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62 days is 62 days away. A couple pieces of good news over the next couple months could put those in the money. I'm not calling this a prediction on my part, but it would be short-sighted to rule out the possibility.
You appear to have stated a fact when it cannot possibly be known at this point in time.
It would seem to be an appropriate place for someone with that title, given they are not yet in a position to have a well-developed sales force scattered around the globe.
I still think she hasn't necessarily been given a fair evaluation by most on this message board. One of the reasons is of course her father, but I don't think that should be adequate reason to believe she doesn't pull her own weigh in her position. Another big reason is that we have yet to see any of her work; it's hard for us to justify the position if we have no visibility to what she does for the organization. Mr. McNally, on the other hand, should now have substantial familiarization with her work, and has shown that he is not afraid to wield the axe when he deems it appropriate. Her continued employment with Titan implies to me that she has met McNally's scrutiny and proven her value to him. Additionally, her continued presence implies that Titan is not planning to sell out to Verb or anyone else, at least not until making inroads in the marketplace by themselves. Just my two cents, but I think I am making a logical inference here.
She has the Motorola Moto Z Force with 21MP camera and the Hasselblad zoom lens MotoMod for pictures. She has been working with da Vincis since the first one came to NH and probably will have some great and challenging questions for the Titan reps, whoever they may be.
Different topic... My wife's AORN Journal came in. It lists Titan as an exhibitor at booth 1157 of the AORN Conference in Boston April 1-5. She will be going. I may try to find a way into the exhibition hall if possible. If not, I asked her to visit, take good pictures, ask for business cards, and find out as much as possible!
Agreed! Any potential investor SHOULD read this board first if he/she is doing their DD. Speculatively disparaging the company serves no purpose except to discourage new investment dollars. Facts, and trying to piece together logical inferences from facts or valid information, are useful to all. Random negative statements with no basis are hurting our investment. And attacking each other makes it appear that TITXF is a viable stock choice for buffoons. I don't agree with everyone here at all times, but when I feel the need to share my disagreement, I try to do so respectfully. Attacks on each other degrade the validity of this message board and the value if our stock as seen by the public. IMO, of course, but I know I'm not the only one here who feels this way. (Thanks Measles !)
At work now so watching the AGM video again will have to wait until tonight.
GLG, do you have a link to that report?
Thanks all!
I agree on Fly-B as a valuable contributor!
Fly, do you have a reference to cite on the Verb/Titan roundtable you mentioned? If we can look back at it, maybe there are clues in there which make more sense under today's circumstances.
There are clearly a lot of factors which hint at a Verb partnership of some sort, but I still don't see the smoking gun to prove they aren't coincidences within a small technological circle of surgical robotic players. J&J (Gary Pruden) made a statement months before Verb existed about their robot being "in development" as opposed to saying "will be developed." When Verb was announced, Andrew Conrad (Verily CEO) said “We expect to work closely with pharma, biotech, medical device and diagnostic companies." Maybe he was indicating a plan to outsource development completely, and maybe Titan was a target acquisition all along. I'm still looking for more conclusive evidence. And the shutdown last year is what bothers me most about a sugar-daddy scenario. That part doesn't add up.
I'm okay with either outcome - independent launch or M&A/Buyout - as long as it gets me substantially closer to retirement.
I think ultimately the scoreboard is J&J or Verb's revenues. I don't believe they would have intentionally induced a 2 month delay just to keep investors in the dark under the guise of some misdirection. A publicly traded company such as J&J has a legal obligation to pursue that revenue for the benefit of their shareholders. Pushing revenue out for a couple months just to play mind games with shareholders would not be legal at all.
I guess we were typing the same general ideas at the same time!
I can't help but think that if Titan was in tight with J&J/Verb, there wouldn't be fundraising issues right now, and there would not have been a shutdown last year. How long was that shutdown? A couple months? J&J could not have let that happen if there was a connection. The subsequent revenue stream from when this hits the market would far outweigh what they would have needed to keep the development rolling, plus the additional lost opportunity by inducing that sort of delay could also have consequences. I'm still of the mindset that Titan is operating independently. No major organization as a benefactor would have let it flounder along as it did.
