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"I guess the question is are there some successful US companies that simply chose to be OTC because there are less stringent requirements the need to comply with."
Looking at some of the names without doing any real research on the matter I suggest that to be the case but I would prefer not to slander anyone without actually digging into it more. However, being on the OTC is likely to severely limit your investment pool.
Ummmm, yeah, about that. I can guess why some of those companies are on OTC, and it is not necessarily a choice or if it is, it is not a good thing.
Look for instance at Hertz:
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/hertz-earnings-plans-to-re-ipo-51628520574?mod=mw_quote_news
They just came out of bankruptcy and are planning to relist on a major exchange this year.
EDIT: And Freddie Mac is also in receivership.
Certainly not if you don't try.
Whether the shares are acquired by renting out existing shares or simply selling shares that don't exist, there is a time limit by which you need to return the shares or produce them. So the strategy is largely the same. I have no idea how many naked shorts currently exist or how many existed earlier. I would tend to doubt that there are a lot of them right now.
In a simplified version of how a short makes money, imagine that research shows that people tend to buy a stock when they see it rising and they also tend to increase their perceived value of the shares they own, figuring that either good news is coming, wanting to not miss the band-wagon, or whatever. And imagine that people tend to sell when the stock goes down and lower the perceived value of held shares for much the same reasons.
The stock is selling at $1, so you coordinate some sales at $1.02, $1.04, $1.05. You start putting in buy orders at $1.07, $1.08, etc. People who were willing to sell at $1.01 are now looking to get $1.10. People start seeing a big price move and they start buying and you start selling to fill larger volume orders. If the price begins to drop, coordinate more sales above the ask. When there are no more buyers, sell, sell, sell it back down to $0.90 and then slowly buy, buy, buy it back up to $0.95 or $1.00.
If the company announces good news, let the stock rise and then sell, sell, sell into the new demand. Keep selling until it turns around and dives, once there aren't enough orders coming in. Drive the price back down below where it started and then slowly buy back all those shares over the next week or so.
One PR might not take a lot of energy but it is not writing a couple of paragraphs it is determining what to put into it and ensuring accuracy etc. People here complain about NWBO's estimates but then want more of them. Personally, I would prefer less.
I am not asking anyone else to make that choice, I am telling you my preferences. Keeping me informed is of trivial importance compared to getting approval for their products. So as far as I am concerned, they should concentrate on the latter.
I am not talking about others, I am not talking about major investors, I am only talking about myself and anyone like me. If it were up to me, they would concentrate all resources on getting to the finish line, not waste effort broadcasting how well their car is running. I don't really care what the share price is other than to the extent that it affects their ability to raise funds if necessary.
All indications are that DC-Vax will be approved in spite of having almost no public awareness. Once approved, the share price will adjust. I am not here to day-trade or to make a quick 100% on my money.
As to the impact of communicating with the shareholders, it is always a drain on resources. Worse, it has no direct positive effect on the approval process. People just want to know. I get it, in theory the more you know the better you can plan but the simple fact is that NWBO does not actually know the answers, as has been made clear for years.
I spent several years working on IT helpdesks and when the mainframe crashed we would get tons of calls. We did not know when the systems would be back up because the people fixing things did not know why they crashed yet. We would say 'no estimate' because we had none. Still, we would be pressed for a guess. Pestering the people who were working on the problem only prolongs the outage. So I would tell people that an Initial Program Load (IPL) of the system takes 20 minutes and since they had not been initiated yet, it would be at least 20 more minutes.
Twenty minutes later, same people calling for an update. No new information, so the cycle continues. Stockholders ask the company for all sorts of information and if NWBO needs to respond to it, people who have other jobs need to be taken away from those jobs to answer, review, or approve some of those communications. In the end, the stockholders don't actually have any better answers and a bunch of resources have been diverted.
:) Not trying to dodge the question but it is a little irrelevant to me.
My expertise is not in medical trials, publishing, or approval of medical products and devices. For those things, I rely on people I feel have relevant knowledge. I simply have no idea how long these things should take, how much a pandemic plays havoc with timelines, the effect of recent changes in classification or avenues for approval. So I read what people, here and elsewhere that I feel know what they are talking about, have to say and then try to do some research on their arguments/statements to see if they seem to hold up. In 18-24 months, if based on people whose opinions and expertise I trust and my own research I feel that we are still on track even though some milestones have not been reached, then I will remain as confident in my investment as I am now.
Ultimately, what the company says about timelines I take with a grain of salt because they are biased and their own self-interests make their predictions suspect. Just as I assume that when a defendant says they got railroaded that there is likely more to the story.
