Hi, and welcome to our first Global Investor Meet. We are doing this a little bit differently here. We're on Zoom, and I know many of you here are our pre-IPO investors, and some of you are fairly new, and some may have just joined this call for the first time. I wanna say welcome to everyone here. I am Roger Hamilton, the CEO of Genius Group. We also have on here Flora, who leads all of our investor relations, and also Erez, who is our CFO. This, I think, is gonna be a really, really informative session for everyone who is on here. Let me start by just giving you a bit of a format.
The first one is our chat is live, would love for you to just post in there, hi, from wherever you are in the world. I am right now in Warsaw, Poland, where we just arrived back here. We have got a very international group of investors and would love to have you interact and connect up. Good to see you here, Tina in Denmark, Alan in Johannesburg. We've got Shirley here from Western Australia. Jing Chai from Austin, Texas. I won't keep reading them out, but you can see we have people from all over the world. Really, really great to have you all here. I have to say for those of you who've been our investors for some time, we haven't spoken for a long time.
As you know, since our IPO, that happened in April last year, we as a public company have had a whole bunch of different regulations that I personally, as CEO, have had to navigate. A large part of that is how to communicate together with investors, which is very highly regulated by the SEC. I believe that we have found a way for us to be able to now move forward in a way which allows us to build our investor community while also being compliant with everything we need to be as a public company. What I'm gonna share with you is the three big things that I really hope to achieve on this call, which is gonna go on for about 1.5 hours . It's got three segments of about 30 minutes each.
The three things are, number one, that all of you who are here right now as our investors signed up at some point or other because of our vision of where we're going to be, a company that's really revolutionizing education, building an entrepreneur education system globally, and at the same time, growing at a pace which allows us to be a world leader. I really hope that at the end of this 1.5 hours , everyone who's here is rest assured that we are on a pathway where we continue to achieve the goals that we want to be achieving to get to the vision we want to be getting to. From that side, that your investment in Genius Group is safe with us.
That's the one big thing I wanna share, and I wanna share with you some of the latest developments that have happened alongside with some of the different messages or releases we've had recently you might have missed as well, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is why that's happened. Why is it that we have got analysts who have been giving price targets for our shares up at the $12 or the $18 mark, but our share is right now trading at under $1? This was something which was a big question mark for us as management as well, and what we've done in the last year is basically say we're not gonna focus at the market.
We're gonna focus at the growth of the business and the foundations of the business, which is what we've been doing. I believe that we ourselves were short to the party when it comes to what's actually possible with share manipulation, which is out there as well. A second thing that I'm really hoping is gonna be a outcome of this call is that we're gonna be able to share with you how our share has been under attack, how this has taken place, like why is this even possible in the U.S. right now?
I'm even gonna bring on the lawyer who is actually leading the charge to actually get this not just investigated, but actually stopped, and what steps we are looking to take going forward as well, which by the way, you can help with as well. His name is Wes Christian, and I'm gonna kinda give you a bit of a background into Wes and exactly how this is his number one forte, and he's even been working with the investors behind the likes of AMC. You've probably heard of the whole saga with GameStop, which has all been really like, you know, under the same market manipulation that we've seen in terms of naked short selling, how it works, how it's affected our stock, and what can we do about it?
The second, third thing I'm also gonna be doing is really basically, sharing with you all that we believe that we've found a middle way point, between not being able to say much of anything other than in our formal earnings reports, and what we used to do before, where I used to share pretty much everything about where we were and how we were growing, and how that middle ground includes us being able to go out regularly with information to you. The main thing, it just has to be done in a global forum where anyone who's an investor gets the same information at the same time.
Whereas before we had our own investor group, before we went IPO, we had our own groups within GeniusU, what we're gonna do now is go out with a blog that I'm gonna do every week. I actually started this last week. You can find me on YouTube, you can find me on Twitter, we can keep the conversation going as we move forward. Even this call we're gonna have on a monthly basis all the way through the year so that we can be answering all the questions. I know Flora already collected a whole bunch of questions from everybody that we're gonna answer on this call. That's gonna be in the third 30 minutes that we're gonna have. You're all free in the chat to be actually adding any follow-up questions.
I'd wait until later when you're starting to hear the questions to see if there's any you have. We're most likely to keep most of those questions for the next call 'cause I've already got enough questions to cover the entire 1.5 hours. Basically, if at the end of it, Flora sees 1 or 2 questions that it would help or it would be relevant to answer earlier, then we'll do that as well. As always, within our community, we like to keep everyone on best behavior, so if there's anyone being unruly in the comments or anything like that, don't be surprised if you're no longer part of this call, but I know that we generally are well-behaved, and that's not necessarily going to happen.
Basically, overall, what I really hope is that from this you're gonna see a new level of communication, a better insight into our company and what we're doing, and most importantly, what's happened to our share price and what we expect we're gonna do moving forward from there as well. Also, obviously, I'm gonna be presenting through this, and so I'm not gonna be able to be watching all the comments throughout, but we can save the comments afterwards so that I can basically come back to all of them as well. I wanna finish by just saying I really appreciate everyone who has come and taken the time to join this call as well. So I got basically about 20 minutes before Wes joins us.
What I'm gonna do in those 20 minutes is basically share on those first two parts, you know, what is our mission that we have actually gone out with? What is the actual progress towards that mission at the moment that we're okay to share right now before our next earnings report? Off the back of the work that we've done last year, how solid is Genius Group in this year ahead? Secondly, what do we mean by naked short selling? What is it that's going on in the market right now with our shares? How is it possible for them to be manipulated, and what can we do about it, right?
By giving an overview of those two areas, then we're going to be in a good position when Wes comes on board to share more about the actual details, the expert behind it, as to how this happens and the kind of success rate that his company has in solving this problem as well. To begin with, I'm gonna start by basically coming over to two things that are both readily available to everyone already on the call. The first one here is obviously we have had our earnings report. The last one that came out was for Q3 2022. The next one will be the Q4 or full year 2022. We aren't yet in a position to release that, but we will be once we have our audited accounts.
Basically this you will find on our Genius Group page under Investors, or you can go straight to this link here. I will actually be dropping certain links as we go so that you have all of the latest links as we go forward as well. You'll see here already that we have got basically the news which is kind of in between the two different elements. When we actually had our last earnings release, we announced 60% revenue growth. As you know, in the years prior, we had prided ourselves at always having at least 50% growth per year.
The fact that in our first year as an IPO public company, we got to 60%, I think really speaks volumes for our team and how we've continued to maintain that growth with higher performance as we go as well. Right? We did have more costs in the year, some people were concerned about the fact that it looks like we were making a bigger loss than before. Do be aware that basically as we've brought on an entire leadership team to grow, this gives us a much stronger position for the future.
Just two things to point out to you as well, that at this point when we were talking about how much cash we had, this does not take into account the full convertible debt that we signed up, which was a $18 million facility where there's an additional $11 million, which we have not drawn down on and can only drawn down on certain conditions.
We announced on an earlier call or what you see here as well, which basically within our within our Group results, this actually just came out yesterday, that we've signed $7.5 million share subscription, which basically means we can draw down at any point based on when we want additional funds as our share price recovers, which means effectively between what we've already signed up, not even talking about, you know, any, you know, future amounts that are available to us. Already, what's actually there available to us is over close to $18.5 million, close to $19 million. To put that in perspective, that's double our entire market cap already, right?
If we actually go into the details of what else has been happening within the business that we were reporting recently, a couple of key things I want to highlight within our group report that came out in quarter three, was that not only had we now started the integration with some incredible leaders within EdTech and the university with Tracy West, who joined as the new CEO of UAV, and Saranjit Sangar , whose background previously was the CEO and Director of upGrad EMEA. upGrad is already like a, what, a $20 billion business, which is doing incredible work within the education side of tertiary education, very similar to Coursera, based in India. She's come and joined us as well. Then from there, the kind of different partnerships that we're starting to do with larger companies.
Some of you who are part of our different summits have seen the partners that have come on board that we're working with as well. And we've actually shared some of them here as well, where the likes of Peter Diamandis or Verne Harnish, who runs Gazelles, or the likes of Jaspreet Singh and Brian Jung, who both have got over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, or the people that are now part of the Revealed Films family like Robert Kiyosaki or Garrett Gunderson, who are The New York Times bestselling authors. We have found every time that we're out there speaking with partners, a huge interest at bringing their curriculum into our platform and also our certification programs that we're launching as well.
What I want to share on this isn't just the growth that we have been experiencing, also in terms of numbers of students. Many of you will know that at the end of last year, we were aiming for a 50% growth in students as well to get to 4 million students. Even at the end of September, we were already at 4.3 million, so ahead of what we were planning for the full year. We did five acquisitions through the year. We also were named as one of the top 10 emerging giants in Singapore by KPMG and HSBC.
The reason I'm sharing all of this information is because if it was not for the performance of our shares on the New York Stock Exchange American, we would be celebrating that we had the most incredible year last year because the fundamentals of the company itself had grown apace. In fact, if I go further into our financials, when we actually shared our financials and the growth that we have seen year on year within our company, plus together with that, the strength of our balance sheet, you will see here that on the balance sheet, we have grown from what was a total of $17.5 million in assets to $91.9 million.
We had grown in terms of our net asset value, after taking away liabilities from what was $8 million before we had IPO'd to over $50 million in September 2022, and then pro forma with the rest of the balance sheet on board as well at $60 million.
Now, if you compare that again to what the share price, which adjusts with our market cap, we basically have got a trading market cap at the moment, which is only 20% of our actual net asset value, which of course if you look at that and say, "Well, how could that be the case when we actually have got analysts who are providing us with a share price, which is much, much even higher than our IPO price of $6 at $12 or $18?" That's why we went into the investigation to see where we were.
What I would say for all investors who are on board, if you're looking to see if us as the leadership and our community and our partners are delivering what our promises for the company as a whole on that third part, which is that we are actually very happy with our growth and, if anything, overachieving on what we were saying we would be doing pre-IPO. Everything has grown at that level. And I want to say a big thank you to all of you who are currently our shareholders on this call who are our students or who are our partners, because you're the ones who actually got us here. The second thing, like I mentioned, which is that there is this whole naked short selling that we are seeing happening in our shares.
