I've always said that I've never seen a message board with such brilliant and charitable contributors (in terms of their willingness to offer their insights and sacrifice their time to write them out for others). The past few days have witnessed heroic efforts by CP, keep_trying, FTM, Bungler and others to attempt to explain the unexplainable. I thank all of you.
At this point, I believe that the law of Ockham's Razor is the safest path (one should accept simpler theories until more complex ones become relevant). Given management's past track record of possessing the unique ability to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, I think it's time to accept the simplest answer: management has either screwed up again or they've been outplayed by BP. Wall Street may well form an irrevocable conclusion (fair or unfair in this latest instance) that management at PPHM is either incredibly incompetent or incredibly stupid (or both). It's doubtful that they will ever again summon trust from big money again.
I know that they were blind (by procedural design) to the coding labeling debacle, but the fact is that this happens so very rarely that, given PPHM's management's previous track record, the fact that it happened to Bavi simply cements the perceptions of the company and it's management.
Comparison's have been made to VRTX with a similar problem from which they recovered. The difference there is that the VRTX management already had gained the confidence of Wall Street. To this point, we were told how long ago that cotara would be in Phase III development (after a methodological dosing delay which cost at least a year)? Still: nothing. ISTs, imaging -- all mentioned as fantastic future possibilities: but with this company it's ALWAYS been about FUTURE possibilities. And just when we're about to complete a supposedly air tight Gold Standard Phase II, we STILL screw up. (And if you cannot invest with relative confidence in that arena, how can you invest in anything this management oversees?)
I do still believe in the science. There have been too many accounts of the future of cancer drug immunological mechanisms (and we've got so many patents sewed up in that area that we'd have years of a head start on the rest of pharma). That's the tragedy.
I haven't sold any shares (and my purchases over the past couple of months or so have left me with an even larger position than I had before -- and thus an even bigger loss), and now I'll hold out until the company is sold for pennies of what should have been the shareholder reward for their $ and their patience. I'll watch management make tens of millions while so many retail investors are again left out in the cold because of those very people who will reap the reward of our financial losses.
I hope I'm wrong, not just for my sake but for all of the magnificent people who have contributed so selflessly and constructively over the past 12 years. But until I'm proven to be wrong, I think Ockham's Razor is the safest assumption.
AI
