We’ve discussed this before. It’s good practice. There is also ambiguity in results that people do not take into account, or in the interpretation even in a trial that could have failed, this one hasn’t likely failed based upon the blinded data... but people keep creating this false idea, an axiom, that is not real.
There is no “immediate disclosure” common law rule.
There is no such thing. She may believe it, but assuming she asked an attorney or an attorney told her she could put that as an axiom in her article, in my experience, is absolutely doubtful.
If it were a rule, a real rule, there would be numerous law journal articles about it. It would be taught in securities law classes as a special class of rule, that had an axiom like effect that companies must be very careful about.
That is not the case. She’s older, she clearly believes in the company and product, as I do. But I do not need a false axiom to convince me of the solidity of my analysis.
People creating these fake rules and repeating what others write, can rightly say, but I BELIEVED that to be true when I wrote it, and they will not be legally responsible for a false but presumably sincere belief in something that is technically not their subject matter area.
But, there is no such axiom. It’s bad of anyone to put it in analytical commentary.
There may be a common belief about generally what companies SHOULD generally disclose, with so many qualifiers and exceptions if you teased them out, that even those beliefs, in the end would be meaningless. But a commonly said, but falsely repeated idea, which by the way I have only recently seen so often repeated after years of investing, does not change reality.
We won’t know, with certainty, until we know. We know that the company has said on multiple occasions they will disclose ASAP. That is their INTENTION. If the results were so bad that there were absolutely no possibility of an approvable product, I think they’d have told us. But we all know, from the blinded data, that that is unlikely anyway. Mathematically it would be very difficult. So using a legal axiom that doesn’t exist to convince people who really should be convinced by the math, is kind of silly.
I have no doubt they could be sued for just about anything they said or didn’t say if someone felt strongly enough about it. The 4 day rule is a regulatory rule that applies to required disclosure that the SEC enforces. The notion that someone might bring suit, can happen at any time, for almost anything. And I’ve said fraud rules, common law fraud is always a possible suit. But silence is not always fraud, and bringing a suit doesn’t mean it is based on a real law, or that the side suing will win. Moreover, results that are complex might not require immediate disclosure if an approvable product still lies within the mix of data, even if you’d like to bring suit regardless. It would be a matter that a judge would look at, considering if they were sincerely reviewing the data, and they’d be given all the benefits of the doubt, like the business judgment rule, if it were determined that they were not intentionally obfuscating. With only silence, it is difficult to prove intentional obfuscation in 4 days.
The entire debate is a muddle of nonsense. People who do not understand what they are talking about, throwing anything they can into the scrabble to try to make a false axiom seem real.
Now 90 days later, if they have no objective basis to continue puzzling over data that they all have exchanged emails in and is a complete failure with possibility of a approvable product for which they might apply to the FDA? Sure. You’d probably have a case. But with just the blinded data, who other than the persistent shorts and that nut AF believes that is what they actually got?