I also want to share that I would have loved to share this with you earlier. A large reason that I could not do that was because of the regulations about what we aren't allowed to say unless it's already in a press release or is already out there to the public as well. I know, in the same way that many people who are on the call were like, "I just wish Roger would share more with me," I myself was also, I wish I could share more as well.
One thing to say that is nothing to do something different about it, which is why I really hope that what we've found is a happy compromise where with these weekly blogs, and with basically what I'm about to share, we can all get up to speed and support each other on this as well. Because like I said, all our investors have a large part to play with this as well. Now I'm going to show you exactly why that is the case. The first thing is just to share here that the two biggest areas on social media where I'm getting very active, one of them is on my Twitter account.
If you aren't yet following me here and you do, you'll be hearing every time we have an investor call, every time that we're actually sharing, we'll be doing it here. It used to be my Facebook group and my Facebook page. Because that really is not compliant with SEC, where everyone needs to know at the same time, I'm going to be using Twitter to do that. That's one thing that I want to share. This link here, I will give to you right now. The second thing is I'm also starting my weekly blog where I'm sharing about this as well. You'll see here that this blog here will also be in video format. Already you can see this one here, which is about where it says we're failing.
This was from last week. You see already here I'm talking about the naked short selling. I'm talking about basically, who we have, Wes, who's come and support us on this as well. You'll be getting updates on where we are and where we're going, every week from now on as well. If you're not yet part of this YouTube channel, very easy for you to subscribe and be part of this as well. Hopefully that way, anything that's not answered on this call, we can answer on upcoming calls. You also maybe not have to be asking because I'm already giving the answers to that as well. Let me just share for a moment who we're about to have, who's going to come and join us, and how we ended up working together with Wes.
It was actually back probably, what, middle of last year when we started really investigating how it could be that our shares were dropping so far. I'm going to give you a link to this article here. It's from Euromoney. It actually, as you see, is dated right back in 2005. It explains this whole idea of naked short selling, and it even gives these examples of where company owners have bought back all the shares of their company in the entire float of what was actually issued in an IPO and then saw their shares continue to sell on from that, and they were like, "Well, how's that even possible?" Right? That makes no sense.
If you actually just even Google Wes's company, which is Christian Levine Law Group , and you see how many companies just like ourselves have actually brought them on board recently to support them, it's because what's happening to us is not just us, it's others as well. Generally, as this article will explain, the funds, or the crooked traders or crooked brokers, whatever you want to call them, that basically are attacking companies, they tend to do it with newly listed, small listed companies that have not so much buying pressure yet, and where they have much, much more selling pressure than there is buying pressure. This link here, I'm also going to give you a number of other links.
There is this one here, which actually explains how the GameStop saga, so if you all know about GameStop, how the mechanics of GameStop actually took place with naked short selling. This explains it, right. The fact that this was actually made illegal in 2008 does not stop it from actually happening. There's also an article here. This one's from Reddit, by the way, and it explains in much, much more detail exactly what the strategies are they follow and what the strategies are that companies can try and use to actually turn the tide on them as well.
I'm going to give you a listing of those strategies in a moment that we are looking, we're considering to adopt and that we're looking at basically picking the best of the bunch and how we do it. Here's an example. We actually have one of the interviewees of the film company that we just acquired, of Reveal Films, Patrick Byrne, who was the CEO of Overstock. It was actually during the entire Overstock saga where they were getting hammered by short sellers. He put a number of things in place which got their share price to go from $5 all the way up to over $100, effectively through something called a short squeeze, where they basically pushed them out of the market.
That only can take place if you have retail investors behind you have enough buyers behind it as well, which is why so much of the solution here isn't just what the management of Genius Group does, it's what our retail investors do or what all our investors do to actually support this as well by being aware of what's happening as well. A couple of other links, I might as well do the links together. This one explains in more detail how the whole GameStop structure works. I know for many of you're not going to be that interested in all the mechanics of it, but for some of you will. Let me just post these in for a moment.
With this, what I'm going to do is just explain, just from a layman's point of view, how we came across this, and then what we did about it. This is a couple of links here. This one here is the link. The first one I just posted there was the link to the Euromoney one. This second link is the one to the GameStop one. This third one is the one which is the Reddit post. There are many different groups on Reddit that like, they have it as their life mission to go against these hedge funds and the guys that are doing this because they also don't think it's fair on the little guy. We've seen that there's been success in that as well.
We wanna be one of those successes, right? Like, why not? That we are on a mission, and the fact that we're getting attacked in this way means that we really want to be, having each of us who are investors in this. Of course, I am the majority investor in the company as well. You know, every dollar that goes down, I am losing more than anybody, right? Like, as a shareholder as well as someone who cares about all of us being part of a democratized education system, right? It's up to us to make sure that we don't get basically pushed out like many other capital, market companies are being pushed out by these hedge funds, going forward as well. I know, because we are gonna have Wes coming on, I wanna introduce him as well going forward.
Let me just share with you what we mean by naked short selling. It actually is a bit of a misnomer because short selling assumes you're borrowing someone's share in order to sell it. Some people talk about naked short selling being about how a broker is saying to you, "Yes, I'm giving you a share to sell," and they don't yet have the share. They're gonna go buy it from somewhere else. We're talking about something even worse than that. Naked short selling at the level we're talking about is where someone is selling a share with no intention of ever buying it, which means it's a fake share. It never appeared. The broker who is then basically loaning them the share also has no interest in actually being able to cover their position either, right?
As you'll see as you read through some of these articles, you can expose this through something called FTDs. To give an idea of what an FTD is, it means a failure to deliver, and it basically is what happens when a broker files together with the DTCC, which is their regulating body, they file with them, "Oh, we failed to deliver that altogether." If a broker does this too much, well, then they're gonna be in trouble, right? 'Cause it means that you're effectively selling something you don't have. It's amazing how the rules work that even though you have this as something that's illegal to do, we can go back and look at our share price.
I'm not saying that what I'm about to share with you, was a discovery by the board or by our shareholders. It was my personal view of what was happening and why did it seem so strange that almost like, consistently, we only saw this, like, middle of the year, that every two months after our IPO, so IPO happened in April. By the time we got to June, two months later, we suddenly had this massive spike in sales where we had over 3 million shares change hands. Now think about this, 6 million shares within a small number of days buying and selling with our share price dropping 50% made no sense when we only had 3 million shares that are issued. They were the only ones that could be traded.
We had a lot more shares being sold than were actually possible, just like in this article here. How that happens in theory with naked short selling is if you have a hedge fund and you have a broker, and the hedge fund says, "Hey, we're gonna sell $6 million of this company." You then have the broker who then says, "Okay, we'll just say we're gonna loan you the $6 million even though we don't have them at this point." They go and sell the $6 million. If they're trading at $5, that means they just made $30 million without buying anything. The broker then basically then says, "Okay, we can't deliver those within the next two days, so we'll just put in a Failure to deliver.
We'll give ourselves a period of time, which could be anything up to two months." What the broker and the hedge fund is hoping for is that there isn't enough buying pressure at the, if it go for $5 or $2.50, there's not enough buying pressure at $2.50 over the next two months, they can just quietly buy up again. If you look at our share price, you see that they quietly bought up, or it looks like they quietly bought up until we actually got to the end of July. It started going up again. August, two months later, again, straight away the whole thing gets sold down. We go 50% down again. Two months later, which is now in November, it goes down. Sorry, October, it goes down 50% again.
December, it goes down 50% again, right? It's just happened consistently again and again. Unfortunately, as it goes with the markets, you can't go back in time so easily to track all of this unless you take the whole thing legal. What you can do is you can track in real time, and we were really lucky to have Wes and his team start to track in real time, where you can actually start seeing is there a discrepancy between what the broker's actually trading and what they're reporting. If you can see that there is this gap, you can actually identify how many fake shares there are. Believe me, it's considerable, right? Now that we know that, now that we've actually gone out with those, with the report of that, we have a number of steps we can now take.
I'm gonna go through those different steps we're looking to take and the way we're going to do it, hopefully, that gives you just a bit of an overview of just what a crazy system this is. I can see that we do have Wes who's now come and join us. Wes, we're gonna take you off mute there. Hello, how are you today?
I'm doing good. As we say in Texas, "rode hard and put up wet," that's okay. You can't get a Texas guy down, we're good.
Okay. Right. Good. That's excellent. You know, Wes, this is the first actual Global Investor Meet that we're having, and I really wanted to bring you on board because this is an education for me as well as for everyone else on here in terms of what's happening with. Do you wanna share with everyone how long you have been at this and how this is not an exception, but actually this tends to happen all the time from what you're seeing out there in the market?
Yeah. Thank you, Roger, for having me. We can never bring too much light to what's going on in this illegal space. Our team started in 2000. I think we actually filed the first naked short selling case. For that matter, I think we were the first ones to discover it, and that's been demonstrated in the most recent documentary, Gaming Wall Street, by HBO Max. If your investors would watch that, it would help them understand how this happens and really how we uncovered it back in 2000 with Susanne Trimbath, who used to work at the Depository Trust Corporation. Of course, the Depository Trust Corporation clears about a good $1 trillion of financial transactions a year. In fact from where we sit, they're the main...
The members of that company, it's a privately owned company, it's a self-regulated company. It's overseen by the SEC, many of the members of that company are in fact the perpetrators. We call that in Texas, the fox in the henhouse. Okay? We uncovered it first in our case, Internet Law Library. I'm not gonna go through every case, I'll just highlight some of them. We've prosecuted 21 cases now in this space. We've done due diligence on over 72 companies, public companies. We helped lobby and get Reg SHO passed, that became effective in January of 2005. When Reg SHO first came out, there were thousands of companies on the Reg SHO list. Guess what? We're dealing with people that are very smart. What did they do?
They started marking all the tickets long versus short, 'cause that way they don't show up in your short interest, which really means in the typical case, Roger, frankly, your short interest from where we sit after looking at hundreds and hundreds of millions of pages of documents in 20 years, literally our team, it's probably 3 times, 2-3 times what the reported short interest is. 'Cause the SEC doesn't report that number unless, you know, it's marked short. If it's marked long and it results in a fail, then ultimately, it's not shown in your short interest. Many of them-
If I could just, like, just for the layman on the call, just to like go through that difference because some people might look at what's the short interest on Genius Group and say, "Hey, it doesn't look like you're being shorted that much." What we're really saying here is that when the broker is marking up that this was a, this was a transaction that happened, they aren't saying this was a short sale where someone has sold something they don't have. They actually said, "No, this is a real sale. We've actually bought it, and it was a real thing that actually sold," and they're just covering that up until they manage to capture the other side. That's why...
