Member Info for cadburyhill

I think management issued a trading update today because it thinks/knows that the seller is almost done.
There appears to be no logic in issuing an RNS like the one we saw today unless that was the case. IF you believed there was still a considerable overhang, then any management team would keep today's RNS back till later, because the seller would crush any buying enthusiasm and the positive message of the RNS would be wasted... That's my theory and I'm sticking to it!

agree with your first sentence, but i guess the wording had to be okayed by both sides.
I'm really pleased with the price action so far this morning. It suggests that the investor base has very few traders and that most/all of us are here for the long haul because we know what John and his team can do and deliver.
He's a substantial equity holder himself - as are others on the Board. It's really important / reassuring to see that management has lots of skin in the game.
As for the Itaconix product - well, the timing is fantastic and there are more product launches to come by the looks of it.
You only have to look at the charts of the hydrogen fuel cell plays like ITM, CERES, AFC to see just how excited the market can get on a green investment theme and bio-polymers, a global market growing at over 10% a year is a sweet place to be.

Agreed. Whilst the bio polymer relationship with nouryon seems to be working really well, being buried in a large sales catalogue on the chelates side has not.
John Shaw is a sales machine - if you’ve heard him present you’ll know that he knows everyone in the industry. By selling directly they don’t have to give margin away to a distributor and John is free to strike deals where and when he wants.
Great to see management gripping and controlling their business.

Only on broken AIM could a company called Skygem Acquisitions acquire another stake in a £80 million annual revenue company to take its ownership to a shade under 20%, and the stock rallies.....6%.
This company is trading at less than 1x sales (I’ll assume its valuable pipeline and IP are worth zero for simplicity) - sales that have been growing consistently at double digits for years....
I am confused and yet encouraged: If AIM is behaving this inefficiently, there must be bargains galore.

Blockbuster defined as >$1bn sales....

This from Fiercebiotech today. Sickle Cell is a blockbuster target and any licence deal that Clive and the team can land in Q1 will surely reflect that.

"Another candidate for Novartis' future blockbuster club is here.

Friday, the Swiss drugmaker won FDA approval for Adakveo, the first targeted therapy to prevent the painful vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs) that come along with sickle cell disease. The nod came weeks ahead of schedule, even on top of a priority review doled out in July.

Novartis has priced the new drug, meant for patients 16 and older, at a wholesale acquisition cost (WAC) of $2,357 per vial. As it’s prescribed based on weight, most patients would take three or four vials a month. That would translate into WACs of $7,071, or $9,428, per month."

surprised no-one else has posted info on COFRA, the guys behind the entrepreneurs fund who have been so instrumental in the recap of this business.
note that their heritage is in clothing manufacture and retail. that has to be encouraging given the xeros technology exposure to denim and garment dying / manufacture.
i think i can state an obvious fact here: there's a lot of justifiable loathing and cynicism towards this stock after the brutal dilution we've all experienced. however, the technology is what it is. I suspect that this stock will surprise to the upside in both the short and the longer term with industry backers like COFRA....

https://www.cofraholding.com/en/home/

If you look at ITM, Allianz did exactly the same thing on Sept 10/11th - sell down a small amount. At the time, I thought the most likely reason was to facilitate another institution to join the register by giving them a starter amount of equity to kick-start a build. It's next to impossible for institutions to build positions by buying in the open market, given the low liquidity in stocks like these.
It makes a lot of sense for an institution to have others alongside it ahead of a possible cap raise and to increase the kudos/status of the invested company by beefing up the register. In the case of ITM, it did Allianz no harm at all and it won't harm Schroders here, either.

See Roche deal outline below.
Well, Pharmaxis are under time pressure if they’re going to nail any kind of deal in LOXL2 before year-end, as per guidance. Given the Gilead failure in LOXL back in 15/16, any kind of deal would be a massive upside surprise to the market. We are on no table of likely IPF candidates published by the brokers. What’s encouraging is that informed investors like Arix still bought Pharmaxis with knowledge of the gilead failures ( sure, there’s more to Pharmaxis than our licence agreement but still it’s clearly THE short term catalyst for them, given their recent work on markers, etc to enhance the data package).
You could argue this is all academic irrelevance given the overhang issue, of course....

