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~800k warrants were exercised during 2015 and 2016, per 10-Ks.
Need to find the original quantity of ADXSW that was issued to determine the difference between what they say is outstanding now, versus the original issue quantity. If the sum of the exercise amount and the current outstanding amount is over the original quantity, then we'll have a bit more info.
Per 10-K under "Statements of Shareholders' Equity":
Common Stock issued upon exercise of warrants
During 2014: 50
During 2015: 691,268
During 2016: 122,661
I suppose "of consequence" is the operative phrase. I do know it's non-zero, but as I mentioned I just don't remember the quantity. You got me curious, I'll take a look and let you know what I find.
First mover advantage has a lot to do with it, I think. They bought a huge chunk of the company for cheap and then ran the price up. Running the price up protected their top dog position by making it too expensive for other entities to establish a position of comparable strength. To make matters worse, any entities that DID try to do so were shorted into relentlessly through the middle of 2015. They were fighting an uphill battle from the outset.
Once both long and short positions were established, they had options to act in either direction as needed. They never needed to use the long shares, but I wonder if they exercised the July warrants ages ago instead just to keep their activity under wraps. I recall seeing in one of the financial statements (maybe a year or two ago?) that warrants had been exercised. Without the current context I didn't think much of it, though I found it bizarre enough to make a mental note. I don't remember the quantity.
I don't doubt they're playing dirty with insider info, but I don't think it was necessarily "required". More concerning, I think they have the BOD/CEO's ear and the BOD/CEO are complying with requests.
Those PRs were nothing but cover. Note some posters have said "they thought those PRs would get the price up but it failed and now their hands are tied". Completely intentional message to telegraph as a misdirection, IMO.
I firmly believe the EMA submission delay and all other delays were/are just buying time for Adage through the end of the retention bonus period.
Would not be surprised if the ATM has been trickling shares to Adage. 890,000 shares... Didn't we see a big bump in short interest a month or two ago of about 750-800k? And of course the use of the ATM is hidden away deep in filings.
890k shares is a lot to issue without a peep. That's what, more than 2% of the company?
Hmm, I haven't gathered that sentiment at all and I watch this board like a hawk. I've suspected Fidelity's shares brought us from 10M short to ~7M where we are, and that was more or less the end of it.
Regardless, just about every theory out there has been shattered except for the one where Adage and Advaxis have been in bed running a years-long short manipulation scheme with Advaxis's blessing. We probably won't ever know for sure 100%, but we're getting pretty close to being more certain than not these days.
Too convenient that the retention bonus period ends in a week, IMO, given everything that has happened over the last year.
What I think: the offering was intentionally sparse on specifics in order to see how many shares will come loose for the shorts in the immediate aftermath (over the next few days). If some predetermined objective amount isn't met, then we will see the offering and it will be used to make up the difference. If the objective is met, we will see the offering retracted.
The retention bonuses were used to keep the necessary players to see this scheme through to completion on the Advaxis side. Not for a buyout, not for anything that benefits any of us -- only to make sure everything went according to plan. Regardless of whether the offering goes through or not, the Advaxis side doesn't need to do anything more and they're off the hook come March.
Almost there, I think. If this works out the way I think it will, we will start seeing some unusually well-composed (relative to the last year) and heavy-hitting PRs in the coming weeks once they're off the hook. Maybe graduated so as not to draw undue attention, BUT that may have been part of what operation silence is about. We don't have a reference point because we've never heard anything.
Ctrl-f "recent developments" in the prospectus and read the section. It's also in the financial portion.
Check out the Recent Developments section of the prospectus also. They've been diluting (almost 1 million shares between Oct 31 and Jan 31) right under our noses. Hitting the ATM?
Yeah, it'll be steered towards Adage. If they even need to, considering there is a line in the prospectus that literally says they can just drop the shares in any specific party's lap of their choosing.
The theory is all coming together.
Finally.
First: if distributed, these new shares can't be used in the proxy vote, correct?
Second: provided the above is true, how will this affect already negative sentiment going into the vote?
