Thank you for that clarification, 123tom. I agree that there are systemic weaknesses in the global markets that could produce much more trouble in the broad markets. My perspective is that the main cause of the weaknesses is central banks vainly trying to control economic dynamics that are too complex to be fully understood, let alone governed effectively or efficiently by central planners.

"Time could be running out."

Technical analysis cannot predict whether the full phase 2a part A report will have good news or bad news, and that is what will determine whether time is out or we're just getting started.

Beta-secretase (BACE) inhibitors only target amyloid-beta misfolding, ignoring tau and other issues, according to my notes. As the article points out, Eli Lilly dropped a BACE inhibitor due to possible liver damage during their trials. If I am correct that BACE inhibitors only target a-beta, they are still ignoring the fact that many Azheimer's patients have no appreciable a-b plaques and are ignoring a statement from the FDA which basically said, "Hey, big pharma, attacking amyloid-beta doesn't work. Try something else."

Chaikin Money Flow: all positive since late May at a daily level. That is evidence that a majority of buyers are holding.

The official float doesn't take the intentions of retail investors like me into account, because they have no direct way to measure it, but the balance of money flowing in is a good indirect measure showing the effective float (the shares actually available to buyers) is getting smaller over time, even after taking the exercise of warrants into account.

Alzheimer’s Disease – Global Drug Forecast and Market Analysis to 2023

This report is $11K. Anyone here want to buy a copy and leak parts of it here?

http://www.marketresearchstore.com/report/pharmapoint-alzheimers-disease-global-drug-forecast-and-21141

Declining volume & trading sideways indicates indecision to me, with both investors and traders waiting to see which direction it will move in. Actually, trading sideways means indecision to me all by itself, but declining volume emphasizes it.

Word of Anavex is still spreading, more people are studying its fundamentals and getting ready to invest, but they don't want to buy in now if it's going to drop a lot more. I suspect there is a growing pool of money to be invested in AVXL when they think the time is right. That's based on the idea that buyers haven't given up on AVXL, they've just decided to wait to ensure they buy at the bottom. If that's right, it could mean once the direction is clearly up, there could be some pent-up demand. In other words, the buying volume hasn't gone away, it's just on the sidelines... waiting.

I prefer fundamental analysis to technical analysis, but that's better suited to predicting the long term. In my ignorance, it seems to me the 20-day exponential moving average has provided a solid floor. I understand it's possible for a price to temporarily dip below a MA like that, or to crash through, but AVXL has been bubbling along the top of that line for 4 days now. It seems intuitive to me that if it was going lower than that, it would have done so by now. So, I expect it to move up, not down, perhaps as soon as tomorrow, if the money on the sidelines finally gains confidence it's not going any lower.

My best guess is a positive Friday, followed by a weekend of getting scared of missing out (again), and a very strong opening on Monday.

I'm all-in on AVXL, so the daily changes don't affect me, but this kind of analysis is fun.

GLTA longs

"Recovered" to 16,000 from 17,500 six trading days ago.

I think you and I have different definitions of the term recover, and I don't have TV and don't watch cnbc.

The Dow is not recovering. Take a look at a 1 month chart of the Dow and it will be obvious it has to climb over 1,000 points before it begins to come close to recovering.

The broad markets have a lot to do with AVXL and each individual stock. Not everyone who invests in AVXL carefully studies its fundamentals, possibly very few do. Those who don't can get spooked and dump at any time for any reason. They see huge drops in their 401K or IRA and get scared, or they get swayed by pundits advising to sell some of everything and hold more cash for a few months. The chain on consequences can go on and on.

Fortunately, over 50% of AVXL is held by tutes, and a smaller but significant chunk held is by very long term holders like me, and by holding, we reduce the float and help the price.

Take a look at a chart of AVXL daily candlesticks for six months. The last few days are just a dip off a high, knocked there by the dramatic falls in the broad markets.

No AVXL fundamentals have changed, no bad news has leaked out. My best guess it that we'll trade mostly sideways with a slow average rise in anticipation of the full phase 2a Part A data to be released in a few months, similar to how it did prior to the release of the interim report. By slow average rise, I mean by looking at daily candles, not ticks, not 1-minute candles, or even 30 minute candles. Those short term views are just noise unless you're a trader. As a buy-and-hold guy, I don't care about moment-to-moment or hour-to-hour price fluctuations, because they won't control what the price will be in a month or a year from now. Science will control our price in the long-run.

$1T is not an estimate of the annual market size for Alzheimer's drugs, it is an estimate of the global costs of Alzheimer's, which is primarily lost wages from mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's patients and their family caregivers and the cost of professional caregivers and specialized housing for advanced Alzheimer's patients.

