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Day 9&10 notes of Copax trial in on SI-Mnta
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After reading the notes, personally I would not put Mnta's odds of winning at more than 50-50, and perhaps somewhere between 30-40.
If m-copaxone gets approved, the price will spike.
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imo, yes there will be a spike but the spike would be less otherwise, no ?
after all, it's a matter of revenues coming in 2014 or even later vs something like 2013 or even sooner assuming approval in 2012.
GrthzGd, thank you for the long explanation.
However if AW launch in Q42011 as in the PR, then wouldn't that invalidate your conjecture ?
Isn't the key to whole mystery of AW a-enox approval is that whether Amphastar can reproduce Lovenox without somehow using Mnta IP ?
And like you say, only they know the answer to that. We don't know that and to some degree MNTA does not know that .
The same logic applies to m-copax. The FDA can/will grant approval to m-copax once they are satisfied with whatever make them happy. Whether MNTA lose their shirt in court or not does not concern them, nor does that legal consideration should enter into their decision to approve or not approve.
re:EMT
Behaviorial Finance disproves EMT long ago.
Instead we can take advantage of the disconnect between price and value.
Ironically, LTCM used that same disparity in pricing to make handsome profits. Where it went wrong is leverage, too much leverage killed it.
For us retailers, that is not a problem because we don't have access to that kind of leverage. Still I have personally sworn off options since the dotcom bust.
FOMC Sept 20-21. So we should hear something from Uncle Ben at the end of today.
I bought some trading shares .
I'm strictly betting on Ben Bernanke moving the SP up and taking mnta with it.
Next 3 months possibles : I beg to differ.
Approval of Copaxone : although it seems to me that Amphastar's approval may shorten m-copax event, by no means this would reduce it to 3 months. The date is still indeterminate imo .
Copax trial : I am not so sanguine about the outcome. After reading Jbog's CS lawsuit notes (day1-7) and day 8 on SI-mnta, I would only put mnta's odds at best 50% (a toss up) and probably a whole lot less.
FOB partnerships : Well, I wouldn't expect any for a long, long time to come.
So at best, the way I see it, m-copax gets approval , not in 3 months, may be mid 2012, and mnta has to wait until teva's patents run out in 2014.
Not a good picture. However there is always a price that a retailer could be profitable in mnta. Not at the currently level though.
Why buy at 12, when I can get it at 10 ?
I don't know about the future . However from my past experiences, when I don't think price can can cheaper it does or when I consider something grossly overpriced, it goes even higher ( like dndn to 55+ )
I have not put out any limit buy. I am waiting for the macro situation in the general mkt to getter better.
Tekcor,
<But it kinda reminded me of how Amphastar was not talked about much on this board >
Amphastar is/was a fat tail event. To be more specific, it was assumed to be a skinny tail but turned out to be a fat one. As such it came out of nowhere and caused a lot of damage
Amphastar know how was ridiculed or minimised coupled with the assumption of high fda hurdles hence the foregone conclusion of impossibility. Hence the unblinking gaze of Mordor was fixed upon Teva ( sorry, can't resist. I introduced my 12 yr daughter to Tolkien and she is getting a kick out of it) and missed amphastar coming out of left field.
I remember myself a few weeks ago fussing about mnta being " a sure thing", which to a contrarian person like myself, is too good to be true. What I mean by "a sure thing" is that I have come to assume that Amphastar was DOA, Teva's minor letter is definitely not minor, m-copax approval is unknown but could happen anytime, fob deals are delayed, but so what the cash is piling up by the day. There are worse places to be in than mnta.
I have come to believe that Victor Niederhoffer is dead right when he grumbles that lady fortuna is always fickle. Just when every thing seems to line up right, then bam. That is why I try extra never to offend the gods :)
JMkobers, you didn't need to do that.
Just like the Daily Exclusivity count needs not come into existence in the first place ( it has been a big burr under my saddle ).
It is unbecoming to rub the adversary's face into the mud once he is down. It is bad karma. The gods punish those afflicted with hubris.
