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Dougb, thanks for your response. I understand it's possible to come up with a number of interpretations but Occam's razor has always stood us in good stead. As 'protocol requirements' is a well understood stock phrase, and given the context, I really don't think you have to go looking beyond the standard dictionary definition of the processes under which a trial is designed. If at the start, you'd asked 100 clinicians/technicians/scientists what the phrase meant, everyone would have given a single unanimous answer. The fact that the word protocol might happen to be used in other fields doesn't mean we should shoehorn it into that context.
That's a good summary and I'd say the most accurate I've seen of the implications, Dough. From the time they were talking about discussing protocols, by definition it would be a couple of months at least before any trials can even start. Add two - six months for a worthwhile trial and analysis. People often aren't aware that, in a well conducted trial, protocol, trial and analysis are all done by different people, to avoid bias, so the process can be quite protracted.
Predictable response I suppose but what I said is absolutely true. I have no interest in investing and said it's not my field, so not having posted before is completely irrelevant. I'm a biologist and just thought that as so many kept asking questions about the meaning of protocol requirements they might like an explanation. The rest just followed on as it was what I've seen on all the boards I've been reading. The penalty of having an insatiable curiosity, I suppose. I've been laid up ill for sometime so no, I genuinely don't have anything more interesting to do at the moment. Surely you recognise the behaviour across all the boards, as your response is an example. If I had expressed an investment opinion that wasn't wholeheartedly supporting the share price I'd be told that I'm clearly being paid 50p by market makers for each post, or I'm a troll, detailing because I'm shorting the shares. Most of the posts on these boards could be prewritten templates. It just seems an unwise approach to investing.
Sorry for a spelling correction error. "It's been almost such a weird phrase" should be "It's been called such a weird phrase".
My God, reading these bulletin boards can be a hard job at times. I suppose I should explain I'm not an investor of any kind. I'm a scientist who just stumbled on one of these boards in the course of browsing the web and started reading them just out of interest in the psychology involved. All the stumbling over the hidden significance of 'protocol requirements' is a case in point. It's been almost such a weird phrase, people looking for significance to the share value and so on. It's actually a perfectly simple phrase, one of the most commonly occuring in medical science and carries no intricate business meaning whatsoever. It simply refers to the process of working out how any clinical or experimental trial will be carried out. How many subjects, how should they be selected, should they all be healthy, all suffering from a specific condition, e.g. obesity, or a purely random selection of the population. Objective of the trial, how long will it go on for, who will conduct the different parts - experiment, data collection, analysis. And so on and so forth. No trial can be started until all the protocols are documented and agreed. Simple, and I'm sure this could have been discovered with just a basic web search. It's bizarre but I've found after a couple of months that almost all these boards are virtually identical, and in fact, I could probably write an entire board myself by now. So many common elements. Rampant confirmation bias (something I've only seen mentioned once in a couple of dozen boards I've been looking at. Share price falls are always due to a shorting conspiracy or market makers manipulating the market for their friends, anything that will mean it's not the investor's own fault for making a bad decision. On the other hand, rises are always due to the quality of the company and its board, never fortunate world events, price ramping or fraud. Always reasons that confirm how the investor made a good and wise decision, showing how clever an investor they are. For people trying something as serious as improving their financial position and risking their existing status to do so, the range of skills and knowledge is surprising. I'd assumed far too high a level when I started reading. There is a vast pool of ignorance and lack of insight into their own biases and viewpoints beneath quite a thin layer of expert investors. I know everyone here is driven only by a basic human need to improve things for themselves and their families so the vast majority of activity here is done by well-meaning people in good faith but it's quite apparent that a great many of the people investing just aren't psychologically equipped for the abstract, neutral thinking that's needed to be a successful investor. I really do wish you all the best of luck but please, some of you stop and give some serious thought as to whether this really is the best activity for you.