The latest Investing Matters Podcast episode featuring Jeremy Skillington, CEO of Poolbeg Pharma has just been released. Listen here.
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..
not trying to ramp this or make a fuss, but the results RNS is worth a careful read.
It's a really well-run ship, this one. It's trying to control all the bits that are within its control. Management has wisely identified - earlier than most - that the revenue take-off point is a moveable feast and likely to always be further away than the operational budget allows. At some point, this stock, which has followed the classic 'Gartner Growth Curve' will accelerate on a top line that begins to build and a decent margin. We just don't know when. But they've built up the portfolio so carefully that I have a high degree of confidence that it's a case of when not if.
I'm happy to be parked here for the next year or so. It could always get taken-out. I've also left a bit of room in case they need cash in late 2020 although it's been really tempting to add below 20...
i WAS following the newsflow but my heart still leapt for a moment at the thought that it had been placed with a proper investor who felt as enthusiastic about the business at these levels as I do! good luck!
yes. got mine via H-L a couple of days back. there are three CVRs - one for each trigger event...
it's simply gone to Blackrock and is still up for disposal. The RNS simply tells us what we already knew, that the mandate was taken off Woodford with immediate effect, ergo he no longer is the holder of the Income Fund's TRX position.
yep, not denying it's a serious problem, Nom. Just that we're going into the real end-game now. There will be an imminent clear-out of the overhang at some point in the next few months and that could be a positive or a negative for holders and management.
Rene, 4D, SLN, etc have all seen big clear-out trades of woodford stock at their troughs. my point is that we're probably very near that point here, too. If buyers are reluctant, it's going to be tough on holders, I'm first to admit that. But hope springs eternal. I still like the way this business has been put together in recent years.
med tech has such a history of M&A that the most likely ending here is that the Woodford stake is taken by someone who then launches a takeover of the company. The big issue is whether the company has demonstrated a revenue line that is strong-enough to justify a take-out valuation that covers most investors for the losses they hold in this name. In some ways, today's news if good. It just makes what was implicit, explicit: the Woodford stake will be sold to someone at some price very shortly.
Well, the U.K. appears to be on the cusp of being investable again in the eyes of global markets ( all could deteriorate in a blink of an eye, I accept). I have started to wonder whether sentiment towards those names where Woodford is a significant holder might turn around very aggressively for a reason I had not considered before.... (I’m thinking Reneuron, Synairgen, Tissue Regenix, 4D, etc. ).
Perhaps, there’s a ‘dog that didn’t bark’ angle here? Perhaps Woodford has not sold down big in these names not because he couldn’t find a buyer and they are cursed by a massive overhang, but because these names have clear and very encouraging value catalysts in the very near term ( I.e. pre- Xmas) - catalysts that his other holdings just did not have.
Hence, he wants to sell into the catalyst and not before it, not least to show everyone that he can pick small cap winners ....For us here in Rene, an obvious value catalyst would be a US licence deal in RP; in Synairgen it might be a fibrosis licence deal via partner, Pharmaxis, etc etc.
It’s only an argument you can make when seeing the glass half full ( having necked the other half) but I thought I’d make it anyway.