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What's the order of operations here? Financials released after the close on Wednesday and conference call Thursday morning?
I'm going to laugh pretty hard if this is their lead-in to an offering. It'll be so typical.
Then again, that dilutive offering could be at a premium... say, $4-5, and issued to our short pals so they can close this chapter of Advaxis's history. And then we'd be off to the races. Close the short position and rocket fuel from buying above market at the same time.
Or not? I don't know. If Advaxis is anything, it's like throwing darts at a dartboard blindfolded, facing away, and under a leg.
Just shorting is significantly less effective because you're not putting the market to work for you. This is where the offering buys come in -- a "reputable" fund, like Adage in ADXS's case, throws its prior successes in other investments around as a lure.
Retail and smaller funds that have noted their success try to jump on their coattails, which then turns into a self-reinforcing buy loop. This allows them to short from much higher than they initially bought.
https://www.gurufocus.com/ownership/ADXS
In the short interest history chart, the key time period is during the spike in early 2015. Note the short interest rising very rapidly as that transpires, ending with a massive jump in short interest that cements the position and simultaneously drops the price so hard and fast that it kills the buy loop.
Now they're playing with house money and carry no risk. Advaxis can win, lose, or be stuck in the mud for 10 more years and Adage doesn't really need to care. But they may have warrants expiring in summer 2018, so they may (and should) do something to monetize those.
For the leverage. ADXSW will never trail ADXS by more than $5 due to that strike price. With that in mind:
You have $1,000, ADXSW is at $1 and ADXS is at $3.
You can buy 1000 ADXSW, or 333 ADXS.
Fast forward -- or reverse, if you like living in the past... :(
ADXS is at $10 (a return of 333%), which means ADXSW can be no lower than $5 (a return of 500%).
In this case, your 1000 ADXSW is worth at least $5000 now, while your 333 ADXS is worth $3333.
The warrants are a completely free $15M for the company. I don't see them just burning it -- it's likely either the price will correct before then since Adage may still have warrants of their own, or they should extend the expiration.
That's what I tell myself to feel better, anyway.
The big question for me is: if the price does correct so that Adage can exercise and profit on their warrants, how much profit are they looking for? If they get it up to $5.01 and exercise for relative pennies and the price ends up in a place where extending the expiration doesn't make much sense, it's a crapshoot for us regular warrant holders. Or, hell, I wouldn't even put it past the company to somehow forget that there are warrants out there approaching expiration; sad thing is I'm only half joking.
Same one of three(ish) opening patterns as always, 95% chance of nothing to see here without needing to look at level 2.
I don't expect much from the short interest report today either. I could see it going small decrease again, and could equally see it going small increase. I'd love a pleasant surprise, but the action in recent weeks doesn't indicate that they're ready to tip their hand via a large short interest change just yet.
The wait for a rescue from neck-deep quicksand continues.
Lol come now. That's essentially saying the company is worth less than the amount of money they've poured into R&D over the years. That's also just a stone's throw away from saying that they'd have to pay the buyer to be bought.
Entertaining read, thanks.
I took a look at Adage's new holdings. They're all up pretty big from when they bought into them... and short interest is also up 2-3x in the same period. Just like what happened here. Now, I have to imagine they don't run the same plays every time, you don't become wielder of $40B that way. Makes you wonder though.
It's all part of the information and sentiment manipulation game, I'm sure. Sort of like the stock bounces around but held within some range of $3 at present, the conversation bounces around but is held within some range of specific baseline ideas/feelings that they're attempting to instill that we can't readily see.
Personally I've largely tuned out of here and most other board-like sources for ADXS. There's not really anything to do except wait and see if Adage wants to make money on their warrants before summer 2018. Anyone (that isn't very familiar with ADXS already) who doesn't tune out sees this pit of despair and doesn't buy, or worse, sells out. That's probably what they want now.
As for how I feel about things: very excited for repatriation and glad it looks like we'll get it. I'd rate that as the #1 factor by leaps and bounds for ADXS's future fate.
Dialing this back to Jefferies Group, which sort of started this conversation. I hadn't noticed that they also seem to be the largest put holder in the overall ADXS list.
https://fintel.io/soh/us/adxs/jefferies-group-llc
It's kind of choppy and hard to make sense of what they've been doing over the years, but from the ups and downs of their holdings it seems like they've been playing the Advaxis game for quite some time. It's hard to tell if they've been winning -- and if not, why do they keep coming back lol?
They really dug in on both calls and puts (about $3.6M of each) between 9/30/16 and 12/31/16 out of nowhere, and at the same time they got rid of every single common share they had. They've been accumulating regular shares ever since while maintaining their calls and puts, but the calls vanished as of 9/30/17. The puts are still there, and there's quite a lot more than $300K on the line there. But without knowing expiration dates, bleh.
