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Maybe Arch understands gambling better than you do. He has stated that he believes that this stock will go to zero with 90% probability and to $200 with 10% probability. With those numbers this stock has an expected value of $20 a share, four times higher than its current value. So it makes perfectly good sense for Arch to hold on to his shares. If he divides his money among many investments like this one he'll make a good return, even if the great majority of them go to zero.
A $244M market cap suggests otherwise.
Some people just hate to be reminded that most of the risk factors in this stock are still lurking out there in the future like so many land mines.
That deadline was not for the preliminary toxicology study. It was for starting the real tox studies -- the ones the FDA needs. So far as I can see those studies haven't started yet.
Problems could arise in the toxicity studies.
Problems could arise in the scale up of manufacturing.
Problems could arise in the Phase I tests.
Problems could arise in the Phase II tests.
A lot of people here seem to think NNVC is 90% done. It has hardly begun the process with Flucide. This stock can still go to zero.
Dr Seymour can make claims until he is blue in the face. None of that matters. What matters is getting clinical trials done. Put up or shut up. That's not just my view, it's the FDA's.
Nope. Lots of drugs have passed through animal testing with flying colors and failed to work in humans. Or had unacceptable side effects in humans.
Sure, Flucide is probably safe to take. But we won't know that with any degree of certainty until Phase I trials are completed. We won't know whether Flucide works in humans until Phase II trials are completed. And given NNVC's unblemished record for missing deadlines, we really don't know when or even if those trials will actually get done.
So you are counting a whole truckload of chickens before they are hatched. There are still plenty of ways for this stock to go to zero.
If you see NNVC as a "relatively safe stock" I can only imagine that the rest of your portfolio consists entirely of start ups from the pink sheets.
Proctor & Gamble is a safe stock.
Intel is a safe stock.
IBM is a safe stock.
NNVC is a speculation. You might get a 10 bagger, you might lose every dime you have in it.
I feel justified in blaming Patrick Cox for his mistakes.
I don't blame him for mine.
Actually I haven't invested in every one of Cox's recommendations and thank God for that.
It is entirely appropriate to judge a stock newsletter writer by the overall performance of his portfolio. After all, he's supposed to do plenty of due diligence himself.
My opinion is well supported by facts. If you had invested equal amounts in all of his recommendations you'd be underwater right now. You'd have more money if you just left it in a money market account and earned 0.5% interest.
I'm sure Warren Buffet has had a lot more winners than dogs.
And few stock pickers have had as many absolute stinkers as Patrick Cox. It takes talent to consistently find stocks that lose 90% of their value or more.
Cox has had far more dogs than winners. If I were to do a Cox style newsletter it would work something like this. I'd pick a bunch of cheap pink sheet and OTC stocks using a roulette wheel, rejecting only those companies that are obvious frauds. Then I'd write up long articles about why the selected stocks are cool.
Later, I'd brag in my advertising about the 20% of those stocks that doubled. As for the 80% that went to zero, I'd say you should have done your own due diligence.
An amusing letter in the recent issue of Breakthrough Technology Alert, now edited by Stephen Petranek:
"What will happen to all the dogs in the portfolio that were Patrick Cox picks? I’ve lost a lot of money and quit buying in this sector. Cox wrote about interesting technologies, but I pay Agora to make me profits, not to read about science experiments that everyone shorts. I will never buy Pink Sheets stocks."
NNVC might prove to be one of his winners, but Cox had a hell of a lot of dogs. Two among them:
Anavex Life Sciences: Recommended buy at 4.85. Recent recommended sell at 0.40.
Protext Mobility: Recommended buy at 0.195. Recent recommended sell at 0.0001.
You have to have a some mighty big winners to pay for losers like that.
I agree that fed manipulation of interest rates will have little discernible effect on the long term price of NNVC. Short term it might move the price one way or the other, as can any number of other purely random factors. Since I'm not trading in and out of this stock I don't see the short term moves as important, whether those moves are up or down.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If yields are going up the fed will increase its bond purchases to slow down the rate at which the yield rises -- but that doesn't mean the yield won't continue to rise. You have utterly failed to explain how the fed buying large quantities of treasury bonds would cause their price to drop.
Sometimes the conventional wisdom is right. The conventional wisdom is that the earth orbits the sun.
It seems very strange to me that you believe that over the past 5 years one of the biggest purchasers of treasury bonds could have been removed from the market without causing the price of bonds to drop.
I think you're the one missing the big picture.
First, keep in mind that by historical standards interest rates are still very low. The recent increase in rates simply brings them back to where they were in 2011, and they were low then.
The immediate effect of the 2008 crash was a huge increase in demand for treasury bonds, as investors fled every other asset and bought treasury bonds. This would have caused a huge spike in the bond prices (and very low yields) except that the Fed at that time sold a lot of bonds into the market. (Despite this there were times during the panic when people bought treasury bonds at a negative yield.) But a longer term consequence has been a huge increase in the federal deficit. The $400 billion a year deficits of the Bush years turned into $800 billion a year deficits during the Obama years. The doubling in the value of new treasury bonds sold each year would have caused bond prices to collapse (and yields to rise substantially), particularly as the panic subsided and people sold bonds to move into other assets. The fact that this didn't happen is due to the massive fed purchases of bonds since the crash.
I read the article and don't find it convincing. Prices are determined at the margin, not by the vast pool of untraded assets. At the margin the fed has been buying a large fraction of the treasury bonds and, more recently, a very large fraction of the mortgage backed securities. That fact that rates have started to go up despite these actions simply shows that these assets are becoming less popular and that buyers other than the fed are staying away. So rates would have been higher without the fed.