Hattie, please see my msg for RegularDoc.
RegularDoc I agree with you. Approval for amphasar does put into question the speciality of mnta technology.
So tinker posited that if anyone were to buy mnta now, it would be strictly for m-copax.
Before today's event I never thought amphastar would make it either because fda hurdles are high or that amphastar abilities are low or a combination thereof.
Now that amphastar got approval perhaps (and this is pure conjecture from my part ) the fda internally has come up with a process to evaluate biosimilars in a reasonable time frame a yr after it approved m-enox.
Before today, I really couldn't tell when m-copax would be approved. After today I still can't tell when exactly, but my common sense tells me it can't be longer than whatever it was yesterday.
The bigger unknown with m-copax imo is then the trial.
Today's haircut is about the same magnitude as the one DNDN got not too long ago when it missed on the revenues side.
If I were to try buying mnta now, I would use limit buys and set it at 10 or 11. And why not ? I've been burned plenty trying to catch falling knives. The last time was with dndn. I bought in at 11 only to see it go to 9 on the debt ceiling debacle. I got lucky and bailed out whole when it went back to 11 a few weeks later.
I gave up trying to be proven right long ago. Instead I try to be profitable and the key to being profitable imho is to buy as cheap as possible and currently I don't have a good feel for mnta.
The cash may not help much. Currently on a macro level, there is way too much cash anyway everywhere. Capital is of little help to the capitalist if there is plenty of it around and the cost of use is low or nil, especially if the venues of deployment are limited .Especially in the case of mnta where the future is sort of cloudy in terms of new projects.
I do have to agree with tinker that as bad as today's news are, it is actually very positive for mCopax. The key is to buy cheap.
Please Stop the blame game.
The guilty part is staring at you every morning when you shave.
Last I check I still live in a free country. No one is holding a gun to my head to force me to do anything against my will, least of all buying a stock.
Please grow up and learn to take personal responsibility.
I have been bearish about the general mkt in general since the beginning of summer from reading several financial blogs. Therefore I have been mostly in cash , including paring down my mnta stake. However should the SP shoot up to 1400 or beyond, I would have missed out on a great move. But the decision to be on the sideline was all mine. No one made me sell, just like no one made me buy or hold on to mnta. So please, stop being childish and act like a grown up.
This is a public msg board. People are free and do express their opinions.We do read and benefit from the exchange of different ideas. However the decision to act still remains personal. Don't forget that.
OT: UBS 2 B loss
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I agree with this argument :http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/09/no-rogue-traders-only-rogue-banks/
They $2 billion hit of UBS is being called the work of a “Rogue” Trader. This is a false and misleading statement. Why? Because there are no rogue traders — just as there are no predatory borrowers — there are only rogue banks.
Here’s a news flash: If you issue credit, your working assumption MUST BE that there will be people who are not qualified who will try to borrow money. Your job each day is to separate qualified borrowers with the capacity to service that debt from the unqualified borrowers who do not have that ability.
...
Anyone who runs a shop that has a proprietary trading desk is obligated to do everything in their power to prevent a single employee from bringing down the company. A rogue trader with massive losses is a sign of complete and utter failure BY THE BANK’S MANAGEMENT. It means that the supervisory functions have failed. That the ability to track what is occurring is not happening, certainly not in real time. In the case of the UBS London trader, he hid the losing trades for 3 years (so much for real time supervisory tracking).
That represents an utter failure of management.
I can't answer for him but I'll give you my reason(s).
In my case I read a lot of financial blogs ( for example : the big picture, pragcap.com and dshort.com , john mauldin among others ).
There are people who opine on the future based on TA charting and/or fundamentals ( the macro people ). I read all that ( my personal preference is for the macro factors ), I chew on it and then I draw the conclusion that currently the upper range of the SP is limited and I am not paid enough, ie the risk/reward ratio is not good enough for me to be fully exposed hence I am mostly in cash , except for a few stocks like mnta, which I have cut back extensively and high yielding stocks like energy partnerships .