My preference is that the company put all of its energy into getting approval and waste as little time/energy as possible updating people like me, much though I would love to know what is going on and where we are in the process. Given the choice between complete silence and approval and rollout in 12 months or constant communication, accurate timelines, and approval and rollout in 13 months, I would take the former.
Sure. Which is exactly what people thought about dozens of other companies over the years. I was merely pointing to some of the big names in the 90's Internet world. Ones who failed or fell by the wayside just as Amazon will. Maybe for different reasons, maybe for similar ones.
It ignores the cycles that we see over and over and over throughout history. When I worked at GE in the late 90s it was a Fortune 5 company, with massive assets, unparalleled management, and regularly touted as one of the top companies in the world. GE's management school at Crotonville was world renowned. Its R&D facility in Schenectady was cutting edge. It was also the last of the original 12 DJIA companies (formed 100 years earlier). In the late 90s GE was buying $Billion companies EVERY MONTH, when being a $Billion company was big time.
Today it is down to #38 on the Fortune 500 and has watched its stock price plummet from an all-time high ~$55 (2000) to ~$6, now back to $13. Down 75% over the last two decades. And GE just got dropped off the DJIA (2019).
A lot of the problems were the result of Jack Welch retiring (and myself, as my last day there was the all time high for the stock :P). Do you think Jeff Bezos is still going to be running Amazon in 20 years, in his mid 70s? But it was also faced with global issues and new innovations and Amazon is going to run into exactly the same problems or different ones people haven't even thought about yet.
IBM, ranked #6 on the Fortune 500 in 2000, now 42. Stock dropped from ~$213 to $110 over 20 years. Similar story. IBM and GE were monster companies with lots of assets, that carried on lots of research and innovation, and that people in 2000 thought were going to still be relevant 20 years later.
Thinking that today's tech giants will always be giants is a good example of Technology Provincialism. You need to read Timeline.
p.s. Anyone who suggests using Google for anything should seriously look at what they collect about you.
"Gravity is a harsh mistress."
- The Tick
No.
A) Who cares?
B) Best outcome for patients and investors is for DC-Vax to be approved and available.
C) Explain why holding off the release of TLD affects anything but short-term shareholder value? I do not believe that releasing TLD is relevant to approval. As they have not been diluting the stock with sales, the share price does not affect operating costs. And really, good news without clear unbiased support has done little but drop the share price in the past.
Sorry Happy but you are sort of full of . . . it.
1. No, there is no law but the question remains, if management is incompetent and self-dealing, and you have no say in changing it because it is semi-privately held, and the courts provide no recourse, and sans competent management approval is impossible, then why would you not take your money elsewhere? NWBO, should it fail, is not going to fail because DC-Vax doesn't work. That has not really been the fear over the last several years.
2. Although I have only been here 4 years, at no time during that period have you or anyone else proposed a different slate of directors. If you are not willing to take even the most basic first step to replacing management, then do not blame the rest of us for not going along with you.
3. The lawsuits that I have seen that were filed against NWBO were dismissed at summary judgment. Meaning that even if all the fact alleged in the suit were as the plaintiffs claimed, they would not amount to a case for which there is any recovery under the law. Meaning that they were frivolous or made in bad faith. The plaintiff couldn't even make up facts that would be actionable. I am sure that if you have some legitimate complaint about management, then the sorts of people who filed the baseless claims would love to champion your cause.
4. As briefly stated in 1 (supra), if you don't believe in management's ability to get NWBO across the finish line, then you shouldn't be invested here because getting a drug/platform like DC-Vax approved is far more about the skill of management to combat the vast forces arrayed against a small, break-through bio tech then it is about whether the product works. IF NWBO gets approved, then management did an outstanding job far and away above anything that could reasonably have been expected of them. Look at Keytruda. It isn't approved for indications because it actually helps people. It is approved because it is backed by a huge pharmaceutical company with near limitless resources. Those resources are going to be used to protect its marketshare. The science is irrelevant. The number of companies able to get to where NWBO has gotten without being scooped up for pennies is distressingly low. And it is not enough to get a drug that works through the Phase III trial, you need to be able to manufacture and distribute the product, raise capital, and a million other things that NWBO has done through management's skill.
While keeping the common shareholders informed about how they are doing is not something they have done well, when they have provided any such information or estimates, they have gotten raked over the coals. I remember pretty clearly when they announced the interim results at ASCO on June 3, 2018 (NWBO PR) and the stock dropped from 0.28 to 0.25, rallied a little and fell to 0.21. Where was belief in the science then? Awesome results and the stock sheds 25%. All good news was followed by the stock getting crushed. I knew at that moment that the stock was being manipulated. Sorry, but you can't reasonably bet on the science and not also be betting on management. The science can't make it across the finish line alone.
