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thank you!
A few questions for someone who has been following on the sidelines, but not carefully:
1) Is the loan that is due in a few days to Johan Eliasch the same loan that allows him to convert the money owed into shares of stock, or has he already converted the 10% note and he officially owns 90% of the company? I've read conflicting reports on what his true ownership stake is.
2) What is the current float compared to the outstanding shares? Of the float, what % is owned by insiders? Different sites have different figures so I was hoping someone may have accurate info here.
Thanks!
So then why the need to give management a blank check with preferreds if hostile takeovers are unlikely?
Long term, probably.
Short term, the charts indicate otherwise.
Good luck!
Strange that there has yet to be a PR about this. Or an 8K for that matter.
What do you all make of the silence?
Meant to say suspension/halt. Not delisted. I don't think this is likely, but I do think it would be a HUGE relief to everyone if the company got current with the SEC.
Regarding the outstanding loan -- what do you make of that? I can't imagine that Johan would take possession of the planes, given his stake in TMPS -- but, its one more issue I think needs to be resolved that is holding the price back a bit.
Still waiting on that PR from TMPS. That will draw a lot more attention. Go TMPS!
Two concerns -- maybe someone here can discuss this with more knowledge than I can.
1) There is a loan due to Johan Eliasch payable in the next few days. It appears if TMPS defaults, Johan gets the planes as collateral among other terms. This would seemingly jeopardize the value of TMPS.
2) TMPS needs to get current with the SEC. It can be delisted at any point if it doesn't, right?
So, that said, what do you all make of these two issues? To me, get these resolved and this thing FLYS!!!
Also, surprising there isn't a PR yet. Hopefully one comes soon. Most small-cap companies would be itching to release big news like this.
Actually, it has everything to do with TMPS. You just need to connect the dots.
Both companies in Newport News, VA. Both companies do the same thing with refueling. And, you can read any SEC filing that shows the two are connected.
What's your agenda? It's okay to want the price to go down so you can buy more shares, I kind of hope I can average down a bit too. But spreading misinformation that is clearly fact-checkable and that will be permanently seared to the internet makes you look a bit uneducated.
Pretty funny that Joey gave himself warrants to double his position for practically nothing.
Seriously, he's the worst CEO ever. There's a reason why Jillian no longer is part of this business, yet he keeps plastering her face around on all of his promotional materials.
Joey wasn't smart enough to graduate from community college. What does that tell you?
Private placements, post-listing, happen all the time. Usually these companies get equity, and a board seat or two. Whether you want to call it private equity or venture capital is semantics because AVXL is, for all intents and purposes, at the same stage as these private companies in need of money to grow.
And you completely neglected my other point/post about doing a private offering for existing shareholders. If Anavex is going to issue X number of shares at Y price, the shareholders should've been the ones who had first dibs to participate -- this would've been non dilutive, and while probably not necessary given the enthusiasm for this stock, warrants could've been offered to as an incentive to participate.
If you want to continue to think that LPC was cheap money, that's your prerogative. But companies like LPC exist for one reason -- to enrich themselves -- and 9 times out of 10, they prey on companies who are in desperate need of cash. As someone else pointed out, they sell their shares ASAP and have no long-term skin in the game. I'd prefer my partners to want to share in the upside. And if LPC is paying $2.50/share and selling immediately, how exactly are they making money? By shorting it at $5 and using the shares they buy for $2.50 to cover.
You get it, Leo. And I wasn't saying it had to be manufacturing -- any sort of revenue producing asset would have been worth acquiring. Anavex needs cash flow. It has two years runway -- and who wants to bet that A273 takes longer than two years to finish the ALZ trials?
My point is that LPC may have been the only option, but its a very expensive option. Arguably the most expensive option. Certainly just as expensive if not more so than traditional VC financing.
The reason Anavex is trading at $3.50 and not $7.50 is due in part to its deal with LPC and the flood of shares that hit the market.
LPC buys shares and immediately sells them onto the open market. How do you think they profit from that?
Hint: more often then not, these funds take short positions simultaneously.
It very well may be that Missling didn't have any other options to raise cash. Lenders aren't exactly keen on giving money to startup biotech with zero revenue-producing assets.
That said, there is a reason why venture capital firms are so widely sought after. If LPC were the best place to find money, wouldn't everyone be using them?
Anavex was severely diluted because of its association with LPC. If the drug works its a moot point. But it isn't necessarily true that it was the best available source of money -- as you said, it was on the OTC with very little to show for itself back then, so it was probably the only source of money.