Yeah, that's exactly right, Roger. Again, you know, don't just believe what I say. Go to sec.gov, go to FINRA's website and look at about 150-200 regulatory fines that have been issued to corroborate everything I'm gonna tell you on this call today, including the mismarking of tickets, which is a violation of Reg SHO. It's further dissemination of false information into the marketplace, and that's really what this case at its most fundamental level is about. It's about telling people that these are real shares. It's about telling people that I loaned real shares. It's about telling people this is a short sale versus a, I mean a long sale versus a short sale. It's about, you know, selling shares you don't have and never delivering them.
It's about spoofing, which is again, misinformation. Posting baiting orders in order to send a stock down. Ultimately we put together a team. You can learn about our team if you want to go to our firm's website or I actually help fund a nonprofit that's run by what I would call the super stock people, the WallStreetBets people. It used to be some of the Reddit people. It's a nonprofit. Those people work there for no compensation. They can go to Naked Truth, nakedtruth.info, and you can see actually a sample of some of the complaints we filed. You can see a lot of these fines that have been issued by FINRA or SEC recently.
Now wait, I'm just gonna help you along here. This here is there's actually a really good FAQ that you actually did on the Naked Truth site, and it gives the Naked Truth website here as well, which explains everything you're doing and what's happening. I'm gonna drop this link in the chat and also, this is a link to your, to your Christian Levine Law Group as well, which I'm gonna drop in as well.
I thought there's so me super interesting things like even this here was from retail investors to try and hire you as an AMC manipulator where they wanted to raise $100,000 and they ended up actually hitting their amount to get there as well. As you were sharing basically what's been happening recently, I'd love for you to share how having retail investors get behind a company can really help a lot at really trying to-
No, no question, I will. Our team that we put together consists of Bob Blakey, who wrote the Racketeering statute. The RICO statute does not apply to federal claims for stock manipulation, but it does apply to state law claims. Many states have a state RICO statute here in the States too, which is automatic treble damages if you satisfy certain predicates. It consists of Rob Shapiro, who's the former Under Secretary of Commerce. Rob runs a company called Sonecon. It consists of my partner in these cases. John O'Quinn was my original partner, which was the lawyer that took down tobacco in Texas. He got us over $17 billion award settlement of against the tobacco companies. He sadly died in a very mysterious car wreck, let's call it that, 12 years ago.
Ultimately, I found Warshaw Burstein and Mr. Alan Pollack, who is my partner in these cases. Since then, I've brought on other law firms. If you wanna go to two pending cases that we've done, you can go to Northwest Bio. I brought in the firm called Warshaw Burstein to help with that case. We're kind of expanding our bench as this case grows, if you will. There's another case called Harrington, H-A-R-R-I-N-G-T-O-N. Both of those are pending in New York. Both of those are spoofing cases. At the end of the day, our team consists of about 25- 30 professionals that are the top backroom analysts. They understand stock lending. They understand clearing and settlement.
They understand all the games that are played. You know, we've uncovered crazy things like, you know, they'll put a put and a call of 50,000 shares on the option market, and they think that's a synthetic share, but the contract's never consummated. Two days before that option is to expire, they tear it up and ultimately those synthetic shares go away. It's really about fake information in the marketplace. I would also send your investors to a prior documentary that just got made public. The original owner of that documentary has decided ultimately to put it on YouTube or somehow on the internet. It's called The Wall Street Conspiracy. That was made about 7 years ago. That was about our client Overstock.com.
That was about our client, the Taser Gun company, that was about our client, Pet Quarters Inc, our client, Eagle Tech Communications, etc. At the end of the day, this is systemic. This isn't just in the States, it's worldwide. The bad news is for the perpetrators of this is more law firms, not only our group of law firms, but other law firms are starting to get on the train here to expose this and prosecute this. Recently, JPMorgan, as a company got fined over $900 million, finally a sizable fine, you know, for their spoofing of the metals market. They also got criminally prosecuted, three of their, you know, what I would call, officers in the company got prosecuted and convicted. Okay. Now whether...
That's on appeal, what I think you're gonna see is more criminal prosecutions. The playing field's changed in our favor for us, and I'll tell you why. By the time you count the 10 million Reddit WallStreetBets, you know, apes worldwide, by the time you count you and your company and the other companies now that are finally deciding to do due diligence on their company, now that they know the software exists for this, the proprietary systems we have for this, that we can actually root this out over time, there's a lot of companies, you know, not just with us, but other firms, which I welcome, doing this, including in Canada.
In fact, there's gonna be some that show up in London 'cause a lot of these undelivered shares, Roger, I believe are not in the States. Don't forget, besides clearing through the DTC, there's a thing called ex-clearing that's broker to broker. The information we're getting, for example, you know, if you want to talk about your company specifically, we found some large imbalances in your company. Imbalances are counterfeit shares. That's just through the DTC, Roger. That's just the first layer of the onion. You have to peel that back and do ultimately more analytics, which will take a lawsuit, which we'll be talking about, you know, later with you and the rest of your board.
The bottom line is ex-clearing, I believe, is now a bigger issue because these perpetrators know that we now know how to find this. How do they avoid that? They don't go through the DTC, which has an audit trail ultimately, because it has daily position reports, right, that you as a company can receive. In fact, that's how ShareIntel got some of this data that you, when you hired them and allowed them to do that service. The DTC provides you that service. It tells you how many shares each broker has each day. Ultimately though, that only applies to shares that they clear. Well, ex-clearing doesn't count that. Okay? Some dark pools don't count that.
Them selling the shares here, but then bifurcating the delivery and the delivery outside the DTC goes to Canada and goes to London and these other places. Guess what? I haven't proven this yet, but I believe those shares just sit there undelivered, and I call it the graveyard of shares. Okay? Ultimately, this is systemic. Wall Street has figured out a way, ladies and gentlemen, to make more money killing companies than building them. What could be more sick than that?
It's the most disgusting financial fraud I believe, this is my personal belief, but this was also John O'Quinn's belief, who was a billionaire. It's our team's belief that this is the largest commercial fraud in U.S. history, and it's being perpetrated by our prime brokers and some hedge funds, but mainly the prime brokers. Don't forget, prime brokers have a prop trading desk and they have stock lending. In many of these cases, I can't talk about specific cases, the SEC and FINRA have already said this in these regulatory fines. They're lending far more shares than they have. They'll give locates. They will publish easy to borrow when it's hard to borrow. Each day there's a list that's published, hard to borrow stocks, easy to borrow stocks. Okay?
I haven't gotten this information on your company yet, but I'll bet it's on the hard to borrow list, but that doesn't stop Wall Street. They'll say it's easy to borrow. They've even pre-programmed computers. Go to the SEC.gov and see the fines to say it's a long when it's a short automatically in the software. In other words, it doesn't take any human being to do it. It's pre-programmed. That's like premeditated financial murder, okay?
Is what it is. As I said on Fox Business News, this is simply stealing. That's what it is. At its base level, it's people stealing money, stealing jobs, hurting companies, including companies like yours that do great things. I mean, Northwest Bio, for God sakes, has immunotherapy for neuroblastoma for brain cancer, okay? It works. Can you imagine them attacking that company? Again, there's an endless number of these stories. Our team is committed to do more and more of these, and we're having to, you know, beef up our team in order to handle all that. We're in a good time to do this because the SEC is getting put in a box. The Justice Department is now prosecuting them criminally. The, the group of investors worldwide are growing and are pissed off, okay?
They're tired of this. They're tired of not letting a company make it or break it on their own, because Wall Street has tried to figure out some of these nuances. What investors need to do is they need to support these companies which is what, you know, the Reddit WallStreetBets, super stock people do, and I hope your investors do. Secondly, they need to get their congressmen, their senators, regardless of what, you know, province they're in in Canada or what state they're in in the United States. This is about a movement. This is about, you know, a rebellion. This is about, in effect, a revolution in part, against our financial markets. It's gonna take every investor, every board member, every lawyer, every, consultant and expert to bring this down.
I t's that large. Ultimately, you expose it one case at a time, you know, one share at a time and just root it out.
Yeah.
That's kinda the overview.
Great overview, Wes. I'm super happy, as I'm sure all of our shareholders and our whole team is, that you're basically working with us. I think it's fabulous that our last acquisition was a documentary company and that there's nothing better than for us to be able to be an example of how it's possible to bring retail investors together and get behind a mission-driven company to make a difference. I think so many people were so burned by what they saw happen with the whole GameStop squeeze that then got shut down by Robinhood, and like everyone's ready for another run at this thing, right?
I think that we have a number of things going for us which they didn't have going for them. I think the two biggest ones. I just wanna walk through a couple of the different actions that we can now take collectively together as well. I'm actually gonna do this for everyone as well just before I go through those actions and what I think is different between us and the likes of GameStop. The first one is that there is a link to The Wall Street Conspiracy: Down the Rabbit Hole. This is a sequel. There you can go find the original as well. You can watch it for free on this link here, so I'm gonna give you this link.
Each of the companies that Wes already mentioned, there's this one here Northwest that basically goes through their story. This is from The Washington Post. This one here which is basically the second company that was mentioned, Harrington. I also Like there's one which I find very fascinating that you're actually working with now, or Creatd, where they're putting all these different elements in place. I think they've got their AGM like this week. They're doing basically-
Yeah, that's Jeremy Frommer's CEO, yes.
Right.
Yes, we're working with them also.
Yeah. You can, like...
You're gonna see, Roger, you're gonna see. I can't get into specifics, but you're gonna see in the next month, in addition to whatever action we are gonna talk about with your company, you're gonna see the mother lode of all, you know, shares that have been issued that, you know, don't exist, come to the forefront. It is gonna pale GameStop. It is gonna pale AMC. It's gonna pale any of it because of how they've, the action that they've taken.
I can't talk, say which company, but I can tell you there's more coming and so your shareholders need to pay attention because ultimately this could be a turning point for all of us if that case can make it to first base, and we believe it can.
Right. Just going through each of the different steps, what our team can do, what investors can do, what you can do to help. If we were to break it down to three different elements, the very first one, which is by far the most important, is if our company does not need money from the markets, then we've got all the time in the world to solve this, and our investors can know that we're gonna keep on performing, keep on growing, keep on having analysts giving us higher and higher price targets. Eventually at some point, there's gonna be enough buying pressure on the stock. The first thing is have patience, and for us, make sure we're cash flow positive.