Third: "proposed" meaning "can be retracted". Like DUAL, it's cloudy with a chance of bluff. Cause a panic to free shares for Papa Adage.
Standard Advaxis operating procedure for the last 14 months.
Lol, no thanks.
And people whose warrants expire worthless 99.99% ain't buyin' shit from this scrap heap ever again. Conversely, if they don't expire worthless, they're likely to reinvest some of the profits and/or continue being "satisfied customers". So it's actually in the regular stock's benefit for the warrants to stay alive even if it entails a tiny amount of dilution.
Enough percentage for someone over there to have said "let's own exactly 4 million shares on the nose". To me, that round number means a human is partially steering their long strategy manually -- not just a simple rule-based algorithm, robot, or a set-and-forget. For me that also rules out any notion that their position is too small relative to their portfolio for them to care. Size of return is probably a factor as well as relative position size, and the short position here is sitting on well over $100-150M in unclaimed profit.
Short profits are worth more than the company's market cap. Comical.
I'm sure there are a million and one loopholes you can come up with to do this when your entire livelihood is to think them up.
Alternatively, the government has a tendency to be soft on financial shadiness/crimes committed by organizations instead of individuals, for example the players in the financial crisis. The time could be worth the crime?
Last but not least, crime or not if everyone is left whole or near whole at the end, I can see no investigation at all happening due to lack of interest. Not much of a squeaky wheel. The ones who sold much too early would only have themselves to blame for selling and would probably move on or not even follow the story.
This sounds awfully familiar...
The introduction of DUAL was an uncertainty event, if you recall, related to whether the Astra combo was going well or not. It was one of the earlier such events in the post-Amgen PR/IR shitshow that is still happening today.
The cancellation of DUAL was shoved into the EMA news as a closing statement. I'm not sure what that could have been intended for if not to yield yet another uncertainty event.
Two FUDs for the price of one. FUD helps Adage manage their short adventures. Pretty genius, when you think about it. I was trying to find evidence of money having been spent on DUAL directly because at least that would indicate it may have been something more than a total bluff, but I can find no such evidence.
I'm not sure about ADRO, as I haven't followed them at any deeper level than to give ADXS market context. Their bad news started flowing rather early, so I'm not at all surprised that they've been dumping for a long time. At least they aren't hiding that stuff like a bunch of Advaxian pansies, imo.
"Obviously not going to submit junk"
The past several conferences running have involved submissions of data that we'd already seen, culminating in a total market snoozefest. Sometimes it's been data we've seen multiple times or even in the somewhat distant past.
Maybe not "junk", but a rose by any other name...
It's so difficult to give these guys the benefit of the doubt some more. I really want to, but this has really been a cynicism-inspiring experience.
I call super, next-level bullshit on DUAL ever being a real thing. Go ahead and look at the annual report again, where they break everything including expenses out by franchise. Conveniently, DUAL is lumped into "HPV associated cancers" along with AIM2CERV, making it impossible to determine what money was directed towards it. And then go ahead and Ctrl+F "dual" and read through and the most concrete thing for DUAL that appears is a "pending patent application".
Nonsense. Nonsense for Adage's benefit.
I'd be wary of making any assumptions about whether certain actions would or wouldn't happen simply because they're illegal. History, even recent history, is absolutely replete with examples of illegal activity in financial markets and those are really only the cases that have made it to light. Probably the tip of the iceberg.
How they do it? They probably just have a "third party" or some other loophole exploitation to make their moves. If it's even necessary, since we have laws that:
A) force insiders to report sales
B) protect short sellers from reporting positions because "proprietary trading strategies"
Which one takes precedence? Is a short sale the same as a regular sale for the purposes of A? Or is it protected under B first?
Bigger question for me with regard to Adage's form 13: why 4,000,000? That's certainly not a number that an algorithm is likely to settle into. They have a ton of positions all over the place, and people will have you believe their holding in ADXS is a "drop in the bucket" for them relatively. It's a virtual certainty that someone said "ok let's sell down to exactly 4,000,000." A nice round number sounds like something I would do, not a big bad hedge fund trying to squeeze out every buck. Weird.
