"And we could all lose our money. But we all could be hit by a bus tomorrow."
Here you are equating the odds of NNVC going bankrupt with the odds of being hit by a bus tomorrow. I doubt that as many as 100 Americans get hit by a bus in any given year. So the odds of any given American getting hit by a bus on any given day is less than one in a billion. Even Proctor & Gamble has higher odds than one in a billion of going bankrupt in 3 years. Any attempt to estimate the odds of NNVC going bankrupt is of course highly subjective, but we can at least attempt to estimate the order of magnitude. I would say that the chances that NNVC will either go bankrupt within 3 years or be forced to issue large numbers of new shares at a very unfavorable price (diluting us to the point where they may as well have gone bankrupt) is much closer to 1 in 3 than 1 in a billion. They have enough money to demonstrate that their drug works in humans provided that everything goes right, and in a timely manner. Anyone familiar with the pitfalls of human testing and the capriciousness of the FDA is well aware that is far from a sure bet.
You seem to think that we know that this drug works in gerbils and pandas. It's never been tested in those animals so in fact we don't know that it works for gerbils and pandas. If a drug being safe and efficacious for rats always meant that it was safe and efficacious for humans then we'd never have to do those expensive phase I, phase II, and phase III tests. I know how nanoviricides work as well as most of the people here. So what? Many a drug that works in vitro, or in a rat, doesn't work in humans. We won't know whether nanoviricides work in humans until they're tested in humans. They might also have serious side effects -- after all, nothing quite like nanoviricides have ever been put into humans before. I suspect the FDA is quite concerned about this, and will be quite stringent in the toxicity testing.
I agree with your view of the upside. Certainly the shares will be worth many times what they are now if NNVC has a tested and approved drug. So I consider it quite rational for a speculator to put some of his gambling money into this stock. I have myself, despite what the usual paranoid people think. (Does anybody seriously think I have the power to "talk the stock down"? Obviously the stock price will do whatever the market wants it to do regardless of what I say.) I'm just surprised to find someone who thinks that the odds of failure is so remote that he's as likely to get hit by a bus tomorrow, essentially saying that there is no risk at all.
If only investing and speculation were so simple. Just find a stock that will go up by a factor of 100, with 99.9999999% probability. We could all be as rich as Buffet or Soros.
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