But I sure would like some news from them!
Well, the impact on TRXC's PPS is negligible at best - Stock is level for today, and down a couple cents since the surgery happened. I would have thought it was fairly big news for them!
But yes, I would love to see something, anything, preferably positive, reported by Titan.
There was this guy - kind of a little fellow, if I recall... He said I shouldn't follow that brick path of yellow. He said he represented the Lollipop Guild or some such. I didn't have the heart or the courage to disagree with him. If I only had the brain...
Holding off on some features to get to market sooner might not be optimal. Some customers might be inclined to hold off on their purchase if they know there is more to come, unless Titan offers free upgrades for some defined period. If you are going to war with a Giant like ISRG, do you want to only load a bullet in one chamber?
If it can cut a full year off the timeline and they can promise upgrades, it might be worth it. If it only saves a couple/few months, it might be better to wait for everything. Also, from a regulatory standpoint, they can get one approval for everything up front, or they will need to file iterative submittals for each new feature. Each subsequent submittal incurs delay and additional risk. Not that I want Larry the Cable Guy designing the instrument, but I find his philosophy to be applicable here - Git'R Done!
My understanding is an instrument of that level of complexity and risk category takes at least 6 to 9 months from FDA filing to approval. If it's that close to design freeze, they still need to do things like animal and cadaver studies to collect enough data for an analysis to be statistically significant (probably to at least a 95% confidence interval)... If they can hit the market in 2018, it won't be first quarter!
I hope so... I grabbed another 35K shares this morning!
Big news for sure! I sincerely hope he does not intend to bring new ideas to the instrument design, causing further setback in the schedule... Sticking to the schedule and reeling it in wherever possible has to be a top priority for this company now.
Investopedia shows Nasdaq listing requirements; I'm quite sure Titan does not meet the first one:
Listing Standard No. 1
The company must have aggregate pre-tax earnings in the prior three years of at least $11 million, in the prior two years at least $2.2 million, and no one year in the prior three years can have a net loss.
That was my take on it as well; it sounds like they plan to go it alone and I'm good with that. I'm surprised they are now aiming for US first. So many organizations seem to go for CE marking first, then adapt that filing with some addenda for their FDA submittal. But with an existing relationship with the FDA, maybe that is best after all, and should be easier to initiate market penetration without fighting language barriers on top of all other challenges.
I wish they could bring the timeline in a little; still two years to market... understandable, but not what I was hoping to hear. Chinese distributor is still on board. We might not need to return Longtai's $2M deposit after all!
From the standpoint of the presentation itself, I like how he stayed on topic regarding the various advantages over the competition. I would have liked to see some additional numbers presented for financials - prospective investors wouldn't want to hear things like how soon our current funding will run out, but he could possibly have provided an estimated market capitalization vs. anticipated revenues over the first couple years, just to give people some better info to work with when determining the real potential profitability of their investment.
Maybe they need to keep the PPS suppressed until they hit the lottery and can invest big $$$ into Titan. Or some other reason they don't want it to succeed. Certainly seems contrary to the purpose of this message board, which I believe should be to pass along factual information and generally assist the company and ourselves as shareholders therein.
I was in Cancun (actually a resort about 40 miles south) when I read the announcement that McNally was on board. It's a great place to receive good news about Titan!
Scottrade is showing me about 7,400 for volume and both bid and ask are for only 2,500 shares. Low volume day so far!
Not me, not yet. Surely Mr. McNally is quite busy getting up to speed and making changes as needed, but hopefully Mr. Barker will assert the importance of these communications. He is also free to write it up himself and submit it to Mr. McNally for approval. He did quite a nice job with it in November!
I wish I could be there! I'd love to see how well he speaks, and what he has to say. I know, it will be available on line 24 hours later, but I also wish I could escape New Hampshire winter weather.
Ok, Scottrade is showing ask .38. Not that bad. Not what I'd be hoping for, but...