Can we infer anything from what they've been doing?
Edit: Ah, could be they got rid of their common shares when they bought the options for tax reasons? It does seem like those shares were sold at a loss. Are shares and options treated separately for wash sale purposes?
Edit 2: And possibly got rid of the call options and picked up a bunch of shares for tax loss reasons yet again? Heh. What a shell game.
I think the filing time is lax on those forms if they aren't already a substantial owner.
On a semi-related note: what's up with the Jefferies Group LLC changes reported 11/14? 97.6% reduction in call options, 286% increase in shares, and no change in puts. What's their angle?
Raja is saying it shouldn't have happened at all to begin with and did little more than hurt long shareholders who now have an unnecessary uphill climb to get back to where they started. The goof is that management is seemingly oblivious to their own company's market conditions and what they can or cannot do. How can you NOT expect a 20% drop? Even retail knows to expect that. And so it looks scummy. And even if it wasn't, there's going to be at least one former shareholder who is not going to want any part of that amateur hour behavior and won't be back, and so all things being equal the climb up the stairs is harder than taking the elevator down.
I don't disagree. Know your business better. This was sacrificing longs to the hedge and short gods in the name of "heehee just checkin'".
That, or Fidelity's shares were reflected in the decline from 10M already and they were just slow to file. Hoping it's yours, though.
Tomorrow afternoon. The last one was 11/9 and showed only a marginal decrease. I don't have high hopes for this one given volume recently, but who knows.
With every passing "Dan was fired", I become more convinced that he was not. So many are so convinced about things and voice them repeatedly to drill them into shareholders' heads, yet most "obvious" ideas have been wrong over and over again.
Misdirection after misdirection, the information war rages on as it has for years in this stock.
Sigh. So the bottom line is "more timelines from the gang who continually push back timelines". Or said another way, "2018 will be the year!" Again.
What good are timelines if they're never accurate? They're amounting to little more than pumping a la "there's this timeline you won't want to miss, you should buy!"
If you're going to take a vow of silence you might as well drop timelines entirely while you're at it.
Lol. Probably means now they're less likely to be held personally liable somehow if things go south because of what they're forced to say to shareholders with questions lately. What better way to protect individuals than to put a company in the way?
The kicker for me is that all that "real selling" didn't translate into shares being covered, which seems to imply the shorts literally watched a few million shares pass them by without batting an eye. So does this mean they're not interested in covering when given the opportunity?
I have to imagine the FMR sales happened during the reporting periods that saw declines in short interest. It's really bad for us if not, I think. That seems to translate into them (the shorts) expecting the price to go lower, or they still expect to get a bunch in a dilutive event like I suggested months ago.
Man, the formatting is atrocious. Does it specify any dates for transactions? I can't find it in that garbage of a document.
Any particular reason this hasn't appeared on form 4? We really need some dates for context.
This one hurts bad because of the information implications. I'm hoping the same reason the form 4 isn't around is the same reason they're also in the dark rather than this being an informed vote of no confidence.. That said, they've been threatening to leave for several quarters, disposing a bit each time, so it's not surprising but still.
I think the warrants referred to here are the actual ADXSW warrants, expiring 10/22/18. I think the vast majority of them are as yet unexercised.
At least, mine aren't. :(
Somewhat unrelated, but since I only have one post. The latest options grant to management is funny. Check it. Now the last few months have been painted to look like an options spring-load if the price runs, rather than more serious SEC crimes. Advaxis evidently has no issue with spring-loading options, as we know from the recent lawsuit settlement. What a great misdirection, now Advaxis and its spring-loading is the low hanging fruit instead of Adage's more involved manipulation.
Maple: I have no strong opinion on buyout one way or the other. I'm open to the possibility but not holding my breath. Biggest question for me is whether Adage still holds warrants as that will likely determine our fate for the next 6-8 months.
Can you list specifically who is manipulating? Names or individuals or companies?
Adage Capital Partners.
Can you give me any specific methods they use to manipulate?
They buy a small (relative to other investments, but medium-large relative to the stock itself) holding, leveraging their prior reputation as a successful hedge fund in order to spur buying interest. They use that buy side momentum to build a short position that offsets their long position's risk and also monetizes the time spent waiting for clinical progress. Following some early success in eliminating risk for the short position, they then use the interim returns from the short position itself to fund HFT algorithms that recycle those short shares and push the price down. See all ebbs and flows of short interest since mid-2015.
The tool they use is HFT. They have the most funds available to project force using HFT, relative to any other party holding the stock; this means they are always in control. They use that HFT to constantly put up bids/asks all over the place near the spread, with the result being that traders and "other HFTs" get bullied into canceling, selling, etc. They also do it the other way, bullying traders and other HFTs into buying when they want to push the price up while shorting into the rise.
