Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Mnta short % is higher than dndn .
According to yahoo , as of Jul 15, shorts for mnta is 16% vs 11% for dndn , which means they miss out big on the dndn disaster.
I have always believe most short action comes from retailers, meaning the little guys piling on the wrong side of the trade, instead of hedge funds.
In the case of dndn, quite of few hedges were burned on the long side according to bloomberg : Steve Cohen of SAC, Soros and quite a few others I don't remember.
I can chime in with the waste in Defense spending.
I have been working for the DOD for 10 yrs and at first the inefficiency choked me up coming from the private world where I worked for 22 yrs before going to defense.
In my opinion, a cutback of anywhere between 15% to 25% wouldn't harm anything. Part of the problem comes from the revolving door between gvt and contractor.
To give an example : a general before retirement would shut down a gvt facility in the last 2-3 yrs of his service, only to have the same capability outsourced later to his employer once he retired.
It is corruption pure and simple but it goes on in broad daylight.
I'll stop here because it really is endless.
That guy is real. I remember him from IV Elan msg board.
He sold out of elan and bought into dndn is the high 20s somewhere and even changed his moniker to start a new chapter.
I do feel bad that he does not manage risk effectively.
Personally, as part of my risk assessment and mgt plan I have sold off 2/3 of my mnta stake when it hit the high teens and low 20s.
What I have left is still a lot , around 30K , which is what the 1st rule of the Zurich Axioms prescribed.
On Risk:
- Worry is not a sickness but a sign of health – if you are not worried, you are not risking enough.
- Always play for meaningful stakes – if an amount is so small that its loss won’t make any significant difference, then it isn’t likely to bring any significant gains either.
- Resist the allure of diversification.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/02/the-zurich-axioms/
<The one bonus with shorting is never covering for stocks that go to zero. So you get the money, but no tax gain. >
Years ago , back in the mid 80s, before the internet, I was reading newsgroups on Unix machines (misc.invest I believe), I remembered a guy asking around if anyone has shares of a stock that has gone to zero and been delisted.
He said his broker won't free up the gain since he didn't cover and he can't cover because there wasn't any to buy.
I happened to be on the other side of the deal and I had in my account several Ks of this now worthless stock and so I transferred them to him. He was very grateful as I remembered.
Jbog, you do have a point about personal self control.
Wrt to the issue of "transparency" and "emailing mnta mgnt ", how long do the protagonists insist on going on.
I for one, have been trying to stay out.
However, this place can easily becomes trashy like yahoo.
Yahoo is worthless because of two things : nasty , personal exchanges and belaboring certain personal points.
A useful msg board can quickly becomes less so due to the clutter.
I am a speculator in mnta too. I won't even bother to delude myself than I am an investor , long or short term.
The difference I see between myself and IG is that I got in much earlier , during the iffy times of the teva propaganda about t-enox imminent approval. I bore the doubt and I got the cheaper price.
IG got in much later , when in his own opinion , the t-enox threat is perceived , whether right or wrong by the "mkt" aka "retailers" to be less, hence the price is dearer. So far nothing new here ; one gets what one paid for. More doubt, much cheaper. Less doubt, not so cheap.
Even if t-enox won't be approved for another year, I would say that mnta price won't move much from the 19-20 mark. The only thing that would move the pps drastically is an m-copax or fob event.
I am happy since at 20 I have a 50% gain (that is what fido tells me) and I can be patient. A person whose cost is 19-20, ain't necessarily be so. Hence the impatience and the relenting desire to pressure and clamor for "transparency". Hell, I ain't born yesterday and I have been around the block much more than once.
Mnta mgt, imo, is more transparent and I based my opinion on their answers during cc for the last 2 yrs I have been in, than just about any company I have ever invested in since 1983.
If I am not happy with CW, I would vote with my feet. Which I did with elan, and look what happened ? 100% gain from 5 bucks :) and I quite don't really know why . I have been with elan since 2003 and just sold out last yr.
OB, IG is being sarcastic.
In my opinion, the moderators here will allow any factual information whether positive and negative.
The kind of dialogue IG wished to continue is useless and a waste of BW, imo.