Me:
After all, while rates have been going up despite the massive bond purchases by the Fed they would be even higher without them.
I don't agree with that view.
Well it can be true both that the Fed has little ability to control long term interest rates and that the Fed can't afford to stop tapering. After all, while rates have been going up despite the massive bond purchases by the Fed they would be even higher without them. Both the big banks and the federal government need low interest rates, so the Fed will strive mightily to obtain them, even if ultimately it is doomed to failure.
An end to tapering will certainly knock some wind out of the sails in the stock market generally, but I suspect it would have only a modest affect on NNVC. This stock has little correlation with the market overall. What the stock price does over the next two years has vastly more to do with what happens to Flucide and the clinical trials than with anything the Fed does.
Thanks for the excellent report.
This is the first I've heard of the Gen II (intracellular) technology. Sounds interesting.
Yeah, that testing in space thing is weird. As for zero gravity, well, gravity isn't a major force on viruses or nanoviricides. Truly a pointless publicity stunt.
Well, there's a big difference between 2x and 10x. I myself think that when we get to the point just prior to phase 1 trials, and all the obstacles of tox testing and manufacturing the product have been resolved, NNVC's stock price will probably at least double from where it is now.
Right now the market has to price in a chance that NNVC never does get to those phase 1 trials.
How does your statement in any way contradict what I said? In all your scenarios where NNVC goes for 10x or more of what it is now human trials have been carried out including phase 2 or phase 3 trials that show some evidence of efficacy.
None of that was any argument for why NNVC should be $50 or more right now.
I am as bewilder as anyone as to why NNVC is not 10x the price. It will be soon.
I think this is amusing. When those first preliminary results were announced you insisted that this was HUGE NEWS because it showed that Flucide is essentially nontoxic. Well, the confirming news, which of course is more extensive and detailed, shows that Flucide is essentially nontoxic (at least in rodents). So no surprise, the stock market yawns.
This is just a confirmation of the preliminary tox results that had already been announced. So it's no surprise that it didn't move the stock price much. It's basically old news.
The GLP tox study is the one that matters. I don't expect to see any results from that until second quarter of next year, at best.
I don't know any more about this than you do but that would be my guess too. I doubt that NNVC lost money trading corn futures.
I agree that there are no signs of panic selling. I expect nothing but random movement of the stock price until tox tests are completed.
I always amused by other people's analysis of why a stock went up or down on a particular day, when there is no relevant news. Magically, one single broker has the ability to make this stock crash, and ZincFinger just knows it. Seriously, how many people both have NNVC in an Iteractive Brokers account *and* are using so much margin that they have to dump their shares every time the price gets near $5? Two, maybe?
NNVC goes down because people want to sell more than they want to buy. It goes up because people want to buy more than they want to sell.
Nearly everyone here, including you, has been telling me for years how totally nontoxic nanoviricides are. So, by your own reasoning, we should not be surprised that there are no signs of acute toxicity at 5% of the diet. I stand by my statement that the results were merely somewhat better than expected. Apparently the market agrees with me. It's in no great hurry to push the stock price to $10.
The tox tests that really matter are the ones that will be done by BASi. I look forward to seeing the results.
I would have expected at least a double based on those tox results.
I agree fully. It's good news, but the real news comes later.
Nothing there is relevant to NNVC. All the "enriched studies" described are for trials on people who have the disease. NNVC's Phase I trials will be on healthy human beings not deliberately exposed to the virus. You have failed to explain how any amount of excellent statistics could enable NNVC to establish strong evidence of efficacy in such trials.
The fact: NNVC will do Phase I trials of Flucide, then small scale Phase II trials, and at that point may or may not have sufficiently strong evidence of efficacy to get FDA approval.
Well, the fact remains that both ZincFinger and Big K have claimed that NNVC might get such great statistical results on Phase I trials that the FDA will approve Flucide without requiring Phase II trials. Which is nonsense.
As for the Phase I/IIa trials being a "combined trial", I am sure that the Phase I trials will have to be done before the Phase IIa trials are done. They will be sequential trials, whether or not you call them "combined".
My conclusion is not a non sequitur.
You said:
Phase II's are *usually* the earliest that efficacy can be demonstrated. But IF a drug has both very low toxicity AND very high efficacy, statistical standards for efficacy could be made in Phaase I if the number of patients is sufficient.
For example, the FDA states that "some drugs have been appproved on the basis of a single compelling study" (No Phase II required).
I'm afraid that cars on an assembly line are a very poor model of drug development for NNVC or any other pharmaceutical company.
Actually, it isn't a couple of weeks to make a drug. It's a couple of weeks to make a first cut at a drug that they then spend a couple of years tweaking before they have the drug they want to test in humans. They're still tweaking Denguecide.
Ooh, the platform is MODULAR. I guess that means they won't have to do tox tests, phase I trials, phase II trials, and phase III trials on the 'cides after Flucide. BZZZT. Wrong. Those things always take drug companies a heap of time, modular or not. It's true that there will already be a manufacturing plant for the new 'cides. That's one reason why the I expect the development time for new 'cides to be six years rather than the ten that Flucide is taking.
My most optimistic scenario: Someday, before the Second Coming, Flucide is approved and is put on the market. Thereafter we get a new nanoviricide every two years or so, assuming about three 'cides in the pipeline under serious development at any given time.
Anybody expecting better than that is bound to be very disappointed.
I'll stand by what I said. And I'm pretty sure the FDA will too.