There is an industry estimate which Dr. Missling referred to in a video interview of $67B/year in sales for an effective Alzheimer's drug. If that estimate turned out to be correct on average, it would take 15 years to reach $1T. 30 years takes it to multi-trillion drug status. If that drug is A2-73, and if A2-73 also turns out to be effective against epilepsy or ALS, the time to reach $1T in sales could be significantly reduced from 15 years.

I did not post my entire list of potential catalysts, and I only mentioned the next ones that are scheduled. The MJFF grant is on my list as having already been announced.

I have a long list of possible catalysts which are not scheduled or not certain, and includes multiple possible announcement for each item in the pipeline.

Dr. Missling, "Phase 2a already started and will be finished by year end 2015."

Interview by KKD in Seeking Alpha.

I suspect he only meant Part A.

No 2nd interim Phase 2a Part A report.

I usually post on YMB, which I find easier to navigate, but I am cross-posting this here, in case I also said anything on this topic on this board. Actually, I'm posting it here first, because YMB has been deleting my efforts to post it there...

I am one of the folks who thought they read or heard that a second interim Phase 2a Part A report would be released in September. Some others here questioned that assertion and asked for the source. I read and watched videos to try to find it, without success. I then emailed Investor Relations, and Christine was kind enough to reply: "The interim clinical data was presented on July 22, 2015 and Anavex has not said that it plans to release additional data in September."

I apologize for having promoted incorrect information previously.

According to my now revised notes on possible stock catalysts, the next scheduled potential catalysts are the full report on Phase 2a Part A and the Annual Report (10K), both due before the end of this year.

This does not change my buy-and-hold-for-years perspective.

I can't send a private message here because I am not a subscriber, so I will have to clutter your board a little to say thanks to you and WolfWayne.

I have posted the link in several discussions on YMB regarding Dr. Macfarlane.

Thanks again!

Can someone here provide a link to the post someone made here which thoroughly addressed several objections that had been raised, including about a poor Australian TV news segment that combined information from 2 different trials and made it seem like it was all about the same trial?

Someone is doubting Dr. Macfarlane's integrity on the YMB and their doubts seem to stem from that TV report.

Thanks.

Trades outside the NBBO, possibly explained...

Okay, I think I may have figured this out. The most likely reason for trades outside the NBBO seems to be Market orders, as opposed to Limit orders. Common reasons for Market orders include Stop-Loss orders being triggered, panicking novice traders/investors, or when a broker liquidates some of a client's long shares to satisfy a margin call.

In a Market-Sell order, if the supply of shares at the NBBO bid is exhausted, shares further down will be bought, and that seems to explain what I was asking about perfectly.

I know most brokers allow margin trading for short sales on penny stocks, but I don't know of any that allow margin trading of penny stocks for long positions, so margin calls are not likely in this case.

Also, I found an article that seems authoritative that rules out the possibility that Dark Pools might be a cause of this, because Dark Pools are regulated and specifically prohibited from trading outside the NBBO. In case you'd like to read about Dark Pools, this is a good start: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100424690.

What causes trades outside the NBBO?

NBBO is National Best Bid and Offer, which is the bid/ask data.

My trade window color codes trades that take place on the bid, on the ask, between the bid & ask, and outside the bid and ask (below the bid or above the ask). It is not uncommon to see a single trade outside the NBBO, but sometimes, like the first few minutes this morning, I saw a lot of small trades below the NBBO. Can anyone explain to me what causes that? Is it manipulation by the market makers to try to drive the price down (in this case)?

The Ugly Duckling
(x-posted from YMB; some over there liked this, so I thought someone here might)

Once upon a time, some researchers thought, "Maybe a sigma-1 receptor would solve our problem." It didn't.

But in Greece, Dr. Alexandre Vamvakides thought, "Hey, just because it doesn't help that problem, it doesn't mean it's not useful for something else," so he began studying it. That kind of research costs a lot, so he joined up with Tom Skarpelos, an investor who could help. He shelled Thrifty Printing, which was no longer in operation, and turned it into a biotech research company, and they named it Anavex Life Sciences.

They added people to their team, and decided to try to reach more investors by listing their company on the American Over The Counter (OTC) Markets. Maybe they didn't know the OTC was frowned on by Wall Street big-shots.

They made some amazing progress, and behold, one of their sigma-1 receptor candidate drugs actually cured pre-clinical trial animals of Alzheimer's! Yea!

Unfortunately, they needed more money, and an expert who liked their research to help them grow into the kind of company that could change the world.

So there they were. A good idea, with great potential, but out of money, stuck in the OTC, and without the right person to lead them forward. The poor company's stock was even the victim of pump-and-dump fraudsters.

But they didn't give up. They kept at it, and finally found Dr. Christopher Missling, who was just the person they needed! He secured a ten million dollar loan, and they launched the first ever clinical trial that would give their leading drug candidate to people with Alzheimer's, and they even started making plans to move from OTC to a big board.