In that matter, I have to agree with 10nisman.
Them analysts shore know on which side of the bread the butter is on.
Also because of its growing cash hoard, Mnta will not need to do any deal any time soon. No deal means no fee for WS.
No fee on WS is equal to dead money as far as the IBs are concerned.
1. Yes or launch at risk ( of paying damages later if you lose in court)
2.Yes.
6. Trial starts this Sep 2011, I believe.
3,4,5 I don't know enuf to give you a decent answer. I'd go by Dew 's odds.
Sodrock, I have to agree with your personalization of the 2 companies.
Sanofi is a patsy compared to teva.
re:Today's Baron's story on AMRN
It looks to me like somebody talking his book. Over my years of reading I belatedly discovered there is a fair amount of book talking in barron's.
Not that it is bad by itself ; just that a person needs to be aware of.
Jbog, I have to agree with you on this.
However it is not worth arguing back and forth, belaboring the point.
Roubini works from a macro pov and he is no mkt timer. By the same token, I knew in 04-5 there is a housing bubble going on, but there is no way I can predict the popping point.
By 2007 I was checking ABX indices on markit.com daily ; still all I could see was that the indices stop going up and then one day boom, these different dated ABXs lost 20% in one day and keep cratering ; some to 10-15% of par value by the time the smoke cleared.
I ain't no econ major and I won't pretend to be able to tell apart the different "schools" of economic thoughts.
However even 30 yrs ago, when I was getting my MBA, it already smelled fishy to me the assumption that the mkt was rational; that is the so call mkt becomes rational because in the end it is the total sum of activities of rational agents acting in their best interest.
It is crystal clear to me now why it is so ; agents are assumed to be rational because otherwise it would be impossible to describe their decision process with mathematical equations or that anything more than that would be mathematically intractable.
Hell, even little ole me could tell there was a real estate bubble going on. I tried to warn my friends and colleagues against swapping houses and moving up to no avail. All of them are now upside down.
Dew, you'll like this dig on EMH
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/06/shiller-more-expectations-theory-less-efficient-market-hypothesis/
Yale professor Bob Shiller’s column in the Sunday NYT ( The Sickness Beneath the Slump) is filled with interesting tidbits, data and analysis.
You may be tempted to think of his column as the typical Residential Real Estate analysis, looking at historical prices and current trends.
Don’t.
What the good professor does this morning is damn his own profession for their slavish devotion to bad theory. The Efficient Market Hypothesis — at least as practiced by Wall Street economists — is the rough equivalent of a million monkeys with a million typewriters creating Hamlet. That somehow out of a crowd of emotional, irrational, ill-informed and greedy humans, some form of truth will emerge.
Dr V, I concur with you. eom
Hattie, I don't have private reply so I will answer you publicly.
Why did I sell in the 19s ? That was easy. I had too much of mnta in my portfolio and I needed to get it back into a reasonable proportion. You are aware how volatile it is, can be so there is no guarantee it won't see the teens again.
Btw, I was a veteran of elan , from 2003 to 2010. I made a lot of money off elan but honestly and more importantly, I left even more on the table.
Do I have regret that I sold mnta at 19 only to see it go over 20, of course I do. But that is the sort of self control one has to learn/master in this game.
I bought a small stake in Amrn (6K)at around 8 in Jan 11 along with Exel (6K) (which zipman loves. I only say this because he is the "buy on dips" guy when it comes to exel ). At one time I was down 20% on amrn . Then one day in Apr 2011, it went up to 16 and I had a 100% gain. Retailers especially late comers went giddy with vision of buy out in the mid 20s and 30s etc .
You have to understand the psychological reasoning here. These people came it late (after the release of the P3 Anchor trial ). They didn't want to bear the uncertainty of Anchor outcome , I did . Thus the only reason amrn would go up even higher imo would be a buy out at a premium by a big pharma.
I sold out in the 16s and 17s only to see it go to 20 and then fall back.
The reason I sold at 16 is because I did a quick calculation on possible future sales using Lovaza current numbers and given a share count of 160M , 16 was a fair number to me.