But what about an offering to existing shareholders? That would have gotten them an influx of cash without being dilutive to those who participated. And more than likely, the offering would've been oversubscribed.
If LPC funds are so cheap and the best way to go, why doesn't every other startup use them?
Anavex should have gone the venture capital route. That's what companies with options do.
Would require a LOT of pennies!
All good points. But you neglect the following:
1. The owner is an overpaid clown who cares more about himself than his shareholders.
2. The owner has a history of overpromising and underdelivering, and at worst, has repeatedly lied to the shareholders -- see: stepping down as CEO, Bahrain, Tanforan, etc.
3. The owner claims to have invested in the recent offering, yet to date has anyone seen any evidence that he actually did so?
4. The owner admittedly doesn't know how to market this concept properly; hence the failed fundraising in the past.
5. The owner represents that his all-star management team are employees; in fact, most are consultants.
6. The owner has shown a huge lack of business judgement in the past. Claims to have had lots of offers to franchise, yet hasn't been able to do so...
7. The owner has a sketchy track record, from working at Barron Chase to being forced to resign at TDAmeritrade.
I agree that if Parsi can get more locations this has massive potential. I hope it happens. I just lack faith in Parsi's ability to execute. Not a terrible risk/reward for a penny or two, but the odds this is going to skyrocket rest with a CEO who is incompetent and arrogant - a terrible combination.
Finally, the malls don't need Giggles. He needs the malls. He has it backward with who has the leverage. If the malls needed GIGL there would be a GIGL in every mall in the country.
I agree that Wall Street gets it wrong sometimes. Probably more often than not when it comes to biotech.
Max Starks. Nicest guy you'd ever want to meet, Boston.
Except when he drank, like a 12 pack to get him a buzz, he couldn't hit the toilet if his life depended on it.
Anyone here worried about NTRP? Seems like they also have a plan to fight Alzheimer's without plaque removal, and are targeting similar diseases like Retts.
Interesting that its stock is up so much more on the BIIB news, almost as if the market is putting more belief into NTRP than AVXL?
Weird.
The logic, for the poster who asked, is that Anavex is a binary gamble. It doesn't have any other revenue generating assets and it's putting all its resources into A273. So, if A273 doesn't work, the stock goes to zero. If it does work, the stock price shoots up.
I said $50 because I am conservative. Others believe the value of an AD drug is significantly higher and BIIB sort of shows that today.
So by saying it hits $50 it goes to $500, is saying that if it works, it's going to be worth a LOT. Whether a lot is $50 or $500 is a topic for another debate.
My initial point regarding the Steelers is that with all their offseason moves, they're not favored to win the Super Bowl. But, the team has a history of winning so I wouldn't bet against them. Similarly, ALZ drugs have a history of failing so I wouldn't bet on them, but one is going to be the next SoC and AVXL has as good a chance as any.
My college roommate played for the Steelers for about a decade. I give the Steelers about the same odds of winning the Super Bowl as AVXL of hitting $50/share in the next five years.
It's not statistically likely, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.
$20M and no debt is nice, but at what cost?
Interest rates are at historic lows, so the cost of borrowing is very cheap right now. And depending on who you borrow from, convertible notes would also have maybe been a better option if the price were higher than the agreement with LPC.
LPC provided a service but it's essentially a loan shark. If I borrow $500 from the local street thug and buy lotto tickets and one of them hits, then year, it was a great decision on my part. But more often than not, associating myself with that sort of person doesn't end well.
If I were Missing, I'd have raised cash to acquire a small revenue-producing company, maybe a manufacturing plant or a marketing firm or something that a) generates revenue now, and b) builds a platform for allowing AVXL to go at it alone in the future.
Good catch. I stand corrected.
So the question becomes...why weren't they approved back then? Obviously shareholders had concerns that weren't mitigated. What has he done to alleviate concerns?
I know a lot of people here have 100% confidence and full faith in Dr. Missling. But handing a "blank check" to a CEO is a risky and irrevocable decision. It may provide the security of preventing a hostile takeover, but it also seriously strengthens the CEO's role -- and history is full of examples of CEOs making poor business decisions and the shareholders are powerless to remove them because of it.
I'm curious to know why this proposal fell flat the first time around.
AVXL never should have associated itself with LPC to begin with. Those guys are vultures, barely a step above Hudson Bay, and are one (of many) reasons why this stock is down so much over the last 200 weeks.