I suppose you don't agree with that prognostication but then that is what makes a mkt.
Mirabile dictu, she goes green, only if for a second.
So where can I park my cash ?
I , for one, would be willing to pay a negative yield rate , something like -0.15% up to a max of -.25% a yr to stay liquid ie to stash my cash in MMF. After all, there are costs associated with running MMFs and I am not willing or be stupid enough to take Uncle Ben's bait to be on my "risk on" mode (as the parlance goes) as he keeps penalizing the savers to rescue the banks.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That's all he knows what to do and all he can do.
The macro picture is butt ugly imo.
If you like mnta at this level, you may get even a better price in the days ahead. I am no technical guy but even I have noticed she's been trading like sh&t lately and I have absolutely no idea why besides my old lame excuse of "price being set at the margin ".
Even with a stock with excellent fundamentals like mnta, one always have to think and worry about a fat tail event. I don't know what that may be, but it certainly behooves any speculator to manage his/her risk accordingly, especially with a seemingly sure thing like mnta.
Let's just take the other side of the coin.
If the so called "mkt" is so crazy ie inefficiently pricing mnta too low , then take a look at some other companies that should be out of business like those who were trying to peddle "cures" for fat pills : arna,orex and vvus.
arna and orex are already down in the buck and change slot (they should be out of business immediately imo ) and I don't get why is vvus still up at 8.
My point is that the "mkt" is crazy, can be crazy and will stay crazy for a long time.
I don't know about the McDuff guy but I was familiar with the marketocracy website. I followed it for a few yrs (3 or 4) around 2001-2004 and was not impressed with them and so I dropped them a while back.
I could not verify all these claims about their performances, actually the track records of the rated 3 or 4 star stars.
Imo they are about the same with the Motley fool bunch. May be there are some stand outs but I sure couldn't tell which ones they are and it was hard to verify their claimed track records.
re: 4 Myths
I would be leery in following Ken Kam's opinion. I do remember him from my days as an investor in Elan and Ken Kam was one of the most enthusiastic booster/believer.
When I followed your link , I found this : http://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/2011/01/26/why-chinese-value-stocks-get-no-respect-on-wall-street/
Well, CCME is now BK fetching all of 31c. Hank Greenberg (of AIG)lost big and unfortunately the shorts were dead on.
Amazing enuf to me that 10Man not only has his facts straight about just every detail regarding Mnta , he also has pretty damn good grasp imo of the big picture regarding the consequences of the political processes of the past 30 yrs and the macro picture of things to come.
Right on.
One important fact but little known is that Texas escaped the housing bubble and hence the meltdown because of its well regulated mortgage laws.
Hence it was spared the excesses of the so called free mkt , meaning free of any kind of rules and regulations, when it comes to the easy mortgage loan practices that pretty much caused the great Recession of 07-08 and the almost melt down of the global financing system.
There is a difference between some insider buys and other insider buys .
To wit the insider buying lie :http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2011/08/11/the-insider-buying-lie/
10nisman, you should know better than to argue with a great trader who can print $ coming and going.
I can actually see his logic about trading in&out of mnta , taking advantage of the volatility and minting coins. I wish I can do what he is doing but I can't. Whipsaw will kill me. It takes both luck and skill to surf the wave like that.
What I don't get is his bilious attitude wrt to mnta and its mgt.
Hell, if I were in his shoes, I'd be happy as a clam .
So Dew, do you mind explain what are your objections to Shiller's CAPE ?
I actually like it the first time I learned about it. It instantly appealed to my common sense.
Just before a mkt collapse , PEs (of SP500) historically looked cheap and at mkt bottom, PEs looked horribly high and expensive.
For a poor retailer sap like myself, how can I judge/tell whether a mkt is cheap or expensive. Take 95F for a summer average
temperature. In the desert where I have lived for the last 10 yrs, that would be actually a great summer ( not being so hot) but for Oregon where I lived for 30 yrs , it would have been a hot summer.
So what ? The point about the sage of omaha is that he always buys what he perceives to be value.
