out nearly $100m."

"Despite the seemingly sound logic of single embryo transfer, research suggests that PGNY’s claims that this practice will ensure the reduced incidence (and, most importantly, resultant costs) of pre-term births are questionable, or at least provide an incomplete picture of the aggregate outcomes."

"CEO Wilson continues to spend a portion of his time managing his Cuattro businesses. We are puzzled why Heska shareholders allow this distraction to persist when the Company is supposedly taking on a dominant incumbent (IDEXX), developing and launching new products, and expanding internationally?"

"After five years and millions of dollars of payments from Heska back to Cuattro, LLC (and into Wilson's pockets), the 2018 asset purchase was meant to address Wilson's conflicts of interest. However, that transaction and Wilson's continuing involvement with Cuattro, LLC only raise more questions."

"We queried KOL's and Nevro competitors on the normalized market growth rate excluding a pandemic. A Medtronic SCS product manager stated it's low single digits at best and cast those who claim it's higher as "liars," adding that they simply make up neuromodulation growth rates for earnings calls."

"Our analysis was proven correct as Ballard was inevitably forced to find a new JV partner to support its expansion efforts in China, ultimately driving the stock from $3.80 at the time of our publication to a low of ~$2.50 almost a year later - down 35%, within the range of our downside forecast."

"DuPont management has demonstrated that it disagrees: Investments(1) as a percentage of sales into growth businesses have been reduced more than investments into mature businesses (Coatings and Performance Chemicals), despite management's claims of increasing investments into growth businesses(2)"

"Mr. Miller’s 10 years of experience in senior executive positions at large media and entertainment companies, as well as his 10+ years of experience investing in cable, subscription, and online businesses, qualify him, in Starboard’s view, to ably assist in the effective oversight of the Company."

"The reasons for the industry-wide failure of these H3R antagonist programs over several decades are voluminous: poor pharmacokinetic characteristics due to lack of bioavailability and/or a failure to penetrate the blood/brain barrier; a variety of off-target effects; and a broad toxicity profile."

"They did that for a reason, because the Joint Value I discussed. They were worried people would go, 'wait a minute, now your just placing the robots, in return for cases.' So you're wiping out the million dollar price tag and your getting cases off it. It's a way to fool the numbers a little bit."

"One could conclude, however, it is common for a bare minimum of two years between first flight of the conformal pro-totype and Type Certification being achieved (which applies for traditional designs, no noted novel technol-ogies, by an established OEM which already has certified other aircraft)."