That's one big thing that as we actually go through this year, you're gonna hear this again and again from our management team, is that this is our focus to make sure we have a solid business which isn't in danger of what these guys want, which is to push us out of business so they never have to cover their shares, right? 'Cause the company went bust.
Yeah.
I'm sure there's many companies.
That is what we call the coup de grâce, okay? That is the coup de grâce. When that happens, ladies and gentlemen, it is the crime of the century because a bankruptcy judge signs an order canceling the equity, okay? Because the equity holders rarely get anything out of a bankruptcy. That allowed the criminals to go free, and I'm even told by a tax lawyer they didn't even pay taxes on it. Unimaginable to me.
Right.
You're exactly right, Roger.
Right. That very first one there, well, management team, we can make that happen by basically just having a very clear focus which is different. When we get to Q&A, I know some of you ask questions about that, you know, and basically do be aware that what we're doing with that is really quite different from what all the other EdTech companies are doing, where they're all still burning through cash, right?
Where we're like, "No, we wanna be ahead of this whole game because of what's happening right now." The second thing is if a bunch of short sellers push our price down by selling fake shares from $5 - $2.50, and then it goes straight up to $5 again, they can't make money 'cause they've gotta cover themselves back over the next two months at the $5 unless they just are constantly exposed. The biggest second thing is that we have enough people wanting to buy the shares. When we saw the likes of that happening in GameStop, for example, then everyone has to cover to buy their own shares back as well. You have the short squeeze, the price goes up massively.
That's down to what we can do by making sure retail investors are aware of what's happening to us, that we are under attack. As you say, if we have enough people coordinated for a good enough amount of time, then we can fight back that way alone. By having investors behind us.
Yes.
And t hat is the second thing that Genius wants to support. The third element, which is the fact that, well, that might slow down people wanting to buy our shares, or sell our shares legally and go do on somebody else, the third thing is then how do we expose this or flush it out? Like you were just saying, you were about to do this with some other companies. There are a couple of different mechanisms that other companies are using towards this. I just wanna share a couple that I know of and that we're discussing internally to see which ones we do.
I could see, for example, if I just take Creatd as an example, they're investigating a dual listing 'cause they say, "Hey, if we're listed on another exchange, then this could be much more difficult for someone to control our price and push it down." They're also looking at special dividends because if you're going out to the market with special dividend, then basically You're forcing the DTCC to force the brokers to say how many shares are out there, and so they basically get caught with their pants down. As you've said to me in the past, the problem with that is some of these brokers will rather just pay the dividend off themselves and pretend they still got less shares.
It has to be something like blockchain-based or selling, you know, actual shares in a subsidiary or something like that that actually means that you're forced to have to go down the line of actually exposing that.
Maybe selling shares to a private company you know?
Right. Exactly.
You've seen Torchlight and Metamaterial do that. Go look that up.
Got it. Got it. The, another thing is doing a special dividend in a different format or even what AMC did, which didn't really work for them in terms of doing the additional APE shares, right? But having preference shares or some other recom things like that. Another part is even delisting and listing again somewhere else, right, which actually forces everyone to have to then basically figure it out. We're not saying we're gonna do any of these at the moment. We're looking at all of them and we're getting your advice on the best path forward as well, but I do want our investors to know there are different options that can be taken that will at least basically help us to expose just how bad this issue is.
Do you wanna just share or put any color on that in terms of what you've seen working or that you've seen companies trying right now?
Yeah. I'll be happy to do that. The most successful one, I think, and it may not be an option for you, is what Torchlight did and Meta Materials did. Essentially issuing a preferred share in addition to when Torchlight merged with Meta Materials, which was a Canadian company. This is an oil and gas company, Torchlight was. Meta Materials is a different company. Not oil and gas. In essence, that company merged with Torchlight and as such, Torchlight owned 25% of the shares of Meta. In addition, when you got a Meta share, you got a preferred A share, which allowed you to convert that into a share of a private company that's not traceable.
Ultimately, you're gonna see that that caused massive havoc. In fact, FINRA actually shut the trading down, but of course only on the buy side, not on the sell side, similar to GameStop. That's an idea. I'll tell you some other ideas that are very simple that your investors need to really listen to this next statement. They need to take their shares out of margin accounts, okay? Every margin account agreement in the United States that I've read of Merrill, Goldman, Credit Suisse, UBS, Morgan, down the list, says that if you're in margin, they can lend your shares in the fine print. Oh, incidentally, when they lend their shares, they're going to short sellers, which are diametrically opposed to what you want the stock to do to go up. It's crazy. Believe it or not, that's legal.
That's not what our cases are about. Take your frigging shares out of margin. That's number one. Number two, put them in cash account, which in the States, not in Canada. I went up and gave a speech in Canada. Believe it or not, it's legal for them to loan your cash account shares in Canada. Not in the States. Under Rule 15c3-3, they have to be segregated almost in a separate group of assets because the company cannot encumber them, okay, which is what they're doing when you're in margin, 'cause they're loaning you money to buy more stock, right? Take them out of margin, and then put them in cash accounts and get a written confirmation from your broker that they are not lending your cash account shares.
Believe it or not, they lend cash account shares too. These people, in general, do not care, okay? When they run out of cash account shares, they're gonna lend nothing except air and but of course collect all the money, the negative rebate, they call it, you know, for the loan. Your customers or investors need to understand that. Especially for anybody that owns large groups of shares. Get those shares out, and if you don't need to trade them, take them out of the DTC and put them in your vault.
The, you know, most people aren't gonna do that 'cause they wanna trade their shares, but at least get them out of margin, at least put them in cash account, and at least get your investors to confirm, have their broker confirm in writing they're not lending their shares, and that they're not gonna lend their shares. That's important. Other ideas are the dividend idea. I would, you know, our team would like to be involved when you're gonna talk to your SEC lawyers about those different alternatives. I'd rather not get into specifics here because I think it gives up some strategy, but I do think there are multiple ideas to box this, okay?
Of course what you're already doing, which is monitoring this daily and tracking this in real time through the DTC. We're gonna have other discussions, which again, I'm not gonna get into the detail of 'cause it's privileged, about, you know, some other things we can do. I think that's scheduled actually for tomorrow morning.
We'll talk about some of that tomorrow. There's certainly, with the level of fails you have-I'm not there, but the level of imbalances you have and what we see going on with our analytics, your stock, we believe strongly is being manipulated. We have the identities of some of those. You know, we're still, it's still gonna take several more months to put all this together. But in the meantime, you know, you have the same symptoms of the other companies that we've looked at that unfortunately are under siege by these people. These, you know, these criminals basically, okay? Ultimately, I think we'll all prevail in this.
You know, for the most part, the vast majority of the companies that we've represented have made it, and that's the most important part. You know, it's, you brought up Patrick Byrne. You know, some people think he's a Looney Tune. Well, they thought I was a Looney Tune too, you know, when I first showed up in court. When I first showed up in court, just a funny story for you and your investors, the judge looked at me and said, "Mr. Christian, next time when you come back to court," this was in New York, I'm licensed in New York too, "why don't you just wear a space suit, okay?" I'm like, "Your Honor, if you knew how much time I put into this is real, Judge, this is real."
"Sure, Mr. Christian. Why isn't the SEC doing something about it?" Well, let's don't get into that. That's a long story. You can figure that out for yourself. You know, when Overstock.com went to the SEC with the information, Overstock.com got investigated. When Taser gun company went to the SEC with their investigation, which we had black and white evidence, they got investigated. Now some of that's changed. You know, the current Mr. Gensler is at least trying to do something, although the new rules, just so I'm on the record on this, really do not address or help this situation. It helps a lot of other things, insider trading, some more disclosures, this and that, some more transparency, but it doesn't say you must deliver shares. It doesn't eliminate the bona fide market maker exemption. There aren't many market makers I know that are bona fide.
Number three, you can only loan the share once. Until you fix those three things, this is gonna continue. This is gonna continue. Blockchain at least, you know, Patrick Byrne and Overstock.com did the first blockchain signed off by the SEC. That really hasn't worked either. It's worked in, to stop the fraud, but there's not enough liquidity in that space and i n that platform really to make it work. I was peripherally involved in that with their general counsel, who's a good friend of mine, Mark Griffin. Ultimately, we're on the right trail. We will prevail in this at some level. It's enormously complex, but the bad news for the bad guys is they know and we know how to find all this.
It just takes time and persistence and sadly, money. If there ever was a time to support this company, it would be now because ultimately, you cannot allow these people to prevail. I think the worm is turning, not just in your company over time, but in this whole space because there's more attention by very, very large groups of people. Ultimately, this is about a revolution against the system. It's what it's about, so.
Yeah. Well, with something I'll share with you and also for all of our investors on here as well is. Well, first of all, just thank you so much for just sharing. Great to have you on board because, like, you've been at this for so long. If there's one thing that everyone knows about me, it is that when there's a problem, we're gonna solve it. If it's a hard problem, we're gonna be even more determined to solve it, right? We're not gonna let any criminals be taking down our mission and our business and where we're going with this as well, provided we continue with the support from all of our investors and bring on board everyone that you know on board as well that actually would care about this.
Because if there's one thing we know how to do is to build a movement, this is a whole new area that I'm just learning about. There are 100% solutions which are making sure that we basically cancel out the wrong with what's right and moving forward in this way. I wanna just finish with basically a quick question. There were a couple of questions that came through. I'm gonna get to the Q&A in a moment with everyone, but I wanted to just finish this little interview with you with a few that came through.
Yeah, I've got five more minutes, so.
Okay, great. A quick one. This first one I can answer pretty quick. You might wanna add onto it as well. This one says, it's from Bash Ali, says, "Well, I wonder how Musk and Jeff and other big boys dealt with this. Surely they must be, you know, also well aware of naked short selling." I just wanna say one thing from my personal point of view, like is, like, Elon Musk tweeted out, "SEC stands for Short Seller Enrichment Commission," right? Like, 'cause he was so frustrated about this. How he ended up solving it eventually was just through grit and just getting more and more of an army of retail investors behind him until eventually the short sellers just got tired of it.
