After evaluating the data with the host platform for our shareholder meeting, Issuer Direct, we broke an attendance record for an OTCQB company shareholder meeting. Along with that, we received a record amount of questions and felt compelled to both elaborate on those we were able to address on the call and add a number of other interesting insights and questions we received from the rest of our investor community.
It’s been less than an hour since the conclusion of what was Jerrick’s first Annual Shareholder Meeting. Before publishing the following meeting transcript (which we cleaned up a bit for clarity purposes) and releasing the video recording you see above, I wanted to once again thank my Jerrick team, who worked so hard over the last couple of weeks. It was their collective effort that not only made our 2020 virtual shareholder meeting a success, but established a baseline and foundation for us to make the next one even better.
I had a front-row seat at the birth of electronic trading, and it had a profound influence on my career and the thought processes that I would systematically apply to all subsequent endeavors. At first, I was simply enthralled by what we were able to do with the data; how we assessed it and took risk in order to generate more money, with which we could take more risk. I became fascinated by the power and control a trader wielded when relying on data to make decisions. It was years later before I began thinking about the bigger picture and the implications of this new kind of trading. It’s a story about how technology systematically changed a well over 200-year-old industry.
Jim Cramer, CNBC host and former hedge-fund manager, recently said, “At the end of the day, the market has no conscience... Nobody is investing to make the world a better place.”
In the spring of 2010 the Middle East reached a tipping point. It was called the Arab spring. A decade later, we are in the midst of the American Spring. We are the country whose fuse is lit and ready to explode. With the stock market making COVID-era highs, the disconnect between reality on the street and the illusion created by printing money, lending at 0% interest rates and outright lies by the federal government, has now seeped into the psyche of the American people. The illusion that 40 million unemployed can be fooled by a check in the mail and bringing back sports is finally being shattered and the glass will cut deep across the political divide.
We have completed the timely filing of our first quarter 2020 financial results. This marks our 10th 10-Q filing as a public company, along with having filed our 5th 10-K in March. Quarterly revenues were approximately $293,000, at the lower end of the range I had expected. Nevertheless, I am delighted, given the headwinds we withstood and the visibility we now have. With some clients asking for discounts and deferred payments and employees making it through a three week period of limbo in March that reshaped our company’s routine and monopolized our time, revenues quarter over quarter were essentially flat. They were, though, over 8 times higher than Q1 revenues in 2019. All things considered, this was a quarter I will never forget, both for its intensity and lessons learned.
