investingdog, you must indeed be new, not only to this board but probably also to the biotech investment and small caps in general.
I kind of derive this from your answer embedded questions. Let me help you.
Why are we at 1.28$, why doesn't the traders community not bring this stock to 5$ if it is all so good. Well the answer is 'momentum'. The traders community DID bring the stock to 5+$ when a 3rd party error was discovered that at the time looked as a threat but recently could be re-framed as a dip in the road, as Garnick called it himself at the annual, now more supported by the information at the last quarterly. So 3 months ago you wouldn't have asked the 1.28$ questions and in some weeks from now you won't either. However you'll probably be asking why we are not at 25$ yet in stead of 5$. The stock already recovered from 0.69$ to the current 1.28$ and has touched 1.50$ already.
Another thing that may be worth to invest some study/comparison time in are the other biotechs that before they suddenly jumped from <5$ pps rocketed over 25$ and much more in some cases. There ALSO the traders knew what was coming, yet the real pps events occurred a few days before or at the official news announcement.
So the answer to that question of yours is that traders try to buy bottoms as long as possible, deploying techniques not to let THEIR purchases raise the price, and then towards or on the news fill the market while taking profit. The LAST THING they want to do is to bring the pps up themselves at their expenses. Of course for the shorters it is the other way around. They need the HURDLE as you called it, talk doom into the boards or depend on some marginal articles of eMagazines where they try to enforce the needed "sentiment of the day" to support their trading movements. They know they can easily fool the new investors that in the beginning, as probably many of us, believe these stories and only after a while can see trough them. On this board you can find perspective and then make up your own mind.
In the side line it has been announced that 31 Main State Judges and the Federal state strated investigations/trials against the bio/pharma industry in relation to sponsoring delays and handicaps of clinical pipelines in order to give themselves an advantage for their pipelines. If you did your DD and checked what is in Peregrine's pipeline and read some of the posts like this one you may see that Peregrine's pipeline may be of existential importance for some BPs. So it is not without grounds that there is a chance that Peregrine was/is/becomes a target in handicap strategies of BPs.
I hope this gives you at least a beginning, very probably not the complete, answer to your questions. You should really look into the front-page of this Peregrine board and compare the detaild DD material that cj and others update and read some of the scientific and non-scientific posts on this board before throwing around words like hurdle. It is a quite hasety conclusion given the fact you just arrived here.
Enjoy reading about Peregrine Pharmaceuticals who is becoming the Microsoft of Biotechnology :)
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