It's not like they don't still make money from him, but they, it's much, much more difficult now because of what's happened, although I'm sure he's getting hit by them a lot at the moment as well. You might have another perspective on that.
There's one thing which is probably one I can't answer, which is from Ross Goudie, who says just in terms of, I think it's here, "Is this kind of thing getting worse, these acts of fraud with the likes of BlackRock or effectively any of these AI-based companies out there?" You know, I have a suspicion that what's happening to us could be run by bots where someone just programmed it in to say when volumes go this much on Genius, then start selling and so on, but I have no evidence of any of that. What do you think? Is this gonna get a worse thing?
Well, y eah, let me add to your first one. It's so important that you raise the money you need to stay, you know, in business, and that you expand your business and maintain profitability. You continue to build that income stream, that net income, that EBITDA, whatever you wanna say, is critical because guess what? It makes it harder for them to perpetrate their lies, okay? Don't forget, they've got people in the press bashing you typically. They've got people on boards bashing you. Incidentally, most of those people are paid by the bad people. They got class action lawsuits they bring against you. Like Patrick Byrne said, it's a perfect storm. I got class action lawsuits and SEC investigations. They're saying I'm a fraud on the boards.
The Fortune wrote a, a negative article about Overstock.com down the list, okay? Expect it all because these financial people own the financial press too. I mean, not own it, but they heavily influence it. It's so important you continue to build your business and grow and beat 'em that way, okay? Because that's a critical component for our experts to say, "This company is making money." When it makes money, the stock goes up. Jurors understand that. It's real simple, okay? Now, if you're losing your rear end, okay, it's more difficult for me to convince a jury that this manipulation is really materially impacting you. Having that support and growing your business, right on, buddy. That's right on the money. On the other... I'm sorry, what was the second question? Oh, is it getting worse?
The AI-driven.
Yeah.
There is no question. Look at our Harrington complaint and Northwest Bio complaint in New York. There is no question that this is to some extent pre-programmed. There are algorithms that are being built to do this spoofing, okay? Period. Again, that's premeditated murder. Spoofing events essentially posts all these offers up, okay? Stacks them up in big blocks ultimately to send the stock to hell, okay? Then once it drops down, you know, about 20%, they'll go in and buy it in and repeat the process, okay? None of those, none of those offers ever got consummated. They take 'em down two minutes before the close. Again, this is about, at its base level, I like keeping things simple. It's about lying, it's about cheating, it's about stealing, okay? Is it getting better? I mean, getting more? No.
I think it's starting to get less, and here's why. Many of the hedge funds have been run out of business, okay? Because they're cracking down on this, including the clearing firms, 'cause they see a freight train coming. They understand we're getting close to this blowing up. That's the negative. It's, you know, ultimately this has gotta get solved. How it gets solved without blowing up the world, I don't know, okay? Some of our experts think it's, you know, a massive problem. At the end of the day, it will get solved, okay? It's no different than 2008 or anything else. At the end of the day, I think it's diminishing, not growing, but it's certainly persistent and there.
Unfortunately, companies with a $2 billion or less market cap are the most vulnerable, regardless of what you do or what your business plan is. But I'm telling you, we have them on the run on this, in my opinion. Not just because of our legal team, because of you and the other probably 10 or 15 or 20 companies that are jumping on this freight train at one time to start a movement. Add to that, the Reddit group and everything else, and regulators who frankly are afraid for their life. I talked to a Canadian regulator, a board member that said, "My God, I may have to move," okay? "And become anonymous because they're gonna come lynch me," okay?
I'm serious. You know, that's where this is headed, is more people understand that their pension funds have been raided, that the entire wealth of one generation has been wiped out. I mean, our experts say it's over $100 trillion in 20 years out of our economy that they've stolen. That counts credit default swaps, stocks, bonds, T-bills, everything, not just common stock. Common stock maybe is only $20 trillion, okay? Over 20 years.
$1 trillion a year, you know, no big deal. Anyway, you know, we're gonna get there. I'm optimistic. you know, we don't really make any money unless we win these cases, so at the end of the day, we're Texas Hold 'em all in unless I'm in a pine box somewhere, this is gonna continue, okay?
Thank you so much, Wes, for just coming and sharing light on this. Can everyone just please post a thank you, Wes, or a some kind of gratitude to Wes in the comments because it is not normal for him to come and just give so much time as he has to us, and I really, really appreciate it. I know you've got another call to go to, Wes, I wanna say thank you much.
I do. Thank you. You know, go forward and let's go get 'em, okay?
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thank you, Wes.
Bye-bye. You bet.
Thank you. All right. Great to have everyone's feedback on here as well. That's really fantastic. Hey, I'll tell you what I'm gonna do now. Like I said, we're pretty much on schedule for the third part where many of you have asked questions. I've got about 20+ questions here that I'm gonna run through. Some of them were pretty similar to each other, so we'll kind of group them together. As I'm going through this, if other questions pop up that you wanted to ask, we may not have time on this call, but I do wanna make sure that we're hearing everyone. If there is anything that we can be getting back to you on or get onto the next call, we will.
Flora's gonna check through as well, 'cause if there's anything, any burning questions that are coming up again that it does make sense for us to answer right now, then we'll capture some of those as well. Even on what Wes shared, I mean, he's gone now, but if there is one or two things that I might be able to add, you know, some color to, or areas of Flora, we can do that too. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna stop. I'm not gonna be sharing my screen right now 'cause I've actually got all the notes here, and I'm just gonna run through them. They are kinda grouped together. The very first couple are around communication.
Some of the things I've kinda covered on this call, but I wanna just dive a bit deeper. Two questions here. One is, "How do you plan to keep investors better informed through 2023?" The second one is, "Will Genius Group have more company news and postings on financial sites?" On that first one, definitely the IR website, which you all have basically access to, you know that. We know it's a one-way stream, right? It's like us sharing what is official, and everything that's on that site also goes to the SEC, so it's also logged there.
We're seeing more and more that out there, that if people are posting, you know, other CEOs, posting on Twitter or social media, blogs and so on, that, you know, SEC is not making a big deal about the fact of it if, as long as it goes to everybody, right? For us to make it very public that we're gonna have a newsletter every single week, it's gonna have a blog finally every week. We're not always gonna be talking about crazy stuff like the naked short selling. We'll be talking about basically, "Hey, here's the latest things going on as well," but it's all gonna be public, which means that there's gonna be much, much more of a dialogue and much more. It's my comfort zone to be sharing more of that as well, right?
'Cause last year for sure was very uncomfortable. We were playing defense, and I'm much more used to playing offense, right? That's a huge philosophical shift. We've got the whole team finding the smartest ways that we can actually do that together. Yes, we're gonna have that weekly blog as we go forward. At the same time, when it comes to the whole company news, the postings, financial sites, we actually have done a lot of that. If you haven't been watching the most recent like posts that have been going out there, you can come back to this site here where we do track as well as what we do as our, you know, formal press releases.
We do also track here under the media section, all of the activity where we get captured by the press out there. We also have all the latest blog news and so on. You'll see on here, you know, that we've got pretty much, you know, a couple of times every single week where we do have posts that are coming out in different areas. It does have GeniusU posts here as well. It also has all of our media posts in here. When Sales Magazine wrote about us, when Elite Business wrote about us, we'll have all these elements in here as well. We 100% are gonna keep growing that as well.
I do wanna say that this is as important that we have you as our, as our shareholders, if you're on Reddit groups, if you're actually like, you know, working in investor groups yourself, as we have many out there, then the more that you're able to kind of spread this on, the better as well. We wanna do our part of it. Anything you do can help as well would be absolutely fantastic. We did used to have a Facebook group, which we had to close down for all the reasons we just said with the SEC, but I miss those conversations, right? Us to actually be able to build out again ways that we can be sharing the latest when it comes out, would be really valuable, right?
On that first one there, absolutely on both sides, you're gonna see a different level of communication, really starting from this call right now, right? The next set of questions are to do with the whole stock manipulation side, right? What we've just been talking about. The first question is, do you believe the stock price is being manipulated by short sellers? Well, I'm pretty much sure after you listen to the first hour, the answer is yes, absolutely. What is the plan to fight back against the share manipulation?
Just again, to reiterate on the different steps that we talked about, the number one, which is the one really we were focusing all of last year, is like, let's make sure that we shift this business from the model it's currently on to one which is not just growing, but is cash positive as well. I'm sure many of you are watching other EdTech companies in the marketplace. I'm sure you know that there were many that were wanting to get public and didn't actually manage to go public last year and now are having to really cut their costs massively because of where they're at in terms of the cash flow.
All the public companies, you know, the likes of Udemy or Coursera or Duolingo, the ones that are the largest EdTech companies that listed, all of their accounts are public. You can see how much cash they're burning through. You can also see how much their share price has dropped as well. There is like, while we're very clear there is this market manipulation, these market manipulators can really only make money easily in downtimes. It's why at the last crash there was such a big issue. It's why now they're more likely to be making money by making prices go down, because it's much more guaranteed that they can make that happen than trying to push the price up.
I'm sure in boom times, they have a whole different set of things that they try. Because of that, like what's really important is that we, number one, make sure that we are sustainable in everything that we're doing, and every message you hear about what we're doing within the company is about what we're doing to be cash flow positive while still maintaining like positive growth as well, which is very unusual in the marketplace. We have achieved that in past years, and we now basically are moving into the coming years where you're gonna be hearing about our earnings guidance in our upcoming calls.
I think that as you listen more and more, you're gonna know why we're making the changes that we're making, to really make sure that cash flow and also profitability are top priorities. The second thing is, as you just heard as well, how we connect up our retail investor community is really important. You know, I was part of that whole GameStop growth that happened. I was rooting for the small guys like everyone else was. To see what then happened, where because most of them were actually going through one app, which was Robinhood, when they stopped all the sell orders, it just basically cut all the momentum. We saw what happened after that. I think we are in a really strong position that we are a global company. We do have shareholders all over the world.
We have people on all multiple exchanges that aren't all using the same app. It's much, much more difficult for any one organization or company to shut down our retail investors that are all over the world as well. Because a big part of our growth this year is our investor community with our Investor Campus, who better to actually basically show as an example what's possible in the marketplace when the small guy basically gets together and can then beat the guys that are doing criminal actions on the at the top level in a way that's opaque to everybody else as well. That can only happen if we ourselves have transparency, and that's why it's a really, really important second step.