Why am I not surprised at this? It's par for the course for these guys given the mind-boggling PR disaster after PR disaster over the last year.
Something that should make you wonder given how DUAL came out of nowhere (mind you, while attached to an earlier "episode" of uncertainty surrounding the AZN collaboration), and is now disappearing into nowhere: was DUAL ever intended to get off the ground at all, or was it just more ammo to sow confusion and uncertainty to help Papa Adage's short adventures?
Just throw this on the ever-growing pile of convenient "mistakes" that immediately acts to mute any possible rebound action.
Glad they got the submission in. Not glad that there's no partner attached. Hope it isn't just bullshit to push the share authorization through.
There's a small section of the proxy that states a list of stockholders is available on premises in the 10 days leading up to the meeting. Does anyone know if this is the same list that's provided in the proxy document, or does this possibly include information we haven't seen? One of the questions often asked is where FMR's shares went.
I don't have easy access to it so I can't say what page it's on.
I'd venture a guess that an acquirer with deep enough pockets would be more concerned with being delivered a well-oiled machine rather than having to fill in the gaps themselves. The same crew would likely be running the search before or after an acquisition, since Advaxis is the subject matter expert on Advaxis. Waiting to make the hires after acquisition is just adding expensive delays comparatively and possibly a risk of losing the key people needed to determine the resources they need to push forward internally.
This isn't something I necessarily believe to be the case, I'm just playing devil's advocate. Like everything else as a result of no communication, it seems to spin either way.
As some have been saying, dilution could be short-term bad, long-term good. The real question is, how short-term is that short-term going to be? Could be just a day, could be a week, could be a month, could be a year or more.
As usual, we have no answers and are faced with yet another situation that can spin either way. I think the only certainty is that we'll either walk away whole or better, or we'll be waiting for a hail mary until the day they expire. We won't ever get a chance to sell and feel like we made the right move.
It's not so much that they are currently paying to keep the lights on, it's that they were willing to pay to keep the lights on at a time when things were more premature and desperate. In exchange for favorable treatment, I'm sure. From there it turns into "you scratch my back, I scratch yours".
CO: "We want RSUs!"
HF: "Ok."
HF: "We want you to screw up IR/PR in every way imaginable so we can cash in!"
CO: "Ok."
In some other universe where the company defiantly rejects playing along at this stage in the game where both simultaneous long and short positions are established:
CO: "We're tired of you pushing us around!"
HF: "Ok, we'll dump your stock and bury your company. Doesn't matter to us, we stand to gain either way."
And here we are.
Why they waited is actually very simple, I think. They could've done this much earlier as the chart was already largely broken by the time of the clinical hold. They could've done it all along. But they HFT'd the crap out of every cent on the way, including holding the price at several points to create the illusion of bottoms with the sole purpose of trapping buyers.
This is why I repeated many times several months ago that buying shares is literally handing them your money. Now that the price is this low that doesn't seem to be the case... Or is it another false bottom? Who knows.
I dunno... It follows some common themes as in responses I've gotten from her. It could be fabricated, but it's a bit of a wet noodle fabrication if it is one considering you get quite a lot of creative freedom when making stuff up.
Better question to me is, do you contact her frequently enough that her demeanor towards you is consciously or unconsciously different than towards lesser-known shareholders? If so, we/you should keep that knowledge in your back pocket for a rainy day when it might be needed.
I have to imagine that on her end there's quite a bit of internal (internal to her, not necessarily the company) dialogue when responding to emails; she must be well aware that anything she responds to anyone, especially a relative stranger, will end up posted somewhere, misconstrued, and so forth. It's probably stressful looking over your shoulder all the time. Strange and vague replies are probably reserved for that crowd.
I doubt it. While the warrants are essentially free money to the company, it's only about $15M. I wouldn't think this degree of risk and bending over backwards for that amount is something they would find worthwhile.
Adage is a scumbag parasite. Unfortunately, I don't think the company is able to kick them to the curb even if they wanted. At this point Adage has so much trading power relative to the rest of the market that they can easily make life very difficult if Advaxis doesn't dance.