Recall that the initial investment is "small" relative to most companies, but "large" relative to Advaxis itself. This means that they are firmly entrenched and it would require equally "large" investments to dislodge them. The problem then is that few institutions are going to be willing to take a "large" risk like they did (they got in on the cheap because they went through the company itself). And retail can't do anything about it either because they lack the ability to act as a single unit. The situation is self-reinforcing and fewer institutions will want to jump in as what is happening becomes clearer. Plus whatever they do in the back room.
At the same time, they hold millions of warrants with a fixed exercise price that largely offset the risk of the common stock "getting away" from them and making it impossible to cover. They can just convert the warrants instead and cover that way in that scenario.
So we're left with watching them steal the money and hoping that they also want to run it the other way when they're done. It was destined to happen all along.
Not even going to touch my thoughts on how the company is helping this happen.
Agreed on the significance of those warrants both from Adage's perspective and from the company's, since there's quite a bit of free cash parked there for the company's balance sheet. I just hope a crappy warrant price of 5.10-5.20 isn't where they say "good enough".
Aligning with my theory is that by purchasing shares in the open market, they became part of the buying pressure that Adage sought to short into.
In other words, money transferred directly from the deal party to Adage. And roping onlookers in along the way to boot.
Terrible.
I haven't looked, sorry. Hornet cited an SEC filing in this post on the subject, though. I skimmed through the filing but it's written in a way that it's sort of hard to know what it's even talking about.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=134924853
They've PR'd this credit every year going back a number of years, so I wouldn't read too much into it.
Complicit -- hands down, no doubts whatsoever.
I'm still waiting for that dilution at a premium, which will signal the end of this and provide instant takeoff fuel. If today's short interest is 5-6M or below, I don't think it'll be much longer until we see that. Today is probably about maximizing damage before the "good news" that the short shares have been reduced further gets out.
I sent my own love letter to the SEC yesterday per Hornet's information last week and laid out just about everything we know/believe about Adage and about the company and their relationship.
We have some evidence -- the last short interest report. Tomorrow's is also needed for confirmation.
It seems logically unlikely Adage would sell at the very bottom after the price spent a good 95%+ of its time since they bought in within profitable ranges. And taking small losses to boot.
Yep. There's no possible way in my mind that investor/public relations with input from over a dozen people could be so piss poor for so long by accident. These are people who had to be vetted as they came on and had to have shown some modicum of intelligence before being put in charge of a publicly traded company.
As Blue said, Advaxis better turn this around quick before it gets buried in lawsuits. And I'll volunteer to head down to Home Depot and buy shovels in bulk.
Are they under 10%? Everyone seems to think so but the latest 10-Q had the basic share count at 40.996M, of which 10% is 4,099,600. Adage has 4,100,043(?) shares.
I don't know if the denominator is basic shares only, though.
(Numbers from memory, but should be roughly correct.)
This is fantastic information Hornet, count me in. Certainly can't assume Advaxis themselves have done it.
Hope these Adage clowns get buried. I could care less that they recapitalized the company, or that they're in the business of making money, or that we might still come out ahead. Some people may not have the luxury of being locked in a stock for years. A desperate need for liquidity could happen to anyone, including any one of us, at any time.
Hate the game and also hate the player that doesn't play honorably. The banker in Monopoly has easy access to stealing cash but that's still frowned upon. This isn't all that different.
He owns 4,100,043.
(Sorry Ig, not much else to say today and couldn't resist a bit of low-hanging, tongue-in-cheek fruit.)
Btw I took a look at the 10-Q just now and it states just under 41M basic/diluted shares outstanding. Adage still has 4,100,043. This makes them a 10% holder still, doesn't it? If so, that changes a lot. Unless they're planning on dumping all 4.1M at once in one huge form 4, I think that means we won't see more sales from them.
Should've checked for myself to begin with lol
On low-ball selling out. It would be better than the status quo, but I think that patience is actually legitimately warranted now more than any time since 2014. Desperate pleas for a mercy kill are relatively pointless. First, from my own "emotional" perspective, such a low-ball sell out would actually amount to little more than personal validation that despite all the torment, I made the "right" call. We as humans generally loathe being wrong and have built into our psychology a propensity to defend ourselves when we're faced with that possibility, even to the point of incredible irrationality that we wouldn't otherwise surface. Second, the wheels are clearly already in motion and it's unlikely anybody with any influence is probably even tuned in as a result. Even if they were, it's already too late. As soon as Adage made themselves known with the first form 4, the game as we (didn't) know it changed into something else (that we still don't know unfortunately).