It seemed like half of forever, but then, on July 22, 2015, the first glimpse of the results were revealed. It worked! Tests showed improvements that were better than the standard medicine for Alzheimer's! Hooray!

And that... was just the beginning.

“I never dreamed of such happiness as this while I was the despised ugly duckling.” --H.C. Andersen

There is no time requirement to close a short sale. The "Days to Close" is just a ratio of how long it would take for all shorts to close all open positions if they used 100% of average volume.

One time factor is that they are borrowing shares when they sell short, so the longer they hold the position open, the more they pay in interest.

And if the price moves up, it reduces the equity in their trading account. If that equity goes too low, their broker will liquidate their assets to satisfy the margin loan.

Ah! Thanks JB!

Shorted Shares up 60% on 8/11/2015

From http://shortsqueeze.com/?symbol=avxl&submit=Short+Quote%99

Short Interest (Shares Short): 5,778,500
Short Interest (Shares Short) - Prior: 3,617,600
Short % Increase / Decrease: 60%

Axovant (AXON) short sale restriction in effect from Tuesday August 11, 12:01 to Wednesday August 12, 8:00 PM EST.

This is NOT Anavex/AVXL.

Axovant is a biotech with an Alzheimer's drug candidate which does not appear to be a direct competitor to Anavex 2-73 based on mechanism of action.

Axovant's price dropped more than 10% today, triggering SEC Rule 201. The price recovered quickly after the rule went into effect.

Rule 201 – Short Sale Price Test Circuit Breaker. Rule 201 generally requires trading centers to establish, maintain, and enforce written policies and procedures that are reasonably designed to prevent the execution or display of a short sale at an impermissible price when a stock has triggered a circuit breaker by experiencing a price decline of at least 10 percent in one day. Once the circuit breaker in Rule 201 has been triggered, the price test restriction will apply to short sale orders in that security for the remainder of the day and the following day, unless an exception applies.

I think today's news is about China adjusting their exchange rates, rather than expanding their money supply. A one-time, relatively small thing some ignorant newspeople are hyping.

As for expanding Western fiat money supplies, there are plenty of economists who rue that activity.

Wow!

That is superlative research, analysis, and reporting.

Wow.

Debunked already. ftc12358 on YMB posted this:

...your theory is scientifically inaccurate. Tons of work by Adam Gazzaley and colleagues at U of Cal at SF with brains of 60 and 70 year olds verses volunteers in their 20's proved that senior moments like where you put the keys aren't true exact memory problems but a glitch in how brain networks switch between tasks.....there is evidence as nerves become very old they lose some function and look like a picture in the winter of a strong healthy 50 foot oak tree verses a 120 aging oak tree with little new growth and some dead broken off limbs missing.

So rather than protein misfolding if someone figures out the cause of what they have proved goes on in our brains - you can check details on above research - then yes! there would be opportunity for a company there.

A Billion Customers?

I was just thinking... I'm 57 years old, and I've been hearing all my life about how people become more forgetful as they get older. There's a medical distinction between serious memory problems that are due to some form of dementia or pre-dementia like MCI, and milder memory problems just due to normal aging. In fact, part of the diagnostic assessment for dementia and MCI is that the memory problems are worse than the memory problems just from aging.

So most people develop mild memory problems as they age. But why? There must be a biological process going on... something's got to be changing. Here's my new hypothesis: Everyone has some protein misfolding in their brain cells that gets worse over time, but people who develop MCI and dementia have substantially (MCI) or dramatically (AD) more of it than "normally" forgetful elderly.

If my hypothesis is correct, and if A2-73 helps prevent misfolded proteins, helps correct those already misfolded, and has no significant side-effects, then regular low doses of A2-73 could become common for everyone after some age, at least in developed nations.

AD patients are in the tens of millions of people. Aging people with memory problems are in the hundreds of millions.


(Sorry if I am slow to respond here. I find I-Hub's interface very confusing, so I hang out mostly on the Yahoo board, where I cross-posted this).

Hi, Alex125, we share the same history with AVXL! I added a lot below .20 and now the run has finally begun. ("Run" being a matter of many months, not a few days.)

GL

Thank you very much! That means a lot because in my very short time here, I've already learned to respect your contributions.

I started tracking and buying AVXL years ago, trying to wait patiently for what finally arrived on July 22. Since then it's been very exciting, and I think the mental stimulation from here and the YMB for AVXL have really been helping my brain make further recovery from MCI and encephalitis. I now write pretty well when I can do it with zero distractions, so people online can't tell that when I talk in person and especially when there's distractions, I appear more like a 5-year old. I'm working hard to improve that, though, and with a lot of help, I think I'm making progress.

Thanks again.

I did not mean to imply immediacy or anything about timing.