If it looked like I am right on amrn or mnta, that degree of rightness is only momentarily because nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. I have learned to control my greed ; you will have to do the same if not done already. I do believe that mnta will by X2 sometime in the future.
When to double down and when to leave money on the table for others is a lesson only learned through wrenching personal experiences that can't be passed on verbally.
One has to live through the experience and more importantly one has to be honest with oneself and accept one's responsibility. Without admission of error, there is little possibility for learning.
A few weeks ago I caught this little tid bit on TeeVee. I saw a guy quoted Oprah that she knows of nobody changing because of facts. All changes are done through the heart or emotions. That is indeed very true.
Personally, it is a hard question to answer.
Not because I want to hide anything from you but because the answer depends on each person's psychological/mental make up.
Take for ex , the stop limit sell as a protection measure. I don't use it. In the beginning, I did . I lost a bunch in the mini crash of 89 with Compaqs stop limits. I remember it crashed from 110 to 80, only to recover at 105 at the end of the day. Guess where my sold were executed.
Since then, I used mental stops. One, you don't show your hands to the MMs but two, it is much harder mentally and I failed most of the time to carry it through myself.
You asked for methods/charts. I don't have any to recommend to you. I am a firm believer in behavioral econ/finance and I read a lot of books on the matter subject. I derived my rules from self examining my own failure/pattern/behavior and try to learn from my past mistakes. It is extremely important imo to acknowledge mistakes so that we can learn and move on and adapt.
I recently read a couple of excellent psychological books on mistake making. If you wish, I will try to go back and find them for you.
As you say, all these plans have specified limit sells. All these are ex-ante.
Jbog 's bitching is ex-post. What this means to me is that when mnta share was in the 20s , he was dreaming of even higher price. He could have gotten out, but his greed kept him in. Now that the price is lower, he bitches. Typical retailer behavior.
BTW, personally I have sold off about 40K in this run , about half of my stake. When it was down in the teens, I bucked up and bought. When it got to the 19s I sold.
Go to insidercow.com
Amen. You are absolutely correct on this . eom
Dew, I get you alright.
However with SP in the 1300s, but now is not the time to buy.
These are certified blue chip companies and they will correct when the mkt corrects.
Why buy now, when I can buy later cheaper ?
OT: pop bottles bombs. Thanks for the warning. eom
OT: On investing : The many hats of great investors
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-investing-the-many-hats-of-great-investors/2011/05/17/AFN02c8G_story.html
I do like this line of thinking when it comes to investing ; it also parallels mine as I do believe successful investing is more a mental, psychological endeavor than anything else.
Btw, Ritholz is a hedge fund manager ; he runs something like Fusion analytics, I think.
Here is an except :
Graduation season is upon us. From the next generation of Warren Buffett wannabes, I occasionally hear questions such as “What should I learn to become a great investor?”
Contrary to popular belief, investing isn’t a traditional academic discipline. Money management is hardly a typical major. There are, of course, plenty of “Business Administration” undergrads, but their focus tends to be on running companies, rather than investing in them.
We churn out MBAs like made-in-China widgets, yet few ever become outstanding investors. And don’t even ask about economists — the profession that missed the housing boom and bust, the Great Recession, the credit crisis and the market collapse.
Great investors are savvy generalists. I can think of five fields that are hugely helpful to asset management. If you were to study these disciplines, your understanding of how markets work would greatly improve. And you would be a better investor.
How? You will generate better risk-adjusted returns; meaning, you will get the most bang for the bucks you are putting at risk. You will suffer less from volatility — the stomach-churning ups and downs in the markets that are one part risk, one part opportunity. And you will avoid the typical mistakes that most investors make.
The five disciplines that can help:
Historian: Knowing what has happened in the past (and how often) is an enormous advantage when it comes to investing. It informs you of the range of possibilities, allows you to conceptualize possible outcomes to various scenarios and provides a framework for thinking about market cycles.
Psychiatrist: Speaking of scared: Have you ever sold anything in a panic — then regretted it over the ensuing months? What about the opposite — greedily buying stocks that were screaming higher because everyone else was?
