AVANIR PHARMACEUTICALS (AVNR)

[sts66]

Retail owns ~ 20M shares, so obviously lots of the churn is 'tutes locking in profits for Q4/14 - if they're selling, might want to follow their lead? Gotta wonder if Baker Bros had some inside info, buying almost 12M shares on Oct 6th - a week before the AVP-923 data was released to the public - also made them the largest owner:

http://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=AVNR&subView=institutional

Not going to rec what you should do, as previous "take some off the table" recs obviously would have cost folks money, but then again I wasn't really following the oddness of the pps action either, which in retrospect certainly showed something unknown was going on. All I'll say is what I've done when stocks I owned announced BO's - hold for a bit to see if another higher offer comes in - and if not, sell to fit your tax situation, or to buy another stock that you think is undervalued, as you're not going to get more than the original offer. Unfortunately, with only 10 days in this case, you can't manage taxes for this one, you're going to have a large tax bill to pay in 2015, a nice problem to have - at least you have some time left to sell some losers to offset some cap gains.

I've had something close to 8-9 stocks bought out from under me, and only 2 of them made me a profit - low pps made them targets and they got stolen from shareholders. Mergers and stock/cash deals make it even more complicated, tax headaches for cost basis in the new stock if you don't bail before the deal is final. Currently have that problem - RFMD is merging with TQNT - I'm up almost 100% on RFMD, but post-merger the new company is supposed to be worth double what RFMD trades for now - but it's in my IRA, so no tax issues, just "is it so high because of merger fever?", or is the new combined company actually going to be worth as much as analysts project?