If the assumptions I mentioned are correct, then it should lead to the price rising faster and faster over time, but that certainly does not control moment-to-moment or even day-to-day price fluctuations.

This morning was a good example of how immediate demands can override trends. I suspect a significant percentage of traders decided to sell to lock in some great profits, causing a dip, which then panicked novice investors who dumped out of ignorance and fear. If that's the case, I'm glad for the traders, and sad for the novices.

Nevertheless, some of those shares being dumped this morning were bought by people or organizations that will hold them long-term, thereby reducing the real float and making sharp rises all the more likely in the future.

A2-73 is in phase 2a, to be precise.

However, the purpose of phase 3 is to determine if a candidate drug is significantly better than placebo (through a double-blind, placebo-controlled study with hundreds of subjects).

Anavex 2-73 has a substitute for phase 3: Donepezil was proven better than placebo year ago. If A2-73 is better than donepezil, then A2-73 has to be better than placebo.

This placebo-substitute logic, together with the near-perfect safety record from phase 1, the death-sentence nature of AD, and the lack of any effective AD treatment bodes very well for an accelerated approval by the FDA if the full phase 2a results are strong.

Here's how I understand it. The float is outstanding shares less insider and institutional shares, which I think is around 50-60M for AVXL. If you knew how to identify shares owned by people like me, who own a bunch and won't sell a single one for a long, long time, you could reduce the number a little more. Let's say the float is 50M.

We had 52M shares traded in the 5 days from 21July2015 to 24July2015.
We had 52M shares traded in the 6 days from 27July2015 to 4Aug2015.

That means a lot of the float has been churning. New long term buyers are holding and shrinking the float, so the sellers are short-sellers, traders, and market-makers.

The float for AVXL is already relatively small and slowly getting smaller from the long-term holders like me. At the same time, word is still spreading, interest is increasing, and desire to buy is going up. Shrinking supply in the face of increasing demand is a formula for rapidly rising prices. The less supply and the greater demand, the faster the price rises.

In the stock market, stocks that rise as rapidly as AVXL has the last two weeks gets a lot of attention just on the technical. All that interest feeds the vicious cycle. Market-makers will have a harder and harder job.

Today was the 2nd highest volume, but it was the highest volume*price by a wide margin, and that was without a major catalyst. I think all we have seen so far is the burning fuse, and it's getting close to the dynamite.

This rise is not the result of a pump, but of a small float and high demand. Get used to it.

KKD did not antagonize Dr. Missling, it just has that appearance. KKD sent M an email with a list of questions, many of which addresses the issue of patents, and KKD's understanding that there is/was a patent dispute.

If it had been a conversation, where KKD keep pestering M with the same topic after it had been answered, that would have been antagonistic, but it wasn't. It's just a quirk of an email-based interview where the questions and replies weren't edited to pretty them up.

Dr. Macfarlane replies RE P300 correlation.

Via kdreesen on YMB:

There is a long thread on this board about the correlation between P300 and MMSE, etc. Paymerx and Pivotalchange were questioning, rightfully so, the implied correlation Anavex made between cognitive EER/ERP effect and cognitive tests (Mini Mental State Examination and Cogstate Scale) in the Ph2a data in the July 22 pr and AAIC poster. They cited references claiming there was no correlation; therefore, the increased amplitude of P300 measured in the first twelve patients was basically meaningless.

After reading some studies, still unsure, I thought I would ask Dr. Macfarlane (principal investigator of Ph2a trial) what he thought.

(Part of) my email inquiry : "...Anavex states that "preliminary measured Mini Mental State Examination and Cogstate Scale changes are consistent with the observed trend of Cognitive EEG/ERP effect," and yet, it seems, based on current studies, there is no strong correlation between the tests and EEG/ERP. I quote one such study:

'Despite the fact that in our study we measured latencies and amplitudes of all the major waves of the AERPs (N200, P300 and SW) in the largest number of MCI patients to date, we like to point out that we were not able to establish significant correlations between latencies and amplitudes of N200, P300 and SW and the patients' performance in MMSE, which is a basic psychometric test for the assessment of patients suffering from MCI. This conclusion, we believe, is in line with the conclusions of the majority of the relevant known studies." [Neuroscience, 2008, Papaliagkas, Vasileios]'

Would you say that's an accurate assessment?"

His response (today):

"The poster presentation referenced the following study:

Clinical Neuropharmacology Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 207-215 (2002)

This shows clearly the correlation between P300 and changes in ADAS-Cogand MMSE."

His language is unequivocal.

Anavex.com > Investors > Share Data

As of 14 May 2015:

Shares issued and outstanding 77,243,580

Options 6,045,000

Warrants 78,965,632

Fully diluted 162,254,212


From my memory of the last meeting in lieu of sharesholders' meeting, the total shares authorized in that meeting is 400M.