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You probably have all of these questions answered by now, but:
- The company website is www.gasfrac.com
- They're based in Alberta and are traded on the TMX as GFS and in the US as GFSVF
- They're not a startup. They've fracked well over 1000 wells and will produce several hundred million dollars in revenue this year. Revenues in recent quarters have been running at roughly 150% year on year growth.
- The stock is lightly traded, and they haven't done a great job in getting properly into the markets. To get the news, read the company website and the TMX (http://tmx.quotemedia.com/company.php?qm_symbol=GFS&locale=EN)
- The best message board at the moment is: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gasfracstock/
Sigh.
Yes, I'm still here and still long.
Maybe there's still a rabbit in the hat. Maybe there's a plan that involves something for the shareholders even after we're through paying off the board and the people with VP titles.
My hope, at this point, would be that ENMD is taken over by CELG, who has proven that it can build a business from a patent. This would be different from my friends at ENMD who I have respected and admired over so many years (and still do), but who have nevertheless proven that they can't, with a couple specific examples, do the job with drugs that CELG later turned into billions in sales.
George may be right or wrong, but he's neither a lunatic nor an idiot. He passionately believes there's a place in cancer care for ENMD 2076, and I hope he turns out to be right for cancer patients as well as investors.
I've spent my own time railing at the shorts. They robbed the company of critical capital when it was needed most, just to make a relatively small number of bucks at great cost to all of us, and they shorted many dozens of other cancer treatments into oblivion, as well. We may never really know what Dr. Folkman, Endostatin, and Angiostatin could have done for cancer patients as a result.
One thing I learned eventually was that you're wasting your time arguing principles with people who have none. They, unlike George, understand only pump and dump. They assume that he must be a pumper, since they so totally lack constructive or productive purpose in their lives that it's the only motivation they can imagine for George.
Mobery, it's clear you think he's wrong. But if can't forgive him for that, at least respect him for his integrity, commitment, and sincerity.
It sounds like Celgene must be thinking about buying out somebody other than us.
Two economists were walking on the sidewalk in New York near Wall Street. One spots a $20 bill in the gutter and says "Look, a $20 bill", but continues walking. the other economist says "Aren't you going to pick it up?" The first economist says "Don't be silly. The theory of efficient markets says that if it really had any value, someone would have already taken it."
ENMD is a suspense thriller.
The timeline is driven by drug development process events, not by the limits of our patience. Very few good upside investments have reliable steps and milestones (if the milestones were reliable, there wouldn't be any risk; without risk, there wouldn't be any upside left lying around for us to buy into).
I've had similar adventures going with another stock the last couple weeks, too (TGB), but at least they have respectable earnings and an ongoing business if the upside event falls apart or gets delayed.
Here, we just have to sit on the edge of our chairs and watch the grass grow.
That has to be wrong, or we've been acquired without knowing it!
I never really meant to seriously offer manipulation as more than idle chatter, but far stranger things have happened over these long years. I would have thought manipulators to be people with 3 hour instead of 3 day or 3 week attention spans, but who knows? However, coming from a $30M market cap, a little success in the trials could quickly raise the stock price, I think.
Speaking of a little success, Celgene has parlayed the right to distribute Thalidomide for leprosy into a company with a $26B market cap almost completely based on Entremed developed drugs. Who knows what they could be doing if they had the good stuff.
Rocky,
I've been waiting 10 years for spectacular results, so please forgive me for being controlled in my optimism and cautious in my conclusions. I hope you're right in every detail.
I'm a long term skeptic about technical analysis for lightly traded issues like ENMD, where the real issues are about a complicated question: "Will it work for cancer patients before we run out of money?" Do you suppose someone could make money in the market by taking over the trend in a lightly traded issue and, for a short time, force it to follow a rising pattern that triggers lots of other people's purchases while you're cashing out and shorting?
(As I think about it, the TARP program has a similar objective, except the government rarely manages to make money at anything)
Maybe it would be easier to make a few bucks by writing a novel.
http://www.benzinga.com/press-releases/10/09/c488905/uptrend-spotted-in-shares-of-entremed-enmd
Actually, I've been lurking right along. After all these years I've already said so much more than I know so many times, there's no point in being in a hurry to do that again. We've been working for the company longer than anybody who's there on the payroll now.