So the Dow opens about 80 points up, but someone is asking .361 for their TITXF? Did I miss something?
In case the question comes up as to why we do this as a mass emailing, it is for a few reasons:
Getting the same email so many times will compel the recipients to read it.
Getting it from so many different senders tends to assure the recipients that it isn't being sent repeatedly by one individual, possibly from a few addresses (would take a lot of work by one person to come up with so many email addresses and fabricate names and shares held) to assert an individual opinion.
It makes it an event for the recipients, which promotes discussion amongst themselves about the content.
What I feel I failed to do is to include in the letter a specific invitation for the recipients to check out the message board, which will allow them to validate the number of senders some of the rationale behind the letters. Next time...
Thank you, but I did the easy part. Everyone here contributed in some way; I just grouped your thoughts together and wrote them up. I think this was another nice group effort, and hopefully will keep the communication channels open with them.
Now the real question... in the next couple weeks, will we get something like another Letter to Shareholders as a response? Mr. McNally just might not be as receptive to our input as Mr. Barker was. Hopefully, he will be. Obviously, we are looking to protect our investments, therefore our goals and theirs are ultimately the same; it's just a question of how to get to the goal.
I got through to all but 2. How did everyone else make out?
At first I wondered what you were talking about, then I saw the buttcrack drawn on the chart! Are you sure it's backside? After all, our ticker symbol is TITFX!
Mine appears to have gone through to Mr. McNally. I did a cut and paste from the list. Did you manually type it in? You can check your sent folder to see if there was a typo in your first one.
Two returned emails... we may have wrong addresses for James Shore and Sachin Sankholkar. I assume they will catch wind of the letter if we can't get through to them.
I'm sending... I sent one to myself first; it seems easier to click the Forward button on that one, then paste the new address, and delete FWD: from the subject line and the header info from when I sent it to myself. Otherwise, it is repeated copy and paste message, then copy and paste address, etc. The Forward button seems much easier to me.
Hopefully we will have adequate coverage, but a later send time may serve as reinforcement!
The list...
David.McNally@titanmedicalinc.com
cseibert@titanmedicalinc.com,
Paige.hargrove@titanmedicalinc.com,
mbernholtz@kerbel.ca,
info@titanmedicalinc.com,
Aprior@evcgroup.com,
Michael Polyviou <mpolyviou@evcgroup.com>,
john.barker@titanmedicalinc.com
James.shore@titanmedicalinc.com
Jasminder.brar@titanmedicalinc.com
Sachin.sankholkar@titanmedicalinc.com
Frederic.nahon@titanmedicalinc.com
stephen@titanmedicalinc.com
The letter...
Subject (for email subject line): Titan Medical Shareholder Letter 3
January 18, 2017
To Titan Medical Inc. Board of Directors and Management:
This letter is the third such document from our group of shareholders who regularly communicate via the InvestorsHub Titan Medical message board, and the first to be addressed also to our new CEO. To Mr. McNally, welcome to the Titan Medical community. We do not know if you have been informed about our group and our prior letters, so for a very brief history, we banded together on the aforementioned message board to convey our concerns over the direction of the company last year. We are unanimously pleased to have you on the team. As a group, we had reached substantial agreement on the list of attributes we had hoped to find in a new CEO, and your experience shows you to be a great match for that list. To Mr. Barker, we would like to express our gratitude for stepping up to the proverbial plate as interim CEO when it became necessary, as well as for creating a new model for shareholder communications, and also for finding Mr. McNally to help guide Titan Medical through these next critical phases.