Trial lawyer: Good litigators are always skeptical, but not negative. Is that witness telling the truth? What is motivating him? Is the opposing counsel’s argument logical? Being able to answer these questions makes for a good lawyer – and a good investor.
Mathematician/statistician: Investing is filled with math: compound interest-rates, dividend yields, long-term gains, price-to-earnings ratio, risk-adjusted returns, percentage draw downs, annualized rate of returns.
Don’t worry if you suffer from math anxiety: If you can operate the simplest calculator — even the free one that came with your computer — you have the requisite math skills needed.
Accountant: When you buy a stock, you are buying an interest in a company’s future revenue and profit. How much you pay for that future cash flow determines whether you are over or under paying. That means understanding the basics of a company’s books is a key to recognizing value.
---------------------
Charlie Munger who is the sage from Omaha's sidekick also said :"It's a matter of finding a few good companies. After that just sit on your ass and wait." Hopefully mnta belongs that category :)
If I don't believe mgt, the right thing to do is to vote with my feet.
I have done that with more than one company. Once I had a stake in elan with more than five figures. I have none today.
I look at exactly the same facts you do, hear the same words from mnta as you do , and I do believe them and you don't .
The way I see it, his trading whether good or bad , depends very much on late comers like you and me buying.
If nobody bites, bad. If the greater fool theory works, it's good.
I am speechless about the conditions (or rather lack thereof) of the 10M financing deal.
I thought I already paid plenty of tuition to Penny (Stock) State University back in the 80s when it was run by Messieurs Blind'em and Rob'em ( aka Blinder & Robinson ). God knows they probably are out already from the pen.
In behavior finance, such a reason is known as anchoring reflex, I believe.
One is stuck , anchored to a fixed data point (usually from the recent past ).
I find myself often ignorant but I do try not be a moron which i defined as remaining and insisting be ignorant in the face of contrary evidence.
re:Boceprevir vs Telaprevir
-------------
That would make vrtx pps rather overpriced , wouldn't you say ?
I am no shorting man, sworn off the habit a long time ago . in y2K with the dot com bust, I even converted my account back to cash and stayed that way ever since.
I will be only interested in keeping watch over vrtx pps only as a lesson in "investors" psychology to applied later
OT: Oldberkeley. I believe you misunderstood me.
---------------------------
What I mean by not trusting chinese capitalism, is that I suspect and believe it to be an extreme form of crony capitalism whereby by design the state implicitly creates extraneously bureaucratic rules with the sole purpose to hinder the foreign companies trying to do business in China.
Hence if there are big profits to be made, the rules of the game are crafted such that as an outsider you are guaranteed to get the crumbs and the leftover of the meal.
There currently are major capital control measures making it nigh impossible for foreigners to directly invest in major chinese enterprises.
Last week, I just finished "Into the Plex" , a book about Google. There is a very enlightening chapter about the toils and travails of Google with the chinese bureaucracy.
OT: You are making a big assumption.
Which may or may not be true. Which is given the fact there is a possibly big and growing demand in the yrs to come in common household goods in these emergent countries ( China , India , Indonesia etc ...), perhaps old brand names like P&G can profit handsomely riding that demographic coattail.
Take soap and detergent for example ; they are not hard to manufacture . What you would strive for is consistency in the manufacturing process and P&G is very good at it. In a former incarnation, I was a ChE and I do have some reasonable ideas regarding quality control of the manufacturing process etc ...
Methinks, actually it would be more rewarding, if it were possible, to invest in the local companies which will participate in the same trend, offering up scale household products but at a discount to the brand names of P&G for example and a few steps better than the common cheap fare.
Chinese can make IC chips ; they certainly can make something that would compete with Tide at a discount.
I don't trust the sort of capitalism that exists in China to be even handed when it comes to allowing fair competition within its domestic markets. I can't prove it to anyone but the feeling in my guts tells it was never , ain't, won't be ever a fair level playing field.
Bad Fung Shui to partner with company that have "Z" in name.
-------
Very funny
Interestingly I find a lot of commonness between today option players and the customers of the bucket shops from the late 19th century to the early part of the 20th as described and explained by Jon Markman in his annotated version of "Reminiscences of a stock operator ".
