Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[Doktornolittle]

Not disagreeing with anybody's analysis here, but based on the little experience I have debating these issues for Oncology stocks posting abstracts prior to presentations at ASCO, my guess was that the conference people objected to letting out that much information prior to the conference.

My recollection is that the conference people restrict such in their rules, not because of any regulatory constraints, but just because they want to keep as much mystique as possible going into the conference. They want people to buy tickets.

Inconsistent with that is the need to PR the news anyway, at least prior to market open, if not prior to the presentation, if there is no webcast. And there is usually no webcast at such large conferences. Still, if the PR of the data is after the conference but before market open, at least attendees have a couple more days to digest the info. Not sure that is allowed. I don't remember if such a PR would come Friday, after hours (before the Saturday presentation), or Monday, after the presentation. What would actually make the most sense would be to run the PR on Saturday, just after the presentation ends. That would be the most fair, but... I don't remember that happening in previous cases.

Also inconsistent with my guess above is that it seems unlikely the conference staff would let that through if it was against policy. I am sure they review those presentation titles carefully. But, maybe they screwed up.

At any rate, I hope they did not violate any regulatory rules, and my bet is that it was not a retraction due to a change in data.

(I get one post per day these days) So signing off.