Don't be too hard on yourself, Batermere. I don't think there's anyone out there who didn't get humbled in the stock market even once.
Luckily, despite what the current stock price of ADXS indicates, it is amazing that there has not been a single catastrophic science failure till date on any of its trials to justify a 94% drop from its 2015 peak (even though that was indeed a short term pump). We ought to take some solace from that fact and be glad that largely manipulation and, to an extent management inefficiencies and omissions, and not science, are the cause of this PPS decimation. If the science were in any reasonable doubt, the short funds would have had no cause to cover even now.
All this being said, I think a bunch of us are in agreement that small cap biotechs are no longer fit for "investment" in this corrupt, HFT driven market. I shudder to think of my own lost opportunities; tech stocks that I considered buying and ignored, such as Amazon, Netflix and Square Inc (with world class management and stable businesses) and which are all up between 100 to 700% over the last 3-4 years.
But the good thing is that the market will always present more options, and if we have learned anything, it should be to invest conservatively and not look for multi baggers anymore; certainly not in small cap biotech unless you have money to throw around. This is not only our failure (which it unfortunately is, given we didn't take any profits when we had them), but also a failure of markets in this country. It wasn't this hopeless or irreversibly corrupt even 15 years ago. Well, we live and learn.