He don't do no tek, whether hi tek or lo tek or bio tek because he claimed he can't grok them.
You know the story of Buffet and his investment in American Express back in the 60s right ? The oil salad scam ? If you don't , look it up.
WB became immensely rich because, one he has patience and two he goes where others fear to tread.
When price and value get disconnected, he comes in exactly when retailers start bailing as their eyes are only on the price.
If I don't like a stock, I vote with my feet. It's still a free country last I check .
Looking at Icahn with his Biib and Amylin expereriences ,I have no illusion that my bitching can change anything.
In short, what is everyone complaining about?
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How about price not going up after they bought it ? My wager that would cover about anywhere between 90 to 99% of it.
Patience ain't a virtue with these retailers.
Hell, I bought 6K of amrn in Jan11 at around 8-9. In the next couple of months it drifted down to a low of 7 on Mar 23 which gets me a loss of 18%. Then on Apr 18, not even a month later , it jumped to 17.
My point is that it takes patience. I have a reason, a thesis when I buy a stock. If the price goes down and my thesis still stands, I consider that a buy gift from Mr bipolar Mkt.
OTOH, if the price is down and my thesis is no longer applicable, I will admit being wrong and sell out.
There is no evidence so far that I know of that would make me change my reasons for buying mnta in the first place.
floblu , iggy feature no works for me.
I just clicked on my favorite poster and it says "unignored this member". which means if it had worked, i wouldn't have been able to click on his name in the first place.
I have been buying dndn with the proceeds I get from trimming my mnta stake.
Since when is Biotech investing about earnings ? Most of the biotechs discussed here or anywhere else ( from the 1-2$ range up to the 50s like vrtx) hardly have any earnings.
To me, biotech investing ( actually speculating ) is all about expectations , whether it be phase 2 , phase 3 or advisory committees votes or fda approval, future (underline that heavily) sales etc ...
In the case of dndn, expectations were high and now they are low. Retailers piled in along with big hedge funds (Cohen of SAC, Soros among others ) and now they rushed out.
At sub 10 , dndn is a good gamble for a contrarian type like myself.
10nisman, when you argue that mnta is a good value with a person like me, you are preaching to the choir.
If mnta trades badly, it only reinforces and strongly validates dew's observation that "the mkt efficient hyp is the biggest piece of bs ever propagated".
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Be greedy when others are fearful.
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Also, methinks the reason retailers/traders are staying away from mnta is not fear. It is over confidence . They think they can pay just a small premium by waiting until the last minute to buy their ticket when the train leaves finally the station (knock on wood here ). And in the mean time they can better speculate somewhere else more exciting, more profitable in their opinion.
After all, what you are asking of a common retailer is patience. You might as well be asking for the moon.
I have to come in on jbog's corner.
If a person is not a risk taker as he admits himself to be and he is willing to pay a premium for the general uncertainty to lessen, then the logical rational thing is to wait.
If the end is a pps of at least twice t he current value, what's a couple of bucks for insurance ?
Beside mnta price has been acting like crap. I am no believer in conspiracy and I do firmly believe in the short term pps is strictly set at the margin by retailers' action.
I was watching a ppt presentation by Rob Arnott of Research Associates ( he is the guy who created the RAFI index which is implemented by the DFA fund family ) and I thought instantly of mnta when he said that investors usually have to trade off between value and growth.
Mnta has both value ( increasing cash cushion, a genuine cash generating machine according to dew ) and huge potential growth .Once the growth potential becomes clear it will take off, I have no doubt of it.
OT: On SP downgrade
from the big picture web :
<In finishing this up, I’ll note that the 10-yr US Treasury is ripping this morning, trading as I write at 2.40%. I guess the talk around the water coolers at S&P must be something like: “WTF? Don’t they believe us?” Answer: No, S&P, we don’t. And thanks for all your help circa 2005-2008 enabling the crisis in the first place. That won’t soon be forgotten. Nor will the defense of Lehman right up until the end.
