re: "If the news had been about reversing disease as the MacFarlane interviews suggested, the stock would have screamed up by a much higher percentage than it went down by. "
I don't see why. Is that a conclusion, based on what. Or is that just an assumption? There seems to be no rational reason for it to have gone down like that. So people are flailing about and grasping at an irrational reason. It's not because of McFarlane, but he is being hoisted up as a scapegoat.
As I argued in a previous post, the people who would benefit from reversal will be a subset of those benefiting from stabilization, and in either case, the same number of pills will be sold to the same patient population. There will be no difference in future profits whether the results from patient to patient vary between being simply superior to every other drug or being vastly superior. New standard of care is new standard of care. It is a binary event. The market will be saturated, as it is now with donepezil, which does not stabilize progression of the disease, when 2-73, which does stabilize, replaces donepezil. Excellent future here.
Advances elsewhere in early detection means that 2-73 stabilization also opens up a new larger market in prevention, something for which donepezil is completely useless. Stabilization is key. Now, that, is a reason for increased valuation over and above standard of care. Reversal or not isn't a future profit issue here either, since there are no symptoms yet to reverse. Adds to expectations of an even more excellent future.
It is merely making an assumption that investors suddenly dumped their shares, minutes after and in sudden total illogical disagreement with positive data, "positive", as stated by the company, came out. In fact, due to the opaque nature of the stock exchange, we really have no way of knowing from whom the huge number of shares being dumped, starting the cascade, were coming from, or even whether they were real shares or not.
Are you familiar with the term "running the stops"? For someone with millions to throw around, it's easy to manipulate stock prices and make many more millions. There's nothing to stop them and they know they can get away with it, so why wouldn't they?
Another thing that aids an attack is the principle that it's harder for a stock that's been driven down, to come back up. E.g. if it's down 50%, it has to rise 100% to get back to where it was.
Perhaps we'll leave it as an exercise to identify, who, besides direct profiteers from market manipulation, might also indirectly benefit, and how, from artficially produced severe damage to developmental company's market cap.
AI
