Replies to post #62457 on Biotech Values

[poorgradstudent]

OT:

>almost all bids and asks are 100-200 shares ... which is ridiculously small!<

:-(

;-(

I need to get a much, much better paying job.

[oldberkeley]

>Does anyone have a strategy to deal with this problem??

I imagine someone will suggest simply staying away from $100-500M market cap companies. And maybe that is the only answer.<

Micro- I think you've answered you're own question. I like the small biotechs but when I buy and sell I basically "build in" the inevitable bid/ask pain, sometimes as much as 5%. If I plan on dumping a large position, it has to be something with at least 1/2 mil avg daily volume and over 1 mil is better. A few years ago I rode SIRI up from $3 to $9; sold on a 400+ mil volume day, 25K shares at market, bam, one block, 5 seconds! Try that with some of these small bios.

[medchal]

E*Trade, and I assume many other of the online brokerages, have the facility for showing only a portion of your order to the market. I hasten to add that I am not recommending E*Trade, and, as with all of E*Trades's fancy trading tools (hidden stops, for example), it often isn't available when you want it. If I remember correctly, you can't use it on any bulletin board stock, and of course you can't send such an order to the NYSE, etc., etc. But there may be other brokerages that have this capability and are more reasonable in the ways they will let you use it. Just a thought.

[rfj1862]

It took me well over 100 trades and several months to accumulate VRUS when it was trading <5000 shares/day.

Just something you have to live with. It only took me 3 trades to dump it all, though :-)

You can also consider hiding the true size of your order. E*Trade allows you to do this, not sure about other brokerages.