Solar Tracer at the Penny Stock Arcade

Dana Blankenhorn

Look up Solar Tracer Corp. on Google and you'll be asked if you
really mean “solar tracker,” which sends you to a company called Opel Solar (OPL.V),
which makes solar concentrators.

Sometimes you should listen to your Google.

But I wanted to learn about Solar Tracer, which says it was bought this weekend by Sector 10 (SECI.OB), a
failing maker of emergency
response equipment.

That last is not hyperbole – Sector 10 hasn't brought in any revenue
for over a year. It's a stock market trick old as
time, a shell buying an operating company so the latter can go public
at low cost.

But why? Why would Solar Tracer want to go public sub rosa? (Full
disclosure. I own no penny stocks. I did have some AIG once, before
that went into penny territory. I bought in at $60. If you are looking
for investment advice, move along.)

Turns out Solar Tracer is run by the Tedrow brothers of Florida. CEO
Christian is a writer, CFO Tyler a venture capitalist. The two have
been working on a thriller called the Judgement
Trilogy – they write under the name Thomas
Tedrow.

Tyler is managing partner
of HART Capital
Management in Orlando, which describes itself as “a new kind of
venture capital firm.” Among its listed investments is ChinaPharmaHub,
for which Christian (left) sits on the business
advisory board. ChinaPharma says it is interested in identifying
and bringing to market interesting drugs from China.

Now that you know something about the management, what would you be
buying, if you were interested in buying into this? Mainly Eugene
Augustin, an expert on microwave
antennas last seen in July selling his solar antenna expertise to Lady Bug Resource Group,
a Kirkland, Washington based outfit that apparently held the URL
Newsolartec as a subsidiary. Christian Tedrow was listed as the owner
of that URL until last week, when it expired.

After buying Augustin's expertise, in November, LadyBug named a
Thomas F. Krucker its new CEO. Krucker is a former Toyota executive.
Inside of a month Krucker bought MAG International, which said it was developing electric off-road vehicles (its Web site was
recently disabled.

So what's going on?

Near as I can determine the Tedrows needed a new vehicle after
LadyBug flew away. That's what Sector 10 is, a company that owns what
was NewSolarTec but is now called Solar Tracer.

Back when the LadyBug deal got done, Solar Thermal Magazine ran a piece on the Tedrows, and New Solar. In
that piece Christian Tedrow described the Solar Tracer as a solar concentrator that can heat water into
steam for generating electricity.

There's nothing new here. Solar concentrators are old tech. There
are breakthroughs going on here but little evidence Mr. Augustin has
one.

Still, shares in Sector 10 doubled in value, to 1.8 cents per share , on the day after the
Tedrow news broke. OTC Picks featured the company
without knowing they were out of the emergency response business. Their
story paints the company as an emergency preparedness play.

I'm guessing this is another ride on the penny stock arcade that's
going to end in tears.

But it would be so much fun to be proven wrong.

Disclosure: None

Dana
Blankenhorn first
covered the energy industries in 1978 with the
Houston Business Journal. He returned last month after a short 29 year
hiatus because it's the best business story of our time. In between he
covered PCs, the Internet, e-commerce, open source, the Internet of
Things and Moore's Law. It's the application of the last to harvesting
the energy all around us he's most excited about. He lives in Atlanta.