But, as they say, "Next year in Rockville!"
For whatever it's worth, it seemed like all the big fun events in the good old days started this way (price and volume activity for no apparent reason). Hopefully there's some good news for cancer patients behind this somewhere.
"It will be just my luck for them to go belly up because of a delayed trial, then have someone else pick up the intellectual property for pennies and turn it in to billions. "
The side bet for this idea is owning some CELG, IMO. Look at how they've turned Revlimid (a distant 4th choice for our team) into Billions. Our biggest problem is we're losing billions in the value of the patent estate because the clock keeps ticking while we fuddle along on a shoestring budget.
I don't always like reality, but I'm gradually learning to respect it.
George posts a lot of good Internet research. The bots that police these boards can't tell the difference between circumin studies and spam (you can't get a human on the phone at Hewlett-Packard anymore, let alone finding one at I-hub or Yahoo). I find his strong opinions refreshing on these investment boards, which are populated with low-lifes who stand for absolutely nothing, boosting when they're long and bashing when they're short, while never actually contributing anything useful to anyone but themselves in their entire miserable sleazy careers.
I burned out on Yahoo after a decade or so. It's ok for George to post a blog elsewhere where it's available to those interested in following it, and where he can't be censored by machines, stock swindlers, and morons.
Re Death Rates
Thanks for sharing that. I believe we need to take the Federal Drug prevention Agency to task for this.
Yes. That and a failure to make any serious headway. Most progress to date comes more from a reduction in smoking that any strategy or tactics employed in the War on Cancer.
These are all great questions, but not as important as "How are the patients doing?" and "With all the progress the American Cancer Society would like to tell us about in the last ten years, why are more people dying of cancer in America today than ten years ago?"
Compost
"...why would it be necessary for him to resign to get the deal done with Celgene?" At the time, ENMD was dealing with a huge collision between expectations and reality, and I've always assumed the cause to be that fallout and possibly some artistic differences between the management teams as well.
I'm sure I know that. John Holladay's wife told me this was John's initiative for the company to partner with Celgene, and that John resigned as Chairman and CEO as a necessary part of making this work.
The company did not have the cash to fund the lawyers further. They dropped the suit against the weasels at Abbott at the same time for the same reason.
The company had been counting on the FDA to slack the approval barriers for the first cancer drugs without side effects. But the FDA's cancer care experts were all trained in the Spanish Inquisition and couldn't believe that cancer drugs could possibly work without also being strong poisons, and there really should be a few fatalities in the trials like CAP4, Erbitux, and Avastin just to prove that we're really in the game (the MDA bolus study was particularly impressive, blowing a zillion dollars worth of Endostatin searching in vain for a maximum tolerated dose and concluding that Endostatin couldn't be working because a high dose every 2 weeks administered like chemo did not appear to increase patient response).
I don't know what happened to John Holaday's large stock position.
Generosity, no. But the deal was initiated by Entremed to Celgene, and Entremed didn't have a lot of choice at the time. Hopefully, somebody will write a book so we'll get the whole story one day.
Actually, I DO own shares in Celgene. I bought a position a year or so after the old New Years' Eve deal, and I've had to sell shares twice since to keep CELG from becoming more than 15 or 20% of my portfolio (a hard rule I've followed after a hard lesson some years ago). And yes, the reason I've always owned Celgene is that I've always considered them to be a white knight if ENMD hits one, and the logical heir to the ENMD patent estate if/when ENMD doesn't.
Arguing against any near term possibilities are the recent capital rounds (why not face up to fate before dilution instead of waiting until after? Why not get money from Celgene if they're really in the driver's seat?).
But the board seat is a significant development from every angle I'm thinking of, because CELG would not take a seat now, after all these years, unless it meant something to them in a way that it didn't before.
I'm not seeing anything to be angry about. The long time deal with Celgene for years has provisions we know little about. I've always presumed that these would include a Celgene hands-off-unless-called upon provision, and maybe even a first right of refusal if the company was to be acquired by another.
Whatever the case, the head of research on the board makes them a powerful insider with deep pockets. Whatever value is in the IP estate, Celgene has a great track record in bringing it to market, and has always been the best candidate for partnership, IMO.