Nope. Not me. But I appreciate the thought! :D
RE: erg61
JR specifically is making the ridiculous claim that NWBO management is reaping fat salaries ($500K is quoted repeatedly, it is actually just over $600K for Linda Powers) while hiding bad data. He ignores the fact that they hold $millions in shares that they would, in fact, be dumping if news was bad. This includes millions of shares and warrants they have received in the last couple of years since long after they allegedly knew about the 'failed trial.'
The salary argument is comical because of how completely ignorant it is. Linda Powers responded to this allegation during the 2 Feb 2019 Annual Shareholder Meeting (https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=146542058)
Maybe her estate can sue.
That would make about as much sense as everything else you say here.
I actually find it rather heartening that this is the best that they can come up with at this juncture.
The two things none of the mouthpieces seem to be able to adequately address are:
1. How does a delay in the release of results indicate failure?
2. If the trial failed, how is it possible for the company to fool some of the world's leading oncologists?
For (1), the best they can offer is JR's insupportable position that this is all a 5-yea Pump-and-Dump scheme. This despite being unable to produce a single instance in which there was financing, share price was X, news was released driving the share price to X+Y, and showing that a large number of warrants were exercised (much less that warrants could even be exercised immediately).
For (2), I think the conversation devolved to rat trials or some nonsense. I honestly couldn't even be bothered to look down that rabbit hole of illogic.
"All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" - Reg (Life of Brian)
Not sure, but I think your longest one is 16 hours. Maybe you could try to extend the record?
Dunno. I was very surprised when they gave pretty concrete timelines at last year's ASM. I assumed that based on their unwillingness to do so previously that they were very confident about the timing but I think they seriously burned themselves by being off by +600%.
I think they very badly want to announce TLD or at least tell people when to expect it but they do not want to get burned again.
If NWBO could have gotten TLD out in time for ASCO, I am pretty sure they would have done it there. When asked specifically about releasing data at ASCO during the ASM two years ago, Linda Powers replied: "ASCO is certainly a great venue and it's been great for us when the timing has worked out." So if the timing worked, they would almost certainly have presented at ASCO.
Now presenting there requires some advanced planning and they may not have been able to provide what ASCO needed in a timely manner to meet ASCO presentation deadlines, but that seems like a bit of a longshot to me.
ASCO is a giant meeting, even when virtual, of their targeted, professional audience. NWBO can't just replicate that on their own with some video conference. And if TLD is as good as expected, then it is going to overshadow anything else presented at ASCO or elsewhere this year.
People who said they spoke to NWBO management last fall about not presenting at SNO and other conferences reported being told that there were other conferences coming up and it seemed to suggest that their plan was to announce at a major conference (probably in conjunction with a journal article or something).
Trying to 'surprise' people with an announcement seems like a horrible idea to me. If anything, you want to broadcast it as widely as possible to generate as much enthusiasm as possible. The goal here is not to squeeze shorts, it is to get NWBO's name out to the public and provide the information necessary to the medical community who will be using this new SOC.
I doubt that the timing of warrant expiration is significant. There have been what, a half dozen extensions over the last 18 months or so? Each seems to indicate imminent news that never comes. Perhaps they optimistically think that they will be able to announce soon but they do not have a great track record in that regard. So personally, announcements about warrant-expiration extensions are meaningless to me.
The fact that they are not presenting at ASCO suggests to me that they are not announcing anything until at least July but then, who knows? Certainly not me.
(Note: although I specifically replied to marzan, I am covering a range of people's suggestions and comments.)
I have no idea what they knew and what they did not know. What I do know is that people tend to badly underestimate how long things will take. They are also rewarded for optimism and rosy assessments. And because they are not the experts in this area, Linda and Les could easily have believed that the process would be much simpler than it turned out to be. However, they had to rely on the SAB, who had not seen the data as of when those announcement were made.
I think it is entirely possible that they truly believed that data lock was imminent and the announcement of TLD would soon follow. It is also entirely possible that that was not the case, I simply feel that it is a reasonable possibility, not a certainty. One possible explanation for the disconnected is given here:
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=163891010
While some people believe that the long silence is evidence of bad news in the data and others are convinced it could only be good news, I can imagine either scenario being the case. I think that something in the data was not what they were expecting or prepared for and either it required additional explaining or presented them with opportunities they had not been counting on.