The third step, which is all the actual mechanisms that are in place, which just unfortunately is the way it is, the companies themselves have to put these things in place, right? To actually, you know, hire lit lawyers, like to take these actions. It does take time to do all these elements, right? They all basically are on the table right now as well.
We've already gone through a number of different things that other companies have tried, whether it's a dual listing, whether it is a spin-off or a special dividend, whether it is making sure that we've actually got opportunities to be able to kind of like change the buying pressure by ourselves having our own company buyback, or whether it is basically doing a reverse stock split, which basically again, changes the price. These are all possibilities that other companies have tried in the past, and they're all on the table right now for us to go through. We do have our next board meeting coming up. We are discussing all these elements, and we will be as soon as we're ready to kinda share, here's the steps, be going through those.
In reality, those first two already are the biggest key things for us to make sure that they find there's other targets in the marketplace that are more attractive than we are off the back of what they've actually, you know, set up on our company right now as well. Basically, you know, in terms of the plan, you'll be hearing that as we go forward, but we do have all these different options that I've just mentioned that are on the table for us right now as well. I think the biggest thing about this is what is our commitment to solve it is 100%, right? That, like, for me, there is nothing more important than making sure that we have a share price that reflects the true prospects as well as health of our business.
At the moment it just is ridiculous. It makes no sense where things are right now, which is all the more reason that I'm super happy I get a chance to speak with you all and that we actually can be doing this as a team together as well. Let's continue on, right? We have the next point. These are more on the share price, actually. Why have we gone from $36- $0.30? So hopefully, again, just by, you know, sharing where we're at.
I do wanna share one thing as well, because even in conversations with our board, you know, like, we have board members who are on many public companies, and some of them say it is not unusual to see the market cap of companies being less than their net asset value. I mean, maybe not as low as, like, under 20%, but where basically it appears that the company is worth a lot more than it should be by a share price. We do know that we're living in a very unusual time over the last 12 months as well, by seeing what's happened with this bear market, by most people thinking there's gonna be a recession this year ahead. It's not like things can immediately change.
However, I've seen enough different examples of companies that when they start taking action in the right way, see a dramatic shift in their share price. Even if we just go back 6 months, we had a pretty healthy share price, right? Things can happen fairly quickly, but that's no prediction of what will happen because none of us can know, right? Other than to actually just do all the right thing to move forward as well. Why has it gone from the, you know, the $36 down to $0.30? Couple of things to take note of. like, we listed at $6 a share. That was our IPO price.
I would have as little explanation for how it could go from $6 up to $36 within the first day as I do for why it drops down to $0.30, right? I do believe there's things going on in the market that I don't understand, which you may not understand either, but that basically by us really realizing that this is a challenge that we need to solve, that we find those ways to solve it.
For me, the fact that we had, you know, a $6 IPO price, and since then two analysts come out at a $12 price target and an $18 price target tells me we should be looking for more analysts to bring on board, which I know Flora has been working on, that we're working towards, like, you know, what we can be doing in this area. When an analyst does, basically a report on you, what they're doing is they're looking at other companies in the marketplace. They're taking comparables. They're not just plucking it out of thin air.
They're saying, "Well, based on your metrics and based on what you're doing versus what they're doing, based on your forecast, based on their forecast, based on your financials, based on their financials, this is the price point which actually we're willing to put our name behind." I think that that's really important for us to keep on seeing that grow with the analysts seeing that as well. None of that makes any difference if we have this illegal activity happening. All the more reason for us to build on that as well. I think that's one of the most important things is if we saw the analysts giving us lower and lower and lower, then any company should have concern over that, right? Where we're going and the directions we're taking, internally, I believe have been the right ones.
Like I said, that's only 1/3 of the story. The other two thirds are how the retail investors are supporting us and how we're communicating with them as well, right? Which is the big message, as I've said, that I really wanna get out in this call here. The next question: "What is Genius Group doing, going to do to increase the share price and gain traction?" I think we pretty much answered that with everything that we've just gone through right now as well.
A large part of this is that even though, you know, this isn't gonna happen overnight, the fact that we're gonna keep on giving updates and sharing what we're doing and what you can do to help as well, I really hope that you'll see, just like we used to have in the past, where our investor community was actually one of our strongest communities, that we get back to that same place again, where all of you who were part of those communities in the past now come join and see that we're not just here to educate ourselves on how to be better investors, but we actually, as a result of being a Genius Group investor, get the inside scoop and the inside story on what actually a company can do, to actually be able to battle against these kind of activities that are out there as well.
Next question: "Why would the Genius Group share price move back up if we continue losing money?" Well, that's justifiable. That's exactly what you heard from Wes say as well. It's like, well, if you have these short sellers that are trying to aim for companies where they know that if they stop the company from being able to raise any more money, then doesn't that mean they'll go out of business? If that happens, then you're gonna be in a position where you can actually just write off your entire liability on the shares that you should be covering.
The answer is obviously yes, which is why it's so important for us not to be losing money and for us to be actually going back to a philosophy that we actually had pre-IPO, which is to be positive share EBITDA, right? Like, for us, our positive EBITDA, at least future EBITDA, and being in a position where our growth rate would enable us to be able to cover itself is a really, really important part of what we do. We were very lucky in that basically in the years beforehand, we did not once go out to an institutional investor, or go to a venture capital firm for any of the funding all the way through to the IPO, which in itself I believe is quite unusual, right?
That's because it was internally funded through our students and our partners, including many who are listening to me right now. The whole point that we basically were able to raise money effectively even easier when we weren't listed than we are listed right now, right, just goes to show that, like, we should be the opposite. It should be that by being a listed company, it makes it easier for us to actually raise the money, and we wanna get back to that position where that's the case. Which means that we actually solve this problem that we have with us right now. One part, like we said, number one is to make sure that we are treating the business differently.
Even if that means that we're not growing quite as fast, but we're actually cash flow positive because of that, we're positive EBITDA, this is like a super high priority for our management team right now. Another question: "Help us understand the path from $0.35 per share to $15- $20 per share as per analyst valuations." It's really those same three things, right? The only question is, well, how long does it take to get there? If we weren't even aware that there was this illegal trading going on, as you heard from Wes, you know, we're talking about thousands of small cap companies that are out there, many of them are have seen their share price drop massively.
They're not, they're not hiring Wes right now, right? They may not even know Wes exists, and they don't even know short selling is a thing because it's technically meant to be illegal, right? The fact that we could still be in a position where we don't even know this is happening and we're scratching our heads figuring it out, I'm just really happy we now do know. Obviously, if we'd known earlier that would have been how could we have known? Now that we do know and we just know basically, like who the enemy is, right, at least from the point of view of what their strategies are and what the counterattacks are, that puts us in a very different position of strength right now.
The question is, like how long does it take to go from $0.35 up 10 times to $3.50, up 100 times to $35, right? For some companies, that takes a decade. For other companies, we've seen like a 10x growth or 100x growth within a matter of days, if not weeks, when there's been a short squeeze or something like that has happened. I can't say at all how it's gonna be. I'd be wrong to say what it would be. All I know is that if we do all the right things, and we put the right pressure on basically the value of these shares going up with all the activity we're doing, then we're gonna be in a very strong position going forward.
I can assure you, we have many supporters out there, including the finance community, that want to see us succeed as well, right? Which is why I'm giving you a 100% commitment that we're gonna find a way to make this work and we're gonna find a way through this if we do this together. The next question, "How long is it gonna take?" Yeah, okay. So similar question as well. Again, same thing, how long did it take for us to drop that value down? It wasn't even a year, right? Even from the $6 down, it wasn't even half a year. How long does it take now going forward has everything to do with like how quickly we can band together and actually work together on this as we go forward as well.
One thing that I do wanna add as well as something which I believe we have that other companies don't have, as well as having the global reach, so that we can't be cut off over one app, as well as having a mission-driven global community that came in largely because they cared about the mission and where we're going rather than just making a quick buck. A third thing, which is that we do understand social media. I do have a strong following on YouTube, on Twitter. I've gone very quiet on all of that over 2022 for all the reasons I shared earlier, 'cause I myself was not aware and clear enough myself on what I could or couldn't say, so it was better to just say nothing.
Now basically where I'm now clear about that, we do have a really strong platform together with many influencers out there that are the people that wanna be part of our faculty. We have a very, very strong way to get out to the people that care, especially the investor communities. With that in place, I do believe that now just consistently going out with the right message is gonna get all the right people on our side. To answer the question, how long will it take? I would say hopefully sooner rather than later, right? Okay, couple of questions here. This one, these are more general in different areas, and then on the ATM that's just happened. First one, what is Genius Group doing to regain the shareholders' trust?
This is a bit of risk. We even had a conversation before this call, should we even have the chat open, right? That was because most investor calls do not have an open chat. You can't just openly just have your share and so on. I made the point that I feel that having a chat open will simply build more trust. I'm hoping that on this question here, which is how do we regain shareholders' trust, that just having this call helps in one step before that. I'd actually love, again, just to put myself at risk, I love it that just from me asking that question, is this helping to build trust? Please just type a yes or a no, right? 'Cause it's okay if you feel no, right? That's okay too.
It's good for us to know that too. If I see in the chat and just see if it's a yes, if it's no, this helps our team and everybody to just get a sense as to kind of like, okay, do we trust enough our shareholders that we're all gonna be doing the right thing as well? It's very nice to see all the yeses coming through. This is super awesome. Thank you, guys, and I'm gonna be downloading this later, so I can just come back and see all the different people on here. It's great to see so many of our partners and so many of our longtime investors here as well, which is super cool. Thank you very much for that. Yeah, they keep on coming in.
Again, this is we know it's a long journey, right? This is a first step. I really hope that everyone's on this call will also come for the one that we're gonna have in February, the one we're gonna have in March, that you'll follow along on the weekly updates as well. Feel free, like, you know, to post what else you'd like to hear more about, what you'd like to see. Wes is not alone. We have a number of other people who are in our community that also are very proactive and are very knowledgeable in this area as well.
As you know, like we've got Timothy, who was on our entrepreneur summit, who was the ex deputy director of the FBI, who's now on our board as well, and who also has great connections to support what's going on right now as well. We have got big guns behind us to make this work, which I think is really super important. First of all, number one, doing exactly what we're doing right now to regain shareholders' trust. Number two, you know, building communication channels which are compliant with SEC, which means that they are public, which means SEC will have no issue with them, and keeping the communication open as we go as well.