“Roche to acquire Promedior for $390M upfront + $1B milestone
prnewswire.com/news-releases/…

Recombinant human Pentraxin-2 for IPF and MF”

Relax. Griffiths has been in Ceres for years and has made millions from his position in it. He’s selling Ceres to buy a lot of the distressed ex-Woodford stuff (e.g. 4D, ETX, Circ, etc. ). He buys distressed/ recovery. Ceres is no longer his type of investment so he’s moving on. I’ll have a bet with you that Ceres will be a ftse 250 company within a year. It’s a great place for a few pennies to be invested. Good luck!

good spot!
it's actually nearer 101,000,000 i think...can only mean that the legacy Woodford position has now gone. Woodford was holding 102,000,000 a few months back.
it means the register is now purged of those institutions who are not participating in the cap raise.

? You referring to the RNS? It’s an outstanding result with very, very sick patients....obviously the sample size is too small to bet the farm, but this is groundbreaking stuff in a new class of therapeutics. You have to give management credit and more time.
The massive overhangs that have dogged this stock (Invesco and Woodford) are clearing, with stock being taken up by smart investors who are in it to make money, not for charity - like Griffiths.

Note that WG worked for Pharmaxis in the deal to acquire LOXL2 asset so they know Synairgen very well...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/news/wg-consortium-in-talks-to-buy-£500m-woodford-stakes/ar-AAJOf9E?li=AA54rU

Hi. It just doesn’t work that way in the volume of stock that Rupert would have to trade. He’d have to find a massive buyer to take the stock off him (and we would have seen the reported trade), or he’d have to go to the market maker in the stock and get a risk price to get them to take the stock. That risk price would be a lot lower than our current levels and he’d have lost a lot of money.

Rupert and the rest of us are waiting patiently for news. If you believe in the biz model and the management then I suggest you chill - if you can. Management can’t generate genuine news flow at our whim but I I know it’s frustrating to sit and worry....
The Woodford debacle has broken the chart and it will take time to build. We all know we should be nearer 10p than 2....GLA.

http://www.adventurousinvestor.com/1471-watch-out-for-the-biochemicals-revolution

The author is the Adventurous Investor columnist at the Financial Times. We are not mentioned but the Morgan Stanley industry growth rates, the highlighting of Croda, etc., all support the investment case at ITX.

They needed to issue fresh equity because the options had been exercised by the directors on the same day....it’s all vanilla stuff and nothing to worry about...

talk about timing. i hadn't seen the directors' RNS when I posted my thoughts earlier.
it's never encouraging to see directors selling one of your stocks. however, options are strange creatures and we don't know the conditions around them. it may well be that they were due to expire and that exercising them was the only choice to avoid losing them all together. There may be tax implications that we just don't understand, as well.
I don't recall seeing the following in a director sale RNS before : "....and to satisfy market demand for shares following recent investor meetings". That IS encouraging.
It's often the case that institutional investors do not buy micro-cap stocks like ours simply because they cannot source inventory to make an initial position worth their while. If directors have sold to provide liquidity to a buyer, it would also mean that the Oceanwood overhang of stock has now been cleared - if it was there in the first place.
If a buyer had to go to the directors to source stock, then the register must be quite tight now. That does allow good price action on good news... (we still can't escape the need for good news...).

every few days, we see a large clip going through. £100k today, for e.g. My guess is that it's the rump of the Oceanwood position....We know they're now below 3%.
We also know that we've got some newsflow catalysts in Q4 and, perhaps, a more benign macro backdrop (brexit). The combination of an overhang removed and newsflow really would move us higher very quickly.....

Ok, the longer that this air pocket of no news goes on, the more cautious I become - I just can't help that. However, I've tried to think of more positive scenarios that might have caused a delay in the release of a monitoring sale confirmation RNS. My pet theory which, is I accept, Friday afternoon 'hot air' is that when we had the release in August informing us of the imminent sale and the strengthening of the balance sheet the business was to be MBO'd. In that scenario, the sale would have been concluded pretty quickly. Now I wonder if we've had a counter-bid for monitoring which has slowed up the disposal timetable but may enhance the price of the business?
Monitoring is a quietly sexy place to be and it's notoriously hard to get any kind of foot-hold in key markets. I wonder if the Chinese or another have taken a view that it's cheaper to buy the monitoring business than build their own from scratch....

I agree that we really would have expected a strategic update by now if things had gone wrong. There's probably not a lot they can say if it's going 'right' because of deal timetable restrictions/confidentials. Although I too remember the Intelligent Energy funding bombshell RNS after a long wait.

Agreed on your working capital point. That’s because management have such a lot of skin in the game here, in terms of equity ownership. We are on the same page as them. If that happened more often in AIM, there’d be a lot more winners....
At these levels you get the chance to buy where management and the board bought when they cleared out Woodford in the summer..