Member Info for Panagean

The idea that a few posts on a dingy internet forum meaningfully move the value of a £28m company that has sat at the same price for basically two months is nuts.

Sareum - and yes, the overpaid senior management - have consistently failed to manage cost- and timing-control. It's not unreasonable to worry that they might do so again, particularly given they don't have a great deal of runway to play with, given their burn rate.

@potnak - just wanted to say that I think you're one of the very small number of realists on here! If that means being pessimistic some days and optimistic others, please keep doing that.

(I am mostly writing this thinking of the relentless and sometimes abusive rampers, a few of whom I've saved my brainspace by filtering. A stock you own is not a football team: the people behind it should be its greatest critics.)

@PCS1954 - no worries, I may not have been clear, it was a long day on my end, too!

My point was basically that, while it was obviously a considered process, I'm not sure the bonus rationale makes sense given other behaviour and the company's overall position. More of a thematic link than a direct one - or maybe it seemed more obvious to me at the time!

"Interesting post meet conversation with MO regarding bonuses, it would seem the awarding of such is not as frivolous as some deem - I suggested that share price level could be a KPI going forward, it wasn't dismissed!! "

I've skimmed the presentation and listened to the Q&A. I was pretty sorely disappointed in the answers to the bonuses and communications questions. My thinking is that either you think that the current share price is a fair reflection of the value of the company (in which case it would be insane to award bonuses), or you think that the share price does not reflect a fair valuation of the company, in which case operational bonuses are justified, but you would also be insane not to invest in the company at these prices (e.g. through salary sacrifice toward more shares). There was a sense to me that the board don't view themselves as fundamentally running a startup that's going to run out of money in six months - that's surely the baseline comparison point, not the AIM market as a whole. Unless I missed something in the main presentation, it sounds like they're working hard to attract non-dilutative funding, but there's no particular information they could give as to why we could expect it in the next six months rather than the past six, for example.

They mentioned that they are financially overexposed to Sareum's success or failure to really invest more. Well, obviously - the risk-free position would be to take a job at a big pharma and have a great big ETF portfolio instead a bunch of Sareum options! If they want external money for what is ultimately an extremely speculative investment, I want to know that they have such an ironclad faith in their product that they are willing to bet sharply against the risk-rational approach to the market and then work their arses off to get it out the door. This, I think, is a secondary issue with having such an old senior team: they've got more to lose from it going wrong than a couple of guys just out of uni working out of someone's garage (not that there's much that can be done about that at this stage).

The communications answer boiled down to "well, when we fail to meet our overly optimistic targets, the share price suffers, so rather than setting more realistic, incremental, clearly-communicated targets, we'd rather just not tell anyone anything". I actually found the RNS reassuring in giving a sense of what these guys do all day, which I had come to partly doubt (so much of our stuff is, rightly, outsourced that I was wondering what actual labour justifies the salaries), and did see a broader sense of progress there than I felt in the bits of the presentation I listened to.

The question I'm not seeing answered yet is - who pays for the CRO screwup? Is that covered by an insurance policy, either Sareum's or the CRO's? The cost of the trial + the delays and salaries associated with that delay are the real loss here, IMO.

I feel like discussions Sareum's future need to have two aphorisms nailed above the door:

- "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (I would prefer "incompetence" over stupidity - but no, Sareum's low price is not driven by a conspiracy)

- "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (no, the board's silence does not mean that a takeover is in the wings and an NDA is in place)

This feels like the real issue to me - unless they picked some real Mickey Mouse lab (not totally impossible, but quite unlikely IMO), the costs of the study have to be covered by either Sareum's or the lab's business insurance (would someone with a background in pharmaceuticals be able to confirm this?). Best case, that's a relatively quick payout, the research restarts quickly, and there's still some positive if somewhat scientifically inadmissable data from the dosed animals in this study. More likely, the payout and finding a new lab takes a while.

I would imagine this is another year's delay. Another "16 week study" (which seems to have taken most of a year to get off the ground), plus the time to organise a new lab and the insurance payout. That - and Sareum's dwindling resources from the BoD's thin-spread attention across different compounds and research methods, and to my mind, excessive salaries (I think the idea that these guys could automatically walk into a job at the same pay scale at this point in their careers is unlikely - I think they should take a 25-35% haircut to net compensation) - is, together with this new delay, the real cost. Our operational costs are ridiculous for a company that has spent a year promising one academic paper (I used to be in a different field of academia - publish or perish, quite).

I am cheered by what looks like some positive results from the study and topped up a small amount at these low prices. I think the idea of someone hanging in the wings is extremely unlikely: people are far too happy to imply from an absence of evidence that there is an evidence of absence (e.g. an NDA).

Nothing against you jonneo, but I really hope this isn't real; it's one thing to not respond to IR emails, it's quite another to forget to access them for a month and then to casually make two spelling mistakes in as many lines of text, failing to really answer the question.

Thanks to everyone for contributing. I don't think this answers my core question though, regardless of your opinion on the board - why are people excited now in particular (partly directed at @potnak, if you don't mind - I've enjoyed your relative skepticism but you've said elsewhere you think something might be going on behind the scenes and I can't understand why).

The science has been as good as it is now for somewhere between 12 weeks and 12 years at this point - to take BlueNose's metaphor on, at any time in Sar's life, there might be a bolt from the blue and we all go home laughing on the way to the bank, just as there is a small chance of winning the lottery each week. What I'm confused about is why some people feel that is more likely at the moment than previously (beyond the slow progress through various trials over the past decade).

Long time holder, long time listener, first time poster. I feel like I've missed something. Even the relative skeptics on this board seem to think that there is some behind-the-scenes stuff going on that means that Sareum cannot fully publish the details of what's going on (e.g. laying the groundwork for a potential buyout) - why, and why now specifically? The only unique detail as far as I can see is the vacant CEO role, which I think it's just as easy to interpret negatively as positively.

Every previous time people have thought something was going on nothing came of it, and Sareum is notoriously terrible at communication at the best of times. I have to say that I feel that whenever Sareum's communication is weak, or squeaks through in the last week of a self-imposed deadline, it feels like Hanlon's Razor is more a likely answer than buyout shenanigans.

Obviously slow progress is being made - but I can't see any particular reason that now, more than any other time, we'll be interrupted by something positive for the next six months.