Park West is supportive now. But, with its current position, it's a potential threat at any point and Missling knows this. Hence, the preferred shares. He's not worried about a hostile takeover from a Big Pharma company -- name more than three recent instances where that has occurred. I'll wait.
It's not their style. BP has enough money to make an offer that AVXL cannot refuse. Missling is more concerned about a potential takeover from a firm like Park West, who may seek to replace him with one of its own handpicked management team all-stars.
The preferred shares may be a good idea in theory as a precaution, but the self-serving interests on Missling's part are obvious. He wasn't too concerned about preferred shares three years ago when all eyes in biotech were on AVXL, was he?
Good post.
Another reason is that Wall Street is conservative to a fault and this is still a very high-risk investment.
A fund manager would rather take a 75% chance of a 15% annual gain over a 10% chance of a 1000% gain. Nobody's ever lost a job passing up a winning investment but lots of people have lost their jobs betting on a speculative company that fizzles out.
When AVXL is more of a sure thing, funds will be buying retails shares. That's what will create a major pop in the price.
For now, low 2.50s is the new support. It hit this level a few weeks ago, retraced, and on today's news pushed back above it -- but I generally don't count news-based movements in my TA unless they are truly game-changing, like an FDA approval or something. Even with positive news in the past, the stock tends to give back its gains.
If it can hold 2.5s, it has an open window to the 5 range. But, if it drops back below 2.20, that 1.70s support is still hanging around.
Should be an interesting few weeks of trading. I'm on the sidelines for now, other than my core holdings.
Obviously all charting goes out the window when there is news, good or bad. But you knew that already.
If you want, go back and look at all of my predictions -- I'd wager that I'm batting above average. And, as I said earlier, it's still early to tell what the follow-through will be. Will AVXL stay above $2.50 or now that the news is out, will it bleed back into the low 2s? That's what we'll find out in the coming weeks.
I'm not buying more in the 2.50/60s. I sold some of the shares I picked up at 2.12 with stops on the rest. If it holds here, that's a good sign. But I'm not holding my breath just yet. Tomorrow it can easily be back in the 2.30s.
Today was a nice surprise. Hopefully there will be more of them coming. In my opinion, until we have data, the only way to keep AVXL from drifting back down is if traders/investors think that more news can come in between now and the data release date.
It also appears that news leaked -- this would explain the run-up on Friday seemingly out of nowhere.
I'm cautiously optimistic, but this still has to hold the $2.5s for a new base to have formed. We'll see what happens over the next few weeks.
Well said. Nobody's TA is going to be 100% alike, but they should be in the same ballpark.
And admittedly, I'm not a TA expert. I don't trade professionally, this is a hobby for me. Thankfully my charts have been correct more often than they haven't, and I'm not pulling my predictions out of my ____, but at the end of the day they're just that -- predictions.
Also, charting is going to differ based on what tools people use. Fibonacci is going to provide different exit/entry targets than Elliot Wave than Bollinger than MACD etc etc...
Tom, please keep posting your charts. I enjoy reading your comments.
Gatorial. I like that. Very clever.
I do think we have a wide range of possibilities right now. It all depends on whether there are more people who want to buy into the Retts news, or people who want to lock in profits by selling into the news.
$1.25 is certainly a possibility. When I said six months ago that AVXL would re-test the 1s, everyone thought I was bashing the stock -- which I wasn't, I was just pointing out that there wasn't a lot of solid support in the 2s. And I'm seeing the same thing here. Let's see if it can bounce up and down but maintain a few points above the $2.12 threshold -- if it can, then I think it's safe to say that the $1s are behind us barring a total market collapse or bad trial results.
That said, I'm not going to go out start popping the cork because of a single 6.5% gain after a 15% drop over the last 5 days.
2.12 is near term support, up slightly from 2.04 the other day but still down from the 2.20 I called the other day. If it doesn't hold 2.12, 1.70s is the next level of support. This time I think it will hold. Which is why I bought more at 2.12/3, even though the charts said I should have waited. Sometimes gut instinct is just as valuable of a trading tool as charting...
Technically, $2.04 was the area where the charts showed support after $2.20. I was hoping for under $2, but as I said yesterday, I picked up shares at $2.12/3 for my core holding account.
$2.12-$2.15 is the new level of support IF it can hold today's gain. If not, there's a lot of room between here and $1.70 for this to gap down.
$1.20s were a bit of an aberration because the entire market was crashing in late December '18. That said, it's possible those levels could be reached again -- though I said before and will say again that I think $1.70s is more likely the near short term support.
