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I have CVS Silverscript in Northern CA. Just checked online last night and if I could get a script my co-pay for 90 days (360 caps) would be $228.19 = $76.06 per month, quoted as 25% of total cost, where the plan pays $684.58. The quote is complicated by the fact that I just entered the donut hole in Medicare prescription drug cost.
We should remember that Sharma is the former doctor who got his license revoked for inappropriate behavior. He has the status and credibility of a quack.
Sounds too much like a DS label, no? How about borrowing from The Fifth Element: “ I choose life. I take Vascepa.”
I know, too Marzanesque.
A classic case of subgroup analysis leading to a colossal failure is Galena Biopharma‘s phase 3 disappointment after plucking a single subgroup from a failed phase 2 and designing a phase 3 around that population.
I didn’t read the Strength trial extension as a negative sign at all. I saw it as Nissen paying attention to the R-it results and realizing that longer is better if you’re looking for study arm divergence with statistical significance.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=148886384
Oy! I hope that’s just play money on a wild-ass side bet. I am certainly in for the big ride and not the quick ride, but expecting it to happen by January is a harsh call. I’m sure you know that 99.9% of longshots, or something like that, expire worthless, A more conservative approach is more likely to yield some fruit. For example, I’m short January $25 puts and long January $10 puts, and fully expect to be adding to my share position when shares are put to me at January expiration. I won’t mind at all because I collected $9.55 in premium for those, so my net cost will be $15.55 per share. If by good fortune The share price is $25 or higher at January expiration then I keep the premium as my profit. Risk $1 to make up to $2.16 markup.
I don’t know much about the Strength trial beyond the fact that Nissen is the principal investigator and that they used a much larger population over a shorter duration than the Reduce-it trial. I think Nissen is unprincipled but not stupid, and he had to have noticed the divergence in the study arms of the Reduce-it trial and realized that Strength was too short to express a divergence adequately enough to get stat sig.
I think maybe they figured out that if there is a divergence it needs time to express. Another 1-1/3 years of the trial will improve the relative benefit if the trial arms are diverging.
I too have CVS Silverscript, in CA. I just checked the online tool and if I could get a prescription, my copay would be $326.22 for 3 months supply by mail ($108.74/mo)!! Once I hit the donut hole then my co-pay would be very low, dropping from the current 36% of cost to 5% of cost (about $15/month).
The problem with that is the money would not go directly to the shareholders. The company might elect to have a special dividend for part of the cash.
Options are not like other trades. All open contracts count as open interest. The only way to make the open interest go down is to buy to close (if short) or sell to close (if long). The market maker is the bank. If he buys five contracts and sells five contracts the open interest remains constant. I know the 20,000 July 19 $20 calls traded on April 24 were opening transactions because the open interest went up. By the way, the open interest you see in option tables is the open interest as of the close of yesterday’s trades. Today’s volume will not affect the indicated open interest until tomorrow morning.
Here is a pretty good explanation with graphics:
https://zerodha.com/varsity/chapter/open-interest/
I can tell you that about 20,300 July 19 $20 calls traded on April 24 between $2.10 and $2.34. That accounts for most of the current open interest in that strike which is the only call strike at that expiration with such a large open interest. I don’t know if those were buy to open or sell to open contracts that traded on 4-24. Today About 5500 contracts at that same stroke or trade between $.84 and $1.12. I won’t know until tomorrow if they were opening or closing trades.
On April 26 10,000 contracts of the July 19 $18 put were traded between $1.90 and $2.08. Those contracts account for most of the current open interest in that strike, and again I don’t know if they were buy to open or sell to open.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting. Do you know what kind of circulation that letter has?
I had a physical therapy session today for a nerve compression issue and while I was on the traction table the therapist and I had a conversation about health. He’s About 39 act told me he’s on a statin and had a family history of diabetes on his father side. I said “you should be on Vascepa” and he said “I am, 4 g a day since about six months ago.” I congratulated him on having a good cardiologist and told him how much less likely he was to have a cardiovascular event because of that.
Reminds me of learning Greek in Greece. Not so difficult once you teach yourself to read and write the alphabet.
Amarin is not on a cash basis for accounting and there’s no reason why they would not count the revenue at the time of delivery. Why do you think they would defer revenue inclusion? Is it common in the pharmaceutical sector to sell on consignment? I doubt that.
Speaking of what else are we holding besides Amarin, anybody else holding Veracyte besides me? I’m in since $11 a few short months ago. Also, for the gene therapy space, Axovant (AXGT) shed its earlier failures and is now focused in gene therapy, with promising early stage results. I have a very small position there just enough to make me pay attention.
Ragman, thank you very much.
Moderators, please make post 184457 sticky.
I had a long talk today with a clinical pharmacist who works for the VA. She was aware of Vascepa But said that she was bound to stick with the formulary of other triglyceride-lowering alternatives. I told her I’d send her the most recent medical findings on Vascepa and reminded her that triglyceride lowering has not been proven to have any benefit for cardiovascular risk and that Vascepa, while it lowered triglycerides, had shown cardiovascular benefits that were similar across a broad range of triglyceride levels.
When I went to the top of this board expecting to find a recommended reading list I didn’t see what I was looking for. I know the list should start with the link to the NEJM, but does someone have a pointer to a list of other recommended links? Thanks in advance for any help.