I'm gonna when I bring Flora on later as well, I think Flora's had a tough time like coming on board onto a company which has had this challenge with the share price, and she is the number one person connecting with all of the investors. I'm gonna get her on later to share any other questions that are on. Just so for you to see as well that she is an awesome live human being that's working super hard behind the scenes with Erez and the team to support all of us as shareholders as well.
Also on top of those elements there, the weekly newsletter, the blogs, everything like that, you know, giving the opportunity for any questions that you have for them to be answered in a public forum like this, is really, really important as well, right? I'm just gonna just mention a few things on here as well as all the yeses. Some of you have put in kind of qualifying things in here. Yeah. Lee said, "Yes, this I think is helping building trust." We've got Alan here. Daphne, your actions are building trust. That's a yes. Many other yeses. Olivia, yes, with honesty I see from you and the experts that you call.
When I say calling experts, we'll do a YouTube video with the likes of Wes. We'll see if it's possible to get to some of the other companies that are getting affected by this as well and speak to their CEOs as well, right? Like, there's no reason why we can't be the ones that are really shining a light, which Wes himself is trying to get onto this with a number of companies. People have no idea are getting affected by this right now as well. And we can be a platform for them as well. You've got Francis saying, "Yes, it's a long journey. Hang in there." Thank you. We've got Fi, "Yes.
Good to be updated again and reconnect." Olivia, "Having key partners and experts applying GeneSys Wealth Dynamics principles." Arlene, "Honesty, yes, but it will take time and further proof action." David, "Shining light on negative news highlights our strengths in transparency, honesty, and connection." I think that this is probably one thing that's really key for me is that we're in a different ocean now, right? We've kind of like gone from a pond where we all were supporting each other to a pretty big ocean, and oceans have sharks. Oceans have all sorts of creatures that you wouldn't have were even existed. The fact we're there, we just gotta build a stronger ship. That's what we need to do, right?
Then we're gonna be able to sail this ocean, and at the end, it's gonna be worth it. A couple of other points here. Share buyback. Will there be any buyback of the Genius Group shares? That was one of the options. That is a possibility that is out there. Obviously, if a company buys back one of the shares, it pulls out some of the shares from the pool. It gives buying pressure because you've effectively, you know, got more buyers than sellers for a period of time. If we still have the short sellers out there, they're just gonna pick up more shares when they see the share price going up. We've gotta be very delicate at what we do decide to do and how we do it.
Having all the options available to us, this is one of the reasons why we have the likes of Wes, and the kind of advice that he's giving us right now as well, right? We have some questions here also about what we just announced yesterday, which was what's called an ATM or, which is basically a facility for more funding, right? There's a question here, does it mean that on that facility, does it mean that Global Corporate Finance, which is providing facility, will buy 7.5 million shares at current market price of around $0.03 a share, give or take a bit? To be issued over an 8-month period at Genius Group's discretion.
That over a 30-month period, the company has discretion to issue shares at an 8% discount off the market price. That's definitely not correct. No one can buy our shares at $0.03 a share, right? Even if our shares are only at $0.30, an 8% discount on $0.30 is still only, what is that? That's like, you know, like 0.2% off, or $0.002 off. Basically, it means that and they can't call any shares on us.
It's not like, with the way an ATM works, it's not like, they'll say, "Okay, we wanna buy this many shares." It's like, "No, we get to say when we want to sell them." It means that we always have that access, that $7.5 million. Of course, we're not gonna do it in a way that's gonna be bad for shareholders where we are selling it at $0.30. That makes no sense for any of the shareholders, right?
It'll be when we see the share price recovering, when we've got great news in the market, when we can see things going up at a level which actually can bear that 8%, then we say, "Great, let's actually get some extra cash for the company." What we're doing right now, given the share price of where it's at, is we're basically saying, "Let's make sure that we are covering ourselves from a cash position, so whatever happens, we're not gonna run out of money," right? Because that's the only way that these short sellers win. Let's make sure that we keep on giving out the message, "Hey, we're not gonna run out of money. You can keep on trying to take us bankrupt.
It's not gonna happen. As long as we basically always have cash there or ability to get to cash, then we're gonna be fine. If we're cash positive, we don't have to go looking for the cash, right? We're really, really careful at how we're managing things right now. We have Erez, our CFO, who's awesome at the work that he's doing at making sure that we are really being conservative in the way that we're building the business right now as well, right? A couple of other questions came off this as well. I'll just read them through together because I think the answer is gonna be quite similar.
Given that the share price is trading at 10% of its intrinsic value at best, would seeing that this as a prohibitively expensive way to finance expansion, unless the new projects yield 10 times the normal returns. Also why is there a need to raise such a large sum, $7.5 million? Is that rock bottom prices? The current market capitalization is $7 million. Current price is $4. This means another 20 million shares. To all of those, again, maybe that's a misunderstanding in the way the press release was written or how it reads. This is no different from taking a $7.5 million overdraft from the bank but not drawing any of it down until you need to later, right? Not quite like that, but you get the idea.
We're not gonna use this until we have a stronger share price, right? We're not diluting at basically the current market cap or the current share price. It's there for when we're at the right share price. Putting it in place now just gives us a very solid way forward, to again send to the market a message that we got cash, right, whenever we need it. We have a final one. This corporate action seems to fall into the MO of the shorts where they short the company into extremely low prices, force company to raise money at a steep discount. Again, they haven't forced us to raise any money at a discount at all. We haven't set any of the pricing on this.
I would like to say to everybody, what's really important is that the convertibility on our convertible debt, if Ayrton, who's our company there, wanted to convert that, it was actually set at a much higher price. It was at over $5 when we reported that at the time of that convertible debt. Even our latest acquisition of Revealed Films also was basically at a conversion price of $5. We've got our acquisitions and everyone who's on the inside of our growth and seeing where we're growing are willing to take a different share price in basically how they value our company compared to what the actual market is at the moment as well, right? That's all positive messages for the market as well, which I think is really, really important.
I think we can do a better job at being able to stress to people we're not needing to actually, you know, draw on any of this right now. It will only happen after the right market approvals. Again, just from a technical point of view, so everyone knows that generally as a new public listed company, you're not able to get SEC approval on an ATM, which is basically like An ATM sounds just like it is, an ATM where you can take the money out whenever you want. You can't get approval for one from SEC for at least 12 months, which means we're not expecting SEC to even approve it until April time. Of course, we're not gonna look to draw down any of that money before then anyway.
By basically, like, again, we could have been clear about that as well, so everyone would know, "Oh, okay, we're not talking about you suddenly, you know, diluting shares now. This is for later." Okay, I know we've gone to 1.5 hours. I do have a number more questions I'm gonna answer, so we're probably gonna go on for another 10- 15 minutes. Hopefully, you're okay to stay. If you do have to go, if there's any final messages you wanted to leave for me or the team, please post them down, and then we would love to hear from you. I'm gonna go on to some of the questions which are business related. The first one, what's currently being done to reduce expenses?
We basically, internally, as many of you know, we put plans together every year for each of the different companies. Within each of those companies, we basically treat them all as profit centers, so each one basically is achieving a certain profit with its own revenues. We have got all sorts of different synergies that obviously come from acquisitions where you can bring things together and centralize them. All of these different elements at the next earnings call, we'll be sharing what the benefits of this have been so far and what we see them being in this coming year as well. We won't necessarily wait until our earnings call when we have our final audit to share last year's numbers before we give guidance on this next year's numbers, right?
We're just finishing up some final things on our current forecast numbers so that the whole team feels very comfortable in what we're gonna share, and then we'll be sharing the earnings guidance for this coming year. You've already heard what our big focus is for that year as well. Each of the different team leaders that we have, many of you know of many of our team leaders. They've been very successful in the past at creating profitable businesses. The pandemic now is over from the point of view of our locations, and we are now basically, like, seeing really incredible growth, as you've seen in our last earnings call. Basically, when we share that with you'll see all those different areas in which we're bringing the cost down.
Many of you already know, as we've shown in last earnings calls, that we already have got a very low marketing cost per student compared to other companies. We also have a very powerful student metrics that goes all the way through from basically those earnings, through to the actual revenues that comes through from each of those new students that comes on board. By us actually streamlining what we're doing right now can make a huge difference to basically the growth of our business as well, which makes it possible for us to have growth and have positive cash flow at the same time as well. Do you expect that GNS will generate an operating profit? When do you expect that we'll have an operating profit or free cash flow positive? Same thing.
Cannot say right now exactly all the details. Other than know that we are very busy on it, and we're going to be coming back to you on that. In the coming meetings we're having, we'll see if we can get some guidance in place, hopefully by February, if not, definitely by March. I'm pushing for that to make sure that we can do that earlier. How is the integration process of all the acquisitions going? What sort of efficiencies have been so far and maybe expecting in the future? I'm just picking a couple of different things here that Flora has written down from the quarter three earnings call where I can share those things. We did mention the integration process. It will do take several months of our strategy, which is what we have been doing.
Focusing efforts on top-line product synergies between different platforms. UAV, the MBA programs, how that links in with the investor and the entrepreneur campus. In fact, we've got the team here with me right now in Warsaw, where we're actually working on exactly this right now. We'll be sharing that with you coming up. Full curriculum for the full year, you'll see our entire product line. Redesign all the processes to make sure they're all consistent. We've already brought together all the finance functions, communication also centralized, we're looking for a smart way to bring together social media together with our investor relations. We talked on the earnings call about the Genius Formula and how that's now being used across all the companies and how we're integrating that as well.
If you missed that call, definitely go back, listen to that as well if you can. Any change to marketing or converting free students to paying students? This has, like, been an ongoing focus of ours. The whole idea of the Genius Formula is how simply can we actually bring on students for less than $1, and then how well can we then actually have a student spending over $10, right? We've done that consistently since we started. You can extrapolate in your own mind what would that look like once we get to 10 million or 100 million students. Basically, our goal is to keep on improving on that metric as we keep on growing the number of students that we have as well. Then, final couple of questions.
How should shareholders view additional M&A in terms of increasing the value of GNS ecosystems? Our tight acquisition strategy, well, first we have been thinking about how do we build the content side in terms of core curriculum and then supplemental curriculum to that. Also acquiring industry certifications with what we did with UAV, for example, government accreditations that we can then apply across the board. We did share earlier that, like, we are now, as we said in the earnings call, bringing on influencers that already have got the ability to actually then bring their students with them.