One of our greatest concerns in the past was the infrequency of communications from the company, leaving shareholders feeling as though we were “in the dark” with regard to our investments. In November, Mr. Barker wrote a Letter to Shareholders which was unprecedented in our recent experience, and greatly appreciated. He provided information and status updates on a number of fronts including personnel and leadership changes, funding, development, and the need for 2017 milestones toward regulatory approval and commercialization. Despite the tenuous situation we felt the company was in at the time, his letter appeared to initiate a new chapter for the company and for investor relations. We truly hope that the depth and breadth of that letter can be a model for ongoing investor communications, whether issued as a Press Release or as a Letter to Shareholders via the Titan Medical web site, as was the first one. The Investor Presentation dated January 5, 2017, is certainly pertinent to new investors who may be getting familiar with Titan Medical and the opportunity being pursued, but most existing shareholders are seeking more intimate details on ongoing operations. As this is now a period of rapid transition on most of the topics from the first Letter to Shareholders, we would hope that more such letters can be written with reasonable frequency. Some contributors on the InvestorsHub message board have also suggested that we propose periodic conference calls with shareholders, but either form of ongoing communications would serve to help dispel fears and increase confidence within the investment community.
The first Letter to Shareholders touched upon the topic of funding and the “desire and need to fund the development all the way to market.” Ongoing discussions on the message board frequently address the concerns over funding, including whether non-dilutive funding measures are possible, and if a merger or buyout is imminent in order to reach the commercial market. The latter options would likely reduce financing risk substantially, but most likely would also greatly diminish the ultimate returns for those of us who are in it for the long haul. This leads us to pose the following questions:
Is Titan Medical still committed to remaining an independent organization, or is it more likely that Mr. McNally’s strong experience in developing partnerships will be relied upon for a new direction?
Is the “Longtai deal” (as it is colloquially known) still a possibility?
Is Titan currently working with any private equity investors?
Might Titan be considering a reverse split for uplisting potential, or is the prevailing assumption that it would not be necessary given a natural rise in price per share due to imminent milestone achievements?
From a shareholder perspective, funding is closely tied to schedule. Can information be shared about the correlation of funding and schedule, such as approximately how much additional funding is budgeted to reach each of the imminent milestones? Also, have the 2017 milestones yet been determined from a schedule perspective?
We know in very general terms that we need to achieve conclusion of development efforts and design freeze, and we need to file for regulatory approvals, and we presume some amount of clinical data will need to be generated via pre-clinical and clinical trials to support the regulatory filings. Is there a fairly firm date anticipated for design freeze and some additional estimates for subsequent milestones?
How many SPORT systems are to be built as "production equivalent" systems for clinical trials and other activities, and what anticipated costs are associated with these early systems?
Are we actively working with the regulatory agencies to ensure we are on the optimal path to approval?
Given the recent changes to the management structure and the SAB, has Titan maintained their relationships with organizations such as SAIL and Mayo?
We understand that we cannot necessarily expect detailed answers to all these questions in a public forum, but this represents a sample of the most frequent topics of discussion among our group, and we feel they best represent our most pressing concerns at this time.
We also look forward to an increase in public exposure to the SPORT system as it nears completion, via appearances at trade shows, conferences, and trade journal articles both in print and on the internet. Updated videos on the Titan Medical web site to show SPORT's capabilities would also attract favorable attention.
In summary, we are grateful for the recent and ongoing changes in personnel and we feel the outlook for our Titan investments is certainly brighter than it had recently been. We believe that continued communications and frequent status updates are critical to encourage new investors and allow for a more optimistic outlook within the investment community, ultimately improving share price and thereby making subsequent funding requirements easier to fulfill. We hope our newly revised management team is in agreement.
Sincerely,
Name:
City/State:
Shares held as of January 18, 2017:
Historically we picked a time and tried to all send it at about the same time. Titan does have a spam filter which blocks email going to too many addresses at once, so each of us sent out separate emails to everyone on the list. Does 1:00 Eastern (in about 25 minutes) work for everyone? Meanwhile, I'll re-send the letter and the latest distribution list.
Randall and Wolff are still listed on BOD. Do we have email addresses for them? I have stephen@titanmedicalinc.com from a SEDAR filing. Anyone have Dr. Wolff?
I was anticipating a "group send" of the third letter, but we hardly constitute a group! Let's see if things pick up for the afternoon. We still need to determine the most appropriate distribution list as well.
Anybody out there today?