I’m pretty sure he thinks he can advise anyone on any subject.
The American public and particularly the aging population in America, and elsewhere, spend a considerable amount of their hard earned income on healthcare and specifically drugs. Vascepa will have to compete for a place in those budgets. So the cost of drugs especially lifetime drugs is extremely pertinent to our subject matter here. You are a very smart poster and a very valuable resource on this board but your laser focus seems to cause you to miss the forest on occasion.
There are an awful lot of diabetics who will want to be on Vascepa, and I think diabetics are well represented on this board. The cost of diabetic drugs is pertinent here.
North, I’ve read most of your posts over the last two years or so and I admire and respect the control you have taken of your T1 diabetes. I just reread your post to which I had replied and saw that you had written “$278 FOR A VIAL ...” and realized that my assumption that you must use a great quantity was based on lazy reading.
I am a lightweight T2 whose pancreas went south with my liver. In 2000, a liver tx gave me a new lease on life but shortly afterwards I discovered after a trip to an ER that my blood sugar was out of control. I used insulin for about a year and a half after that but when I saw the required amount going steadily down I weaned myself off of insulin. Apparently my pancreas had recovered somewhat. The endo gave me Prandin (generic name repaglinide) to control my mealtime spikes and for many years that was good enough to keep my A1c in the low 6’s. About two years ago my now annual A1c came back at 7.0. That and a retinal bleed in my left eye shocked me into action. I asked my PCP for a script for prandial insulin. That worked for the intended purpose but morning fasting numbers were still too high. So I asked for a basal insulin to complement the prandial. Compared to what I think most T1’s use it doesn’t take very much insulin for me to stay in range. My last A1c was 5.9.
I suspect that if I went back to a more rigorous/regular exercise program and cut my carb intake in half I could stay in the high 5’s/low 6’s just using repaglinide without insulin.
Wow that’s a pretty hefty copay, I just picked up my latest refill of NovoLog, two vials, with a co-pay of $94 on a Silverscript plan. Maybe you are getting a much larger quantity then I am. I’m pretty sure NovoLog is T2 in my plan. No moon
I’d love to see them call Nissen to be their expert witness at trial and then watch him squirm under cross.
“Case dismissed with prejudice. Expenses awarded to the defendant. Penalty assessed against plaintiff for frivolous lawsuit.”
You are spam. Ignored.
Can your conversation with the inept clown/cardiologist? Be referred to a review board for the ACC? This guy should not be credentialed
The quick answer is it looks like the two officers who sold did so to cover the tax obligation on the exercise of a much larger number of options. The exercise creates a very large income windfall with the corresponding large tax bill.
Well Thank you Apparently Wellness Letter has a much broader footprint than I realized.
"Berkeley Wellness | Berkeley Wellness
www.berkeleywellness.com
Berkeley Wellness is one of the most trusted sources of evidence-based wellness information that gives a day-to-day approach to a long and healthful life."
Retail exposure!! My brother-in-law Just forwarded to me a screenshot from the latest issue of the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter. That is a well-respected not-quite-free health advisory that covers a variety of current topics.
I tried several times to post the image here but no pasó nada. The article summarized the R-I results nicely in a sidebar, but also mentioned a possibility of a minor effect from MO.
Maybe the "[img][/img]" instruction is for a url and not an actual image?
Trading short term also works if you keep your short term trades in a specified account; for example, what I call my trading account. Core holdings can be maintained in a separate taxable account or even better a retirement account. I rarely hold for more than a few days/weeks/months in my trading account.
Registered professional traders have to update their portfolios every day, using “mark to market” accounting. The change in market value is ordinary income for them.
Of course if I believed, like a certain former elf, that life is a Newtonian equation then I wouldn’t bother trading at all since whatever I did would be offset by an equal but opposing force.
“I don’t know much but a lot of people seem to think I know more than they do, so here goes nothing. One more thing. They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Well I’m here to show you how true it is.”
Wait for it ..........
I don’t dispute the possibility or even the likelihood of great benefit for patients not on statins. I just declared and still declare that that Is a trial not yet run, so we don’t know what the outcome would be.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe we have no idea what the ARR would be in a population not on status. That’s a trial that has not been done. Would you run it on a population with already low LDL, or would you run it on a population that would normally be prescribed statins but are intolerant, or on some other criteria?
ACH with Ameritrade is available overnight for stock transactions. Granted that there is a three day clearing for options transactions. Checks are still obsolete for dealing with financial institutions in my opinion.
A simple spread is two transactions, and more advanced option transactions can have many legs, each being considered separately for term and gain/loss.
Settlement dates are not relevant to long/short term determination in nearly all capital transactions. What matters is purchase date and disposal date; that is, the trade dates. The only exception I know of is when you close out a short sale for a loss the settlement date determines the tax year, so in the unusual case where you short a stock on Jan 2 and cover for a loss Dec 31 of the same year, the settlement date, three trading days later, will be more than one year since the purchase and will push the loss into the next year as a long term capital loss.
It’s the way you say what you have to say. There’s a dark cloud hanging over all of your posts. This has been noticed by so many others besides me that perhaps you should stop and think about what has changed in your attitude. You come across as extremely sour on this investment.
MMM suggests that you are not as bad as I portrayed. I am inclined to revise my characterization to say your negativity is annoying but there are many other posters who are downright offensive and make you look like a pumper.