Celgene was given a role in the company as part of the Revlimid deal, and the exact words have never been published. Then, like now, there's a need for cash. Taking a seat on the board is a big deal, IMO.
Why now? Maybe no one ever invited them before.
OT: Bowser Browsers (no offense to Fargo)
I've encountered all kinds of hangs and halts with IE8 and Firefox since switching to Windows 7 (Chrome works much better). Are you a Win 7 user?
Maybe its the adware desperately trying to get around cookie and antivirus malware controls (in Google's case, the adware is probably already built into the application, for our marketing convenience, so everything runs smoother).
Re: treating cancer with one injection...
This reminds me of the old days, when we had people hyping Avastin to us as the panacea that was so far ahead, so superlative, that no one else needed to be trying. After all, it is an effective blocker of Folkman's #1 growth factor.
But it turned out that there are sometimes lethal side effects, and these continue to keep Avastin from approval for any but metastatic cancers and glioblastomas. They also keep Avastin from being the long term solution these patients need.
So, keep those panaceas coming, it would be wonderful for millions if any one of them actually pans out!
I look at Celgene's success with ENMD's former properties in the Thalidomide family, and I keep thinking there's a lot more where those came from. Should we suppose that ENMD's IP estate will be valued more, or less, by Celgene because of Revlimid's increasing market value?
The other important thing to remember:
We're only allowed to run these tests on advanced cancer patients, the ones who have already failed other therapies. A 60% response rate that lets otherwise dying patients go SCUBA diving is pretty exciting. I don't suppose she wants to hear me tell her that SCUBA diving is one of the most dangerous sports, and I wish she would just go snorkeling instead.
I believe the patient successes with Endostatin and Panzem are just as real (especially for the patients involved), just not as common among those in the trial population. One of our long time frustrations with the FDA is their zealous insistence on high efficacy numbers among patient populations who lack treatment options. The capital required for sorting out the who and why to yield a stronger success rate was just too hard to do with PZ and ES, but it doesn't mean success isn't there in some combo, some subset, or some earlier stage of the disease.
George said that they should be available late this afternoon, 3:30 I think.
Making money is an odd concept when your expenses are in all quarters but your revenues are only in Q3 and Q4. This is great for confusing the stock-screeners, isn't it?
As I recall, Gleevec was approved within about 6 months after a very small study (100pts or so) that showed a nearly 100% response for one specific kind of Leukemia (AML). Exactly as unlikely then as things might be now, an unprecedented response would be, well, unprecedented.
I love George, and I love the idea of a major breakthrough for present and future cancer patients everywhere. But, sobered by past personal experience that a love affair with a stock is extremely one sided, I believe it is dangerous to love a stock. I never give stock advice, but if I did it might be "Don't bet the ranch."
"Next year in Rockville!"
As I just said to an old friend, I'm still having that Charlie-Brown-with-Lucy-and-the-football syndrome. But let's go for it one more time anyhow.
Rubberchicken,
So sorry to hear of your loss, and thanks for your post -- it helps us all.
This board (along with it's predecessor hostings), has a long history of people we don't really know very well, but who we know extremely well in this one dimension of their lives. If anyone ever writes the book, we even had a wonderful oncologist who hosted the party for us at the annual meeting several years ago, the first party he'd ever hosted, fittingly for a large number of people he had never met. We look forward to the day we'll all be in a partying mood again.
--Bob
Ken,
We'll keep you and your wife in our prayers, along with our prayers for 2076, resveratrol, watercress, or anything else that can possibly help you.
Best and kindest wishes!
--Bob
Since nobody seems to know why it went up, it's hard to know why it went down. Whatever trading "patterns" we have are probably more about traders playing chess with each other than they are about the fundamentals IMO.
However, those of us still here after ooooh so long in ENMD are here because we believe there are potential drug candidates in that pile of intellectual property and we'd like see if the company can produce a real and exciting press release for us some morning.
But, after hours trading prices are established by single events. There's always somebody with buy and sell orders on the fringes, hoping someone will be dumb enough to place an after hours order at the market. I don't read too much into the value of a company by the after hours prices in lightly traded issues.