Yup. Looks like our valuation estimates are similar, in the $1-$3B range. I actually said I think with PDD news it could be a $5B valuation. I know some are saying $20B, $50B, $100B...I just don't see it for a lot of reasons already mentioned. At $3B even fully diluted, it's $30/share. That would be fantastic.
Well yeah, I meant a .40 gain on a stock priced at the same level as Anavex. Not a .40 gain on Amazon or something.
This is a dead money stock. The risk for being in it right now is lost opportunity cost. The risk for not being in it is that in theory, at any moment Missling could spring news that propels the stock price.
In time, the risks will shift. It'll no longer be "if" Missling springs news, it'll be whether the news is positive or negative.
That's just it. Early bird gets the worm but sometimes it catches the hook.
I have a friend who runs a very well known fund, and I've been telling him about Anavex for the last 2.5 years. He's yet to buy a single share for his fund's portfolio.
HIs reasoning: At his fund, a 20% gain results in a nice Christmas bonus. A few 50% gains gets someone consideration for a promotion. A 50% loss gets someone fired.
He's perfectly happy wit a 20-50% gain. Which means that he can sit on the sidelines, and buy once the drug is approved. He'll miss the home run, but he's not going to strike out, either.
I suspect there are many other people like him who are waiting until the risk here is diminished before they take a position. They'll be the ones many here on this board sell their shares to.
Ideally anything under $2.03, I'd like to see this drop back to the $1.70s for a full position but it may catch some support before then. That would be a good area for it to form a new base from the previous lows in the $1.30s, and some consolidation there would be healthy.
I bought back the shares I sold earlier this week at $2.12/3, but only about 10% of that position. They're going into my core account, and I'll wait to see what happens before I add more trading shares.
Nothing with the stock is changing, except maybe the cash burn. But Dr. Missling is on record saying there's enough runway to advance through the trials so we have to take him at his word, I suppose.
I think where you're missing my point is that stocks like Anavex typically bleed down, then spike up when there's news (or the expectation of news) and then bleed down, repeat, etc.
There won't be any stability until Anavex has a revenue producing asset so investors -- not traders -- but real investors can properly value the company and create models. Right now, all people can do is hope that 271 works and try to assign a valuation based on the potential market, but this doesn't take into lots of factors like partnerships and distribution deals and insurers and all that fun stuff.
Right now the stock market is raging. So, investors have a choice. Buy AVXL and hold it and have that money do nothing, or sell AVXL and invest elsewhere, make some money, and buy back AVXL later.
If AVXL had an upcoming catalyst, there is a lot of risk in the above strategy. But when there's nothing that will fundamentally drive the price back up, there's not much risk in selling and buying in later. Maybe you sell at $2.10 and in three months its 2.50, but if you can make more than .40/share somewhere else, it's a profitable decision.
As I've said repeatedly, there is ZERO reason for anyone to buy this stock right now if they aren't planning to hold it for at least another few years. Maybe in a few months that will change but AVXL currently is a zero-revenue company with a speculative, high-risk asset, and no known news for at least a few months.
Meanwhile, everything else is going up. Why would anyone want this for the short term?
I'll continue to try and buy the lows to add to my long-term account, and trade the price swings when the opportunity presents itself.
This can easily drop below $1.25. It can easily climb back above $5.
There's no way to properly assign a true value that isn't speculative because there aren't any revenues. Right now the company is burning cash every quarter. Until it has an revenue-producing asset, any spikes or dips are simply because current perception of A273's prospects have changed, and/or outside market conditions make Anavex a more or less attractive investment relative to putting money into something else.
And so it begins.
I mentioned yesterday when this was in the mid 2.30s that $2.20 was the necessary support.
My buy target is almost here.
Yup. HIV is a good example. We've essentially turned HIV from a death sentence into a disease like diabetes -- it's there but it can be controlled. The social stigma still exists, but it's not -that- big of a deal anymore provided you have access to the right cocktail of medicine.
I think the same is true for AD. It won't be one pill -- it'll be a cocktail of pills. Hopefully 271 is one of them.
The hardest part though won't be approval. I think the FDA is desperate to find a better alternative to Aricept. I think the hard part will be to convince, initially, the insurers to cover Anavex so it's affordable to the masses. In time they'll come around, but I can see them resisting as much as possible until the last possible minute. They'll call it experimental or something and will want to run their own studies and cost-benefit analysis. Depending on how long this process takes, Anavex may only have a short period of time before its patent expires and generics become available that insurers are more apt to cover.
Missling I think knows this, too. Hence, the international focus.