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Post by matt on Feb 1, 2018 8:52:35 GMT -5
Wow! Cooped up in the same capsule for over two centuries? You must really be in love. I have been cooped up with the same woman for 35 years and counting. I would gladly sign up for another 165.
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Post by matt on Jan 29, 2018 7:27:35 GMT -5
Somehow, some way, MNKD got themselves in so much debt that the other BP know this, saturate the message boards and on line media, chats, etc w negativity until they can buy MNKD for pennies on the $100 of true value while at the same time paying the endos not to prescribe Afrezza w their kickbacks on their current meal time insulin. True? It is not quite as draconian as that. Knowing the financial position of your competitors is easy if they are a public company; all the information is there in the 10-K for anybody with a passing familiarity with accounting to decipher. The balance sheet is the result of a series of assumptions, dating back to the early days of Al Mann, that did not materialize as planned. Big Pharma does not stalk and manipulate prices of weak competitors regardless of what the rumor mill might say. If a pharma wants to own a small company, they simply write a check big enough to get the deal done because the slow demise of a target company is accompanied by the slow demise of the remaining patent life on the target product, and that is in nobody's interest. The two things that are killing Afrezza in the market are these: 1. Lack of proven superiority and a black box warning. Some patients may swear by the product, others are not so excited, but ultimately there has been no large well-controlled, randomized clinical trial that shows that Afrezza provides improved long-term outcomes compared with the other alternatives. Physicians increasingly practice evidence-based medicine, and the evidence is lacking. 2. Current insulin offerings are substantially cheaper. Combined with the lack of data showing the Afrezza is demonstrably better at controlling diabetes long-term, managed care is not going to pay the significant premium for Afrezza, especially while Lilly and Novo create financial incentives for the large PBMs to standardize on their products. Absent data that shows Afrezza to be a superior long-term therapy for IDDM, the competitors are going to remain on the preferred tiers while Afrezza is relegated to lower tiers of the formulary or excluded completely. Neither of those factors requires some shadowy conspiracy cooked up by Big Pharma in a back room; it is simple bare knuckle brawling in a competitive market place where Lilly and Novo are punching harder because they can. If Mannkind had the data they needed, the roles might be reversed and some of those early assumptions that led to the current balance sheet might have materialized somewhat differently.
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Post by matt on Jan 16, 2018 16:44:55 GMT -5
MNKD shareholders should get a P.R. today? don’t they technically have 4 days to announce material news? You are correct that most 8-K disclosures have a four-day filing requirement, but I don't think there is an obligation to file anything. When the note was renegotiated the company disclosed that $10 million would be placed in escrow and that Deerfield had an option to take payment in shares in lieu of cash (essentially a call option with a $3.25 strike price). That satisfies the SEC requirement for disclosure on this transaction, and no further disclosure is required until the first quarter 10-Q is filed. That said, many companies will issue an 8-K or PR notice voluntarily even though not required to do so. If there were further negotiations that took place, such as Deerfield accepting a different number of shares than was originally disclosed, then that would trigger a filing obligation because of a material change in the terms.