If you wanna get to 100 million students, it's a whole lot easier getting 100 celebrity influencers who have great content that have 1 million each than going out looking for those students one by one, right? Basically, you'll be hearing as we go through this year about our strategy of what we're looking to build in terms of integrating certifications, where there are very few EdTech companies that actually own their own university that can accredit programs and at the same time link in with the influencers that already attract masses of students in for the things that people really want to learn, right?
Also at the same time, looking at saying, "What can we do acquisition-wise in terms of technologies?" I don't think it's gonna be any surprise to say that obviously, acquisitions can either cost a lot of money or they can basically cost shares if you've actually got shares at the right share price. If they don't have either, you need to have to be much more creative about how you do acquisitions or when do you do acquisitions, right? We're keeping all of that in mind when we're actually looking at our acquisition strategy, where, like we said before, cash and positive EBITDA is the number one most important thing.
With our current acquisitions, we already have the potential, as we've already said, for strong growth within this coming year. Also, what is the actual development of GeniusU and the possibility to invest in the Metaverse? This is a really great subject because we also have gone through a whole series of kind of legal viewpoints in terms of what is the SEC going to regulate us on when it comes to our GEMs idea of credits, and can we make them a cryptocurrency? Can we create up a Metaverse in the right way? We just had our first call today about Genius Educator Metaversity. Some of you may have been on there as well.
We now are at a point where we know what the SEC will or will not be happy with, what we can do to actually set up the GEMs as a credit system, so we can actually have student credits right now, and we can integrate that into a 3D virtual reality. We also were talking, as we have since the IPO, about the AI side. We now have GPT-3. Many of you may not be aware that GPT-4 is coming out in the next couple of months. Each version of GPT, which is the AI platform, is 100 times more powerful than the one before. So GPT-3 is 100 times more than GPT-2. GPT-4 is 100 times more than GPT-3. GPT-3 has got over 1 trillion neuronets connecting all the information together.
GPT-4 will have over 100 trillion. 100 trillion is about the same number of neuronets that you will find in your brain, which means we're about to actually hit a crossing point of having now a platform that we can use which is gonna be technically as smart as we are. That's happening within this year, right? Basically, we of course are embracing all the AI. We've been talking about how this is coming our way, and this is where I get super excited. I get much more excited by that than talking about fighting crooked traders. Basically, this is something which I wanna be spending a lot more time talking about in the upcoming investor calls that we're gonna be having as well.
Then from there, we'll be sharing with you the next steps of getting involved in this, for those of you who already are involved, like, you know, what that all means for us within the first half of this year, which is kind of what we're predicting at the end of last year. The last question I love is, like, does Genius Group think it was a good idea to list on the New York Stock Exchange? You know what's really interesting is that the idea of going public in order for us to make it easier for our shareholders, to have liquidity and for us to be able to attract more shareholders and to grow, we've had a very unfortunate start to our time on the New York Stock Exchange, I'm looking at this on the long term.
I think our whole team is looking at this on long term. Everything we do is to say, "Is this gonna make us a stronger company by 2030? Is it gonna actually make us, like, make a dent in education by 2040?" Because we're always thinking in that way, anything short-term that happens which is the wrong thing, it's like, "What can we learn from this and how can we improve on it?" So I don't regret it, 'cause it's too early to regret this, and there's still all the fundamentals of why we did it, is right. Do I regret I was not aware of the possibility of naked short sellers earlier? 100%, right?
If I'd known that earlier, then maybe there was things we could have done earlier or started tracking our shares from day one if I'd known other people were out there doing this. Can I help other companies that are going to list to tell them there are these dangers, and these are things you can do to prevent this from happening to you? 100% I can do that now. Is it too late now, right, that basically, like, we've done this, that we actually are gonna regret it? The only way we regret this is that we don't fight it, and we end up folding to it, right? Which is not gonna happen. I don't regret it. I think that it's still all the reasons we came on was for the right reasons.
I think what it's allowed us to do to actually hire much, much higher level executives that can now help me to grow this business has been amazing, and we're gonna see that in the coming months as we continue to see the growth of our company. Also, even just the ability to be able to hire the likes of Wes, to be able to bring on board really great investors that have come behind us. We have had a number of investor meetings that's happened in Manhattan that we want to be bringing to other parts of the world eventually as well, where what's been amazing is just seeing the reaction of investors that are seasoned investors look at our story, where we're going, and get very excited by it and wanna be into this as well.
For future investors as well as past investors, the sooner we can solve this problem for everybody, the sooner we're gonna see Genius Group become the group that we all believe that it can be as well. I think it's unfortunate how it started, but it's absolutely not the wrong thing for us to have done. As long as we persevere on this, then we're gonna see things come out strong on the other side. With that, I am going to get Flora to basically just come on for a moment and say, Flora, anything I missed here, and were there any immediate questions that popped up that you think we should be trying to cover on this call right now? Hi, Flora.
Hello, Roger, and hello, everyone. Great to meet you all. Just a few questions which just were on the chat. Are we likely to see shares drop in value again for the same reason now that we're onto them, the short sellers, or will it stop? Should we expect to see the share value drop again in a two-month cycle? Again, this, it's very hard for us to predict what's going to happen to the share price. We don't know what they are going to do. All we can actually really influence is all the actions that we're gonna do against that so that, you know, we ensure the share price goes up again. Again, very hard to say, but we're doing our best to fight against them.
Yeah, I agree. I'd say one thing really, really important about this as well is. And this is, you know, obviously follow a lot of what's happening in other markets and other shares, and also even things like Bitcoin price and so on. You know what you always find even with the likes of our mentors when it comes to the likes of Bitcoin. Okay, could it drop 50% again? Of course, anything can drop 50% again. If you think about the long term, and if it already something is a bargain and it drops again, well, the reality is that's a really good buying opportunity if it does do that if you actually wanna acquire more. Now, I know that that's not the thing we all wanna hear 'cause we're all shareholders already, right?
The bottom line is that we're gonna be going out with that message to as many people as possible, that, you know, right now, you know, our share price already is at a total disconnect from actually the value of the company. As time goes on, that will continue to be the case. The more of our shareholders who actually go out there and share that message as well and believe in our company the way that we do, the more that we're gonna actually be able to fight them through the buying pressure of more people coming to buy. Like we said, if we're right now at, like, you know, $0.40 and it drops to $0.20, if it bumps back up to $0.40 very quickly because people said that was a buying opportunity, then of course it's gonna stop them.
It's gonna scare them away more, because they're not able to make the same profit that they can make by just buying back at $0.20, basically.
Other questions were, I transferred my shares to Tiger Brokers, what do I do now? Is it safe to buy Genius shares through any broker now? Really what I would suggest here is to, you know, re-listen to the recording and listen to what Wes suggested. You know, you can, you know, have your shares at a broker, but the best is to take it out from the margin account. And if you have them in a cash account, double-check with the brokers that the shares are not being lended. You know, this is what I suggest you do. Re-listen to what Wes has suggested, and I'm sure, you know, this will contribute to what we're trying to do.
Someone wanted to hear more about the returns coming through given the marketing of all the investments rounds. You know, about returns and financials, you know, this is something that we are releasing on a quarterly basis. We are expecting to provide a financial guidance in the next few months. You know, look out for that. Also our quarterly earnings, we have calls with analysts that ask questions, and you can also ask me questions by emails, and we'll make sure to answer, you know, any questions that you have. I think that was all about the questions that were on the chat. Any ones that I've missed, we'll ensure that we're gonna answer them to the next call in February.
That's awesome. Fabulous. Thank you so much, Flora. For those of you who have been in contact with Flora but never actually seen her, you can send a message to her here as well. I think it's really great that we've actually got someone of Flora's caliber who's here supporting, you know, the whole team as well. Her background is just incredible in terms of the number of, you know, different companies she's helped to support going forward. You know, she was working on the Saudi Aramco IPO, which, as you know, is the biggest in the world, and just knows that we do the right thing, keeping me on the straight and narrow, making sure I don't say anything that I shouldn't be saying, etc. Thanks very much for that.
We have covered hopefully everything for our first call. I know this is just the first call, but I'm just gonna continue. I'm already reading through some of the comments here, it's really heartwarming to see all the chat everyone has gotten in here as well. Any final comment you'd like to actually make in here, any chat, any words for me, do post it in here now as well. I will save the chat and make sure I kind of like, you know, read all comments and see where everyone's at. Thank you everyone so much for attending. Flora, we haven't yet confirmed on the February timing or, or do we have a date now?
It's not confirmed, but as soon as we confirm it, we will release it on the investor relations website through a press release. You will know it if you're subscribed to our news.
Okay, let's remind everyone about that as well. For anyone who's on who might not be subscribed, 'cause we were having an email database, but now we've got the subscription which makes sure we capture everyone. What are the steps for anyone who's not on there to make sure they're subscribed?
On the investor relations website, we have a page where you can just put in your email address and tick a couple of boxes to know whether you wanna hear about news, our press releases, our SEC filings, how our stock price is going. You can tick any of those and you will receive it as soon as it's released. If you are on the investor relations website, it's under news and events and email alerts. If you can't find it, just shoot me an email at investor@geniusgroup.net, and I'll send it to you.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Bookingam just also just posted the link in there as well for the email alerts. One final thing I will share with everyone as well, is that some of the investor meets that we had, they were basically, you know, connected to us by people that already had their own investor communities as well. For any of you, I know many of you are part of investor communities already. If there are any of you who go, "You know what? I could get 10- 20 people together that would love to hear this story, that would wanna hear more about this," then definitely connect us. It could be virtual, that we do it together.
It could be, when I'm actually in, your country, we could organize things in a way where, for me, this is number one priority. How do we build a really, really powerful investor community that really ensures that, as well as all the good work we're doing for our students and for our partners, that it works both ways for investors as well. We know that we're built through the power of community from everything we've done so far, and I believe it's gonna be exactly the same at how we rebuild our investor community going forward as well. Do let us know if you happen to be someone who has a great team that you'd love us to connect with.
I'd be more than happy to do a session with them and share more about what we're up to and what we're doing within Genius Group. With that, I wanna say a really big thank you to Flora, Ares, who are both on the call, and to everyone who's come and joined us, and we'll catch up with you on our next call. All right. See you all later. Bye-bye.