Seems that a few here on the message board are a bit prickly-understandable considering where the share price sits. Yes, there may be newcomers to biotech investing here and others who cannot believe that they may be wrong. IMO, if you are not against the company (short) then you are welcome and needed.
People are giving their opinions, so I will also chime in. I have been investing almost exclusively in biotech for the last 8-10 years. Currently have 8 holdings. Finance degree. Still work but do what research I can, spending about 15-20 hours a week keeping up with things concerning biotech. I have had winners, losers, and some that do nothing. I am good at picking a company and not so good at selling when I should.
I believe that these small cap biotechs are sometimes manipulated. Certainly not by brokerages like Fidelity, but by the institutions that have billions of dollars and desire to make more. Shorting the share price into the ground is one way to do it. Small cap biotechs are easy fodder. They do not have any earnings and therefore must issue shares to dilute. Trials often fail. Timeline for catalysts is known, for the most part. CEOs often inexperienced. Retail investors often inexperienced and easily influenced.
Here is my guess as to what has happened with Marker. And it is a guess. Some institution’s research staff came up with Marker because it met their criteria to short. Nothing personal. The right market cap, the correct range in shares outstanding, timeline to trial readouts, etc. So they (and possibly others) decided to short it. This is not the only company they are shorting. They are very experienced at doing this. I do not think that they were expecting the pancreatic data results. And those results actually did not come out of the blue-CEO hinted at good results to be reported at a later date. That should have and did move the share price up. I think that institutional shorts continued shorting during this time to keep the price somewhat in check. Results leaked a bit prematurely that Friday morning, upsetting Marker’s game plan a bit. Institutional short shorted heavily after that blunder, in order to start the share price moving downward once the market opened (share price actually was up nicely in pre-market trading on perceived good news). Some investors saw the price heading down and sold, stop losses were hit triggering more selling. Any upward momentum in share price greeted with more shorting to keep price down. Margin calls soon coming in creating more selling. A perfect execution by the shorts. Nothing illegal, just immoral. Unless there was a bit of naked shorting, which would not surprise me.
To be honest, I was not surprised by the drop in price, but was somewhat dismayed by how far it did drop. Somewhat expected with the size of the short position leading up to those results. I was kind of surprised that there was no “hit piece” written and published to correspond with the takedown. They used to be common, but seem a bit rarer these days. In any case, the hit piece was not needed. Some say another CR would have proved efficacy, but honestly, I think that this was preordained to go down, no matter what the data indicated. I had one company I was invested in drop 30% the same day FDA approval for their drug was announced.
I will be glad to see shorts covering. It seems short squeezes are very rare these days. Shorts are well researched and have nearly unlimited resources. I would love to see uptick rule reinstated and require institutions to file their short positions along with the required long positions every quarter. Probably not going to happen any time soon.
This is all my opinion. I could be completely wrong about Marker, but I have been in biotech too long to believe that these small companies are not manipulated. And not only downward, but pumped to increase share price as well. Which is just as bad, IMO.
So good luck to everybody. I believe the science is sound here. I am encouraged by the latest hires-I have found that management is as important as the science. Marker is by far my largest position-I have been selling off other biotechs to buy more here at these prices. If I am wrong, it is definitely going to sting.