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Post by matt on Jan 12, 2018 15:56:21 GMT -5
Just posting a possibility that sounds reasonable; I am hoping that is NOT what transpired. If you have anything to the contrary I would like to hear it. That is precisely how most PIPE transactions are executed. The bankers get a package of securities price to sell, typically based on Monday's market close. The selling team at the bank hits the phones first thing Tuesday morning to find buyers for the securities at the discounted price offered. Once an individual buyer has committed to participate in the deal, they can short the stock without it being considered a naked short because at that moment they have a bona fide economic exposure to the underlying stock. Contracts are confirmed and funds are wired on Wednesday, and the money is release to the company and the shares to the investors either late Wednesday or Thursday. This is frequently called an "overnight close" even though it actually takes 2-3 days. If the PIPE investors sold short well above $6, that is free money because they can cover the short with the newly delivered shares. They make the difference between the short price and the deal price in a period of about 48 hours with minimal risk (the only risk is that the company does not deliver the shares; I cannot a recall an example of that happening for a NASDAQ stock). Not all PIPES are shorted in this way, but many are, and especially so for certain banks such as Rodman & Renshaw, and Wainwright. Follow the market for a while and you will know which investment banks specialize in funding PIPES in this manner. A good place to start is to see which companies present at the Rodman & Renshaw conference in late September or early October; they are there for a reason. Don't take my word for it; research companies that have done large PIPES and you can normally see an up-tick in volume a day or two before the deals are announced. If you see increasing volume with decreasing price for no obvious reason don't be surprised to see a financing announced a few days later. The problem with many PIPE investors is that they don't care about the company, its industry, its business, or its strategy. They want to make a quick 10% profit for doing the deal, which is relatively simple to accomplish, and they have their money back almost immediately so they can do multiple PIPES with the same capital. Sure, 10% is a small return relative to the potential, but most investors will take a guaranteed 10% for tying up their money for about a week. If they can participate in 10 such deals a year, they are looking at close to 100% return on that part of their portfolio. In many cases the investor gets warrants as well as a discount, and those can be held for future gain. Who gets the deals? Only those big investors that can be relied on to participate in any deal the investment bank presents, and some of the discount is to compensate favorite customers for IPO or secondary offerings that did not work out. A PIPE placed off an S-3 shelf registration is not bullish the way a true underwritten secondary offering is. Both are secondary offerings but the investor quality is quite different. Like Spencer says, Wall Street can be a brutal place. He is entirely right on that point.
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Post by matt on Jan 8, 2018 18:06:52 GMT -5
A very good reason to be at JPM is because EVERYBODY else is at JPM. Some years the crowd is so bad that it is hard to move from meeting to meeting in the five minutes scheduled between presentations.
As noted above, most of the "good" discussions are held off-line, either in break-out sessions, invitation only meetings, and quite a few one-one-one meetings in the coffee shop or the hotel rooms behind closed doors. Some of the discussion does not start until the dinner hours and continue until midnight or so. I have attended at least ten JPM conferences and I have never seen a deal done at that, or any other conference, but I have seen a lot of introductions that resulted in later deals. It is a lot easier to grab thirty minutes of somebody's time when they are in the same hotel as you for a week than it is to fly half-way across the country for a meeting.
Besides, if you have been in the industry for any length of time you run into people you only see at conferences and they often pass along tid-bits of intelligence you did not know, like who is looking for deals and who is looking to divest assets. The therapeutic portfolios are always churning, and Mike needs to know which companies may be interested and which are definitely not interested if he is going to be efficient in trying to broaden the business opportunities.
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Post by matt on Jan 6, 2018 13:31:54 GMT -5
The reason there is no US partner is the difficulty of penetrating the diabetes market. It takes a sales force dedicated to the indication that calls on both primary care offices and specialists like endos. Lilly and Novo would be great partners but they will look at Afrezza net of the impact to their existing product lines, and while some companies are happy to make their own products obsolete the economics are not always there. Fact is, Sanofi was a logical choice for the partnership but that did not turn out as either side had hoped, and there are no other pharma companies eager to spend a lot of money trying to displace Humalog or Novolog just so that they can get kicked around by the PBMs. People are dancing in the street now that weekly Afrezza scripts have hit 500, while Novolog and Humalog each do more than 140,000 scripts weekly. To get those scripts the price for Afrezza would have to come down below what Novolog and Humalog sell for to the PBM. You can argue all you want that Afrezza is a better mousetrap, but until there is a FDA label claim approved for superiority the PBM is going to carry the cheapest non-inferior drug they can find, and with Afrezza's higher manufacturing cost the company can't play hard ball by lowering the selling price.
The problem is not what MNKD would get out of the partnership, the problem is that the industry lacks a partner that wants to spend serious money to get into a price competitive space like insulin that already has to very successful players. Big pharmas have lots of opportunities presented to them every year and they have to pick and choose the therapeutic areas where they want to invest and the particular projects they want to pursue within those therapies. The financial press covers the 1% of opportunities that turn into partnering deals, but they never know about the 99% that get turned down due to a poor fit or insufficient economic potential for the partner. It is the same reason Mