Dr. MacD,
I respectfully disagree. And unlike most of the times when someone says "respectfully", I do actually mean it. Your post was well written; you stated your opinions and followed through with substantiation. But I still disagree with some of your points, and hope to provide similar levels of substantiation.
First, a takeover today would require a vote by shareholders. I do not believe a majority of shareholders would accept a buyout offer which doesn't put most warrants in the money. There are tons of them left at $3.40 and the new batch at $4. Do you really think anyone in their right mind would take a $4 buyout offer? Well, not everyone is in their right mind, but I feel certain that a majority would shoot it down.
You claim that Titan is not seen as a threat to any player in that field. If that were true, why would the biggest players be after our top talent? Mr. Brar, Mr. Jensen, Dr. Genova... Titan isn't selling a product yet, so there is no loss from any potential patent infringement as of yet; they can't sue Titan until they can claim loss. Capital has been hard for Titan to come by, possibly due to influence from these competitive robotic megalopolies, but we still manage to scrape up the needed funds to continue. The most harm these competitors could do to our program is to snipe our top talent pool, and that is what they are attempting. They know the eventual threat is real but there is little they can do to stop Titan at this juncture. They are doing what they can by trying to break up the band (and our vote FOR repricing options will help keep this team together to the finish line).
I find your financial estimates reasonable ($50M + $50M). A distribution deal can help mitigate some of the second $50M chunk if they pursue such a deal. Announcements of Design Freeze, FDA filing, FDA and CE approvals, etc. should easily put at least that much cash in their pockets via warrant exercise. I can't rule out the possibility of one more raise before then but I remain hopeful they can get by without it.
I, for one, have never sold a share of my Titan stock, and I have been accumulating more whenever the (financial) opportunity arises. As much as I may be considered somewhat of a "cheerleader" for this stock, I believe I have not yet used either the word "scoop" or "rah" in any of my posts. I try to assess information logically, and occasionally share the results of my assessments out here.
Therefore, as you suggest, I derive my "wishful bliss" from observations, some factual and some borne of interpretation. To these ends, as I shared with a friend of mine just this morning, I was reviewing the most recent Annual Information form on Sedar. I observed that Titan is "awaiting confirmation of schedule for preliminary audit of quality system by European Notified Body." Although the plan is to launch in the Eastern U.S., such early progress with the EU should bode well for the idea that European marketing will commence shortly thereafter, so they are not planning to wait around or progress TOO slowly, merely cautiously when entering the market.
I then observed (Q2, Milestone 5) "verify production system operation..." I interpret this to mean that the current system is believed to be the production system, as we are already in Q2. The statement is intended to convey the "verification" aspect of the sentence, but it inherently states that the hardware they are working with is, for all intents and purposes, the Production System - and I say this with better than 90% confidence. I'm not 100% sure of this interpretation due to the ambiguity in the first Milestone 5 statement (Update system design and related hardware and software documentation). It would not make sense for it to mean they are updating the design of the instrument at this juncture, but an argument could be made that they are combining design and documentation tasks into this one entry; my belief is that this entry is entirely a documentation task which could have been more clearly expressed as "Update system design documentation and related hardware documentation and software documentation." Also, if said task was more than just documentation, it is highly unlikely that any design changes could be documented, built, module tested, integrated, and system tested all within the bounds of Q2. Design Freeze has not been declared, but I find their wording to be as close as possible to declaring it. To further substantiate this, the list of Milestone 5 achievements places Design Freeze in the middle, not at the end. It is not unreasonable to presume some reasonable sequence in the list (e.g. updating the documentation must precede some of the other entries). Design freeze could therefore be substantially earlier than the end of June, given the tasks they list after that entry.
As for the broader bear market conditions for medtechs, I will note that ISRG's high for today is within a dollar of its all time high; one could hypothesize that the surgical robotic market isn't entirely beholden to the trading patterns of other medtech companies.
All my opinion and interpretation, submitted for your consideration, with respect.
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I believe most warrants would be out of the money if there was a takeover today. No one knows why J&J overpaid for their acquisition into this field but we do know they were very well connected and had loads of cash to progress their development.
Investors will do what is best for their bottom line. Warrants will be worth little upon a takeover since then the time value would be missing and you would be FAR better off to buy the common shares. Your assumption of a huge premium implies someone is desperate for Titan technology whereas the market has not indicated that to the be case at all. That is not to say that someone should not be interested but the reality is Titan is not seen as a threat at the moment to any player in that field.
I have stated before that Titan needs $50M per year until FDA approval and then $50M minimum to roll out the product line commercially since there will be no profits for the first year as orders will be small while potential buyers test it on a small scale.
Scoop ... scoop ... rah ... rah ... rah. I do not believe for a second that these posters are constantly buying and never selling their shares. That is ridiculous and particularly when all they can say is silly phrases like scoop and provide wishful bliss.
Still watching but not buying at the moment. I believe cash will be harde to come by and the spend will be relentless due to broader bear market conditions for medtechs that are outside of Titan control unfortunately.