Both stand to win or lose based on the underlying motion of the security without actually owning it.
Plus ca change, plus rien ne change.
btw, the customers of the bucket shops regularly get cleaned out like clockwork but that didn't stop them from coming back.
However those who came flocking back were not necessarily the same ones who were taken to the cleaners earlier ; a minor but important difference. However a great and timeless lesson on human behavior.
As MNTA IR stated some time ago, Teva is a $49B Co. - people listen
-------------------
It's not really about the mkt cap. It's about the fees that Teva throws out whenever it buys another company. Granted a company with a big mkt cap can afford a lot of deals, but it really boils down to money one can earn through these fees.
Given the facts that teva has been quite active in acquisitions lately, one should put oneself in the shoes of these analysts at the brokerage houses. What incentives do they have in spelling out in black and white for the common joes the situation as they see it wrt t-enox ?
I forgot who said it but it aptly applies to this situation :
" How can you expect a man to understand the facts when his keeping his job depends on not understanding them ?".
So which is the real reason ? Will it please stand up ?
You or IBD ?
I notice there is a very strong human desire for association between cause and effect even if such a relationship turns out ot be wrong or unprovable later.
I also notice a marked preference for unprovable cause and effect relationship especially since the association can then never be proven wrong.
ps: i know your quip is tongue in cheek and I don't believe IBD caused the bump either.
Push for interchangeability would really raise the technical bar and thus a positive for mnta.
Still as dew noted, clinical trials would probably still be required for the first applications, although as CW noted , the requirements for proof of efficacy may not be the same degree as the original trials.
I sure don't , but apparently there are plenty who do believe they can influence the pps either way through msg boards (like on yahoo) and then there is another crowd who actually believes the former do.
-----------
please control your emotions. do you really think guys in any message board can influence the market ?
-----------
Amen.And they vote too. eom
Zip you're a-okay by me although we differ on at least two things.
I know we are both together in mnta and exel.
I am more optimistic on mnta than you are and I am a lot more skeptic on exel than you are.
go seek, pay no attention to what the man said but what he does.
Now what we have here is different personal opinions on the facts.
On the surface, Sandoz/Mnta seemed reluctant to increase mkt share/penetration of Lovenox, citing production constraints.
Well, if it is truly production constraint then if Sandoz wishes to increase production then it has to build more capacity period.
I am with you in interpreting this as a signal to SNY that Sandoz is not interested in eating all of SNY lunch when it comes to Lovenox, or at least to the point where SNY feels it has to retaliate by offering a branded generic.
At the current level of mkt share, Sandoz/Mnta probably feel that it is reaching the limits thereof where a duopoly will be stabilized and yet there is still plenty of profits to go around for Sandoz/Mnta.
On the other hand, if I were to really believe that the reason Sandoz/Mnta is reluctant to invest additional capital because ofimminent t-enox approval thus wasting that capital , then the logical thing for me is to sell, may be not all my stake, but I would seriously trim my stake down proportionately to my estimated probability of that event happening.
Ask him if he sold. If he hasn't , then I would move on and pay no attention.
I'm with Dew on this.
Although it is a bit disconcerting and annoying because I do have a large stake in mnta , I am not concerned.
The fundamentals of the company is excellent ; " a cash generating machine" is how DD put it and I agree with that description .
Daily pps is determined by the difference between buying/selling.
Investing is really a mental game more than anything else. That is the lesson I gather from reading Jesse Livermore and many other great succesful stock operators.
It is about knowing oneself , one's fears, biases etc and learning to compensate for those.
Companies that advertised to be on sale ,are usually not worth buying.
Conversely, those who aren't on sale, are the most desirable.
I learned that memorable summary from "Into the plex" by steven levy about Google and their experience about acquisitions of smaller tech companies.
DFRAI, I don't compute
------------------------------
case in point - the large silver short positions that jp morgan et al had - one of the reasons that silver went to 50 dollars an ounce.
------------------------------
if you believe that it was shorts that drove mnta pps down from 27, then how jpm being short silver driving the silver spot price up parabolically.
without shorts, price, whether silver spot or mnta pps, would be a lot higher otherwise due to supply/demand imbalance.