Less time should be spent calling for low-ball sales and more on dissecting what exactly Adage is planning and how it all fits together.
Lastly, I find certain "things" interesting. One of those things is how obscure tidbits/discoveries of information always somehow find their way into the public consciousness and cause confusion and discord. An example of that is this PowerPoint footnote regarding the GOG delay. I'm all for DD and I feel I do a decent amount, but for some of these things I really wonder whether they're yet more intentional, malicious broadcasts of "management incompetence" that are intended to sway sentiment. In short: I'm fairly sure Adage wants heavy selling right now: they telegraphed it with two form 4s and kept 9.9% of their long position to maximize their ammunition to push the price down. Not a huge logical leap to suspect they also fire these nuggets of bad news into retails' minds. As always, I expect Advaxis is 100% complicit in this activity.
I maintain that there's no way a group of people can be so horrendous at investor relations by accident. Advaxis is literally just buying time for Adage to do their thing and bumbling about to help Adage reach their goal.
Adage: "Advaxis, jump. Do it or we'll sell it all and crater your company's aspirations."
Advaxis: "Uhhh okay fine, how high?"
9.9%? I really fear that means we're in for some very red days ahead. The only logical reason I can see for that is they will unload the rest to cause maximum direct impact since their indirect threats via form 4 haven't worked as well as they'd like.
Does anyone know what the implications are of their "indirect" ownership? Looking at the form 4 footnotes, it sounds like they have a neat little web of similarly named companies they operate with and who knows what loopholes this lets them exploit.
Thanks I guess. Am I right in assuming they still have over 10% ownership? Saving some ammo for round 3?
Somewhat unrelated but since my posting is limited, is there anyone that can be contacted at GOG regarding the "delay"? I'm in and out quick so I'm not up to speed but I see a lot of commotion about it. If they're going to pin the blame on GOG I want to hear it from GOG themselves. I unfortunately don't trust a word that comes out of Advaxis while they're under Adage's thumb.
BTW keep it up Gant. I hope people are paying attention to you. The hero this board needs, connecting the long term and short term dots instead of tunneling on one or the other.
I wonder if we'll see that second form 4 from Adage drop in the next few days to try and spook more shares loose since they conveniently kept just over 10%. And really, for what other reason would they do that? I see that as step 1 of X before they're done. Question is when.
Also can't surmise what X is, which is really the key to it all.
It didn't start in June 2015, it started in December 2014. Look closely, the "suppression" was here all along, it just wasn't evident during the run to $30 because euphoria outweighed the damping effect.
Look closely at the short interest from Dec 2014 through Mar 2014 especially. It's a real eye opener. Particularly in Dec and Jan before Pearson, there is no explanation for the enormous jumps in short interest. Also compare November 2014 with December 2014.
(Yeah, I said I wasn't posting anymore. I feel this point is important enough to do so anyway.)
I suppose my only question would be how you arrive at the $50k treatment cost assumption. The choice of that variable has a huge impact on the result.
Possible, yes. Legal, I don't think so.
Supplemental question: is there a difference in materiality between "the data conclusively says this is ineffective" versus "our informal observation of the patient experience makes us suspect it's ineffective"?
Buy warrants if you're going to listen to this guy and not common stock. Upside is better and you won't be feeding the short cycling that's happening.
By the way your impression of NSYNC is spot on today.
You used the wrong price, don't forget it's ADXSW and the price is floating around between $1-2. 14,505 is accurate. I don't sell at a loss, ever, unless it's to stop a swing trade -- not under these manipulated circumstances, at least.
Doesn't mean I need to be happy about sitting on such a huge paper loss. Quite pissed, most of all because I could have owned WAY more.
Trying to lock in for long-term was a terrible mistake, should've just kept trading it. I put 75% down on a car just with profits from trading this.
Sure, no problem.
ADXSW
9/9/16: 393 @ 6.94
10/5/16: 962 @ 8.32
10/6/16: 500 @ 7.51
10/6/16: 500 @ 7.46
10/10/16: 1000 @ 8.98
10/11/16: 500 @ 7.40
10/27/16: 700 @ 5.60
11/15/16: 1100 @ 6.75
11/17/16: 1000 @ 7.29
11/18/16: 1000 @ 7.15
11/21/16: 1950 @ 7.96
12/1/16: 1000 @ 4.91
12/8/16: 700 @ 4.96
1/20/17: 300 @ 6.84
2/27/17: 1100 @ 6.55
3/6/17: 800 @ 5.78
7/7/17: 1000 @ 3.35
Total cost: $97,821
Current value: $24,513
I traded before settling into this position to lock in long-term, which is why it starts 9/16.
Note: wash sales galore in here. I don't know what that does to the data that is shown to me.