Adding: No comment about S&P is complete without mentioning their complicity in rating GS’s Abacus deal AAA.>
I read yesterday that a bond rating has two parts : ability and willingness.
The US gvt can always pay its debt so that the rating for ability to pay remains and should be AAA. The willingness , because of the current and possible future deadlock in DC, should rightfully be downgraded to AA to send the pols a message.
I don't remember who said it but he said something to the effect :
"if I get to come back after death, I want to come back as the bond mkt because nobody f*%ks with the bond mkt ". A true statement if there is one.
So MNYC, did T/A help you spot DNDN ?
It would have been a fat profit. Last I check there are more shorts on mnta (16%) than dndn (11%) as of jul 15 according to yahoo.
So what that means most shorts missed out on dndn.
OTOH, if you are counting on the inherent high volatility of biotechs being amplified by a choppy general mkt to make a quick profit shorting on any big mkt move down then I could say that I often take the other side of what you call shorting.
I would buy a biotech with high volatility on a sharp move by the general mkt and sell later when it snapped back. I have done that many times in the past with reasonable success. Whether you win or I win depends on the general mkt , which neither you nor I can predict. If the wind is at my back ( ie the crash is short lived ) I make a profit, if it blows your way you profit.
What I mean by it takes higher skill shorting than being long is of the fundamental short. Take for example, the many blow ups recently of chinese reverse mergers listed here in the US. To be successful, one actually has to have people on the ground checking the facts. Something which is definitely way overhead for the retailer shorts.
I have come to respect hedge funds. They do the dirty digging and if they profit by finding contradictory evidence , I consider they have earned their profit.
I am leery of shorting anything.
If I think I've learned anything from my own experience ,it is that it is much harder to make a profit shorting than being long.
It takes much more skill to be a successful short than being long imo. Hence I don't short and I don't do leverage , either margin or options. GLTY though.
ECB to buy Spanish bonds. So where does ECB get the "money" to buy these bonds ?
As a matter of fact, where does Uncle Ben get the "money" to buy and get these rotten MBAs off the balance sheet of JPM,Citi, GS , BAC etc during QE1 ? or QE2 and may be QE3 ?
And how come if Uncle Ben "prints money" why haven't the 10yr notes and the 30yr bonds yield gone up. They have actually gone down with 2 rounds of QEs.
I believe I have the answer to the inflation question. All the FB did with both QE1&2, is an asset swap. The FB transferred these lousy MBAs from the balance sheets of the bank onto its own ( this can be verified by looking at the BS of the FB every quarter ); in its stead, these banks's accounts at the FB are credited with the extra reserves the FB created out of thin air (which is a sort of money printing, except there is no money involved).
Here I must admit I owe a lot from learning about the real actual working of the monetary system of a sovereign entity like the US federal gvt whose currency is fiat currency, untied to any thing like gold, from Cullen Roche who runs pragcap.com.
I am a pragmatic person and I will change my understanding and view of the world if a better explanation comes around and I have learned a lot from MMT (aka modern money theory) from Cullen.
Many gvts are like that : the US, England, Japan, China etc ... Europe is different.
Dav, a short term wise mnta pps is determined by retailers action.
I have no idea what would happened, whether it would go up or down. Although I noticed my other biotech positions have suffered also.
Personally, I am really stuck. Even though I shed 2/3 of my mnta stake at a relatively good price ( compared to the current price) I still have a lot left at 30K shares.
If mnta sinks with the mkt, It would be foolish for me to buy more. That would not be good risk mgt. If I had not already a good size position, I would add more.
Price and value are not always connected. Those who can tell the difference can usually profit from the disparity which in the case of mnta hopefully is short term. After all the company has a big cash cushion and has plenty of possible future events which can be positive.
Dr Vin, I agree 100%. The Dept of Defence is actually a misnomer.
It would be more accurate to rename it as the Dept of Offence as it would be more appropriate considering its current world wide missions and responsibilities.
A lot of people , myself included, derived a well paid and secure job , which is a great advantage in this globalized and competitive world, within the defense sector.