That's what happens when Papa Adage needs time bought to do whatever they've been doing since the start of 2017. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- there's no way this crap is so consistently awful by accident.
Stir the pot to tank the price, clam up so that the price can't increase, put the lid on any good news that can't be directly controlled using whatever tools available: a garbage conference call full of empty promises, inconsistent information ("We're not looking for a CEO! No, wait, we are! Are we??"), early proxy documents with a threat of dilution, fire your CEO, the list goes on and on.
Ignatius loved to use Ridge as an example of an "upstanding citizen" that wouldn't participate in a scheme like this. Now Tom Ridge is on his way out the door, just like DOC. I bet that decision came out of ethical and legal concerns, the same reason I suspect why DOC left.
Hey Keithz - how many shares you own these days?
I don't believe warrant holders have any voting power, but I'm with you on anything else as far as communicating with the company.
Maybe a public Google sheet or something is in order for coordinating these kinds of efforts? It would remain static instead of being buried under regular conversation on the board itself.
A small email distribution list could also help with coordination in a time-sensitive way, since moving in unison sends a stronger message. Might be overkill, I don't know -- just riffing.
This has "loosen shares for Adage" written all over it, just like everything else in the past 12 months.
The added authorization when there's already substantial breathing room to the current authorization also looks a little bit like hostile takeover protection.
But it seems like everything is always designed to spin good or bad, and so we continue guessing blindly as always. The saga of bad PR/IR continues.
I still say DOC left because of ethical and legal concerns pertaining to this kind of crap.
So assuming (loosely) for a moment that M&A is picking up in order of descending respect/hype: now that a couple of major CAR-Ts are out of the way, how much longer do we think the line is until ADXS is up to bat?
In other words: what other companies still in the immuno space would you "expect" to see bought out before ADXS based on results and/or hype?
For this exercise, assume repatriated funds have lowered the perceived cost of M&A across the BP board, and that each M&A puts added pressure on BPs that haven't yet exercised those funds to pick up players to bolster their pipelines (a bit of a feedback loop).
I think it holds some water. I also think the counterargument that there's little reason not to close them out holds water, but it could just indicate more legs down before then.
I'm very, very wary of the little change in short interest the last few rounds. A decline to roughly these levels happened once before, leading up to the NEO licensing. Those shorts came right back after the good news.
A downtrodden "meh" is all I can manage to feel about this investment anymore.
Are these long-ago promised shares included in the "fully diluted" (49M or so I think?) numbers that appear on the various SEC forms? Or does this amount to a ~5% dilution that appears out of nowhere?
If not, it's kinda crappy if they can just hide large amounts of dilution in forms that were filed years ago only to pop out "Surprise! But it's not real dilution since we told you so years ago!"
I guess a lot of diligence really is due with all these loopholes and tricks. But who's got the time to look through hundreds of filings for this junk?
Anyone know roughly when the next wave of 13Fs will be? Should be getting close no? This should be a good one.
Any idea if the uptick rule has been set today? I see a low of $2.71 which is just a hair under 10% from $3.00.
So the "$70 million" cash assumes liquidation of $46M in investments? Is it common to frame a cash position this way?
Section 15 Subsequent Events. Did we know about these option and RSU grants? My memory fails me.
It still reads DOC under Lombardo's signature on the 10K. Sloppy.
Bingo.
But if they do it correctly (at a premium), it will help much more than it hurts. Still just as confident as I was back in the summer that that is how this scheme ends.
I don't think it's an issue of being stupid, I think it's an issue of it having been planned all along, much to our pain and frustration. You know this better than most.
I say get it over with already.
No one is seemingly as investor-deaf as Advaxis management either, so I wouldn't assume anything about any patterns.
I'd counter this is a good time to announce an offering for the same reason terminations tend to happen on Fridays. The holidays serve as a distraction from the bad news same as the weekend does. I doubt institutions care if an offering happens on Christmas or any other day of the week as emotions are largely removed from them.
Not to mention it's a Thursday right before a good number of people probably have taken Friday off, essentially making this Friday news.
I hope it's good news but the timing makes little sense in my eyes.