Pilot,
I'd love to see you write that book, and I bet I can still find the people to sell 50 copies or so! Let me know if you need help finding them.
Regards!
Gina Kolata's article was factual, possibly excepting the disputed quote of course. The sad part is that we'll never know if Judah could actually have cured cancer in two years, if only he was unshackled from a process that takes decades to understand the obvious.
Fortunately, our understanding of the obvious is getting better with Avastin, a drug based on the first of Folkman's angiogenic discoveries, and in only 15 or 20 years. Tragic is the lost opportunity to have Folkman work with a few dozen cancer patients the way he worked with a few dozen mice.
There's no ASCO update on the ENMD website following publication of clinical results (a first in the 10+ years I've been a stockholder), and there's no press release telling us anything. Either there's nothing to tell, or maybe they just didn't have the cash to pay either the PR company or the webmaster's invoices.
The problem? We, the people who own the company, many having been here longer than all of the people currently identified to us as being on the payroll, deserve better from these guys. Frankly, I'm hoping that last week's runup is a sign that the ENMD patent estate is about to be sold to companies who can actually develop drugs from them.
Avastin? Harf. With its death-hastening side effects it will never routinely treat people who aren't already securely in cancer's cross hairs. Yet, Avastin is being sold as the anti-angiogenesis wonder drug while Panzem, Endostatin, Angiostatin and the rest are rotting on back room shelves. In the right hands, they just might be saving lives instead of burning through their patent years.
I've been wrong before, and I Sooo hope I can turn out to be wrong this time as well, but I believe it is finally time that this company be shut down to cede it's intellectual property to some other company that can actually do something useful with these valuable assets.
Right now, how about a buck per share in a Celgene stock swap, and moving on? But then, Celgene would know how 2076 is turning out, while ENMD stockholders have no clue (it turns out that this is somehow fair by SEC standards). Note to self: The next time somebody can conclusively prove to you that there's a brilliant, wonderful, caring Harvard doctor who has drug candidates that can attack all known cancer models with no side effects which are licensed to a spectacular little company that's way ahead of it's time, just do your friends and family a favor by tarring and feathering the SOB and running him out of town on a rail.
Considering that there's only 1 drug event we know of going into ASCO 2009, there's no one in the company any more to "hype" it, and everybody but us has forgotten we're here, I'd take the run up as the speculation of people closer to the trial results who like what they are seeing. Dare we hope again?
The Federal Drug prevention Agency wonders about Avastin. I do too, considering that Panzem kept some patients alive and almost symptom free before they were kicked out of the trials to die under lesser therapies. I also wonder how FDA people sleep at night when they spend their days obstructing the only treatment possibilities of patients without options.
"WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal health regulators said Friday it's unclear whether Genentech's blockbuster cancer drug Avastin significantly shrinks the deadliest type of brain tumor.
The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the company's drug for patients with recurring glioblastoma multiforme, a form of brain cancer that is generally fatal within six months.
South San Francisco, Calif.-based Genentech has asked the FDA to give its drug accelerated approval. That designation gives market access based on promising early results.
However regulators said in documents posted online that they are unsure that the company's results are strong enough to rush out the new indication.
The company's application relies on imaging scans that claim to show a reduction in tumor size. Patients were considered responsive to the drug if their tumor shrunk at least 50 percent over the course of two consecutive visits to their physician. In two separate studies, Genentech reported that roughly 25 percent and 20 percent of brain cancer patients responded successfully to the drug.
However, FDA reviewers said they have never used "response rate" as a measurement to grant accelerated approval for a brain cancer drug. They noted the difficulty of measuring tumor size via medical imaging.
Avastin is also known to decrease swelling caused by excess fluid in the brain, which could give the false impression of tumor reduction, reviewers noted.
FDA's panel of outside cancer experts previously stated that a drug would have to have a response rate above 30 percent -- higher than either of Genentech's studies -- to outweigh the uncertainties connected with brain tumor imaging.
Next Tuesday the FDA will ask its panel to weigh in on whether Avastin should be granted accelerated approval for patients whose brain cancer has returned. The agency is not required to follow the panel's advice, though it usually does."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/FDA-questions-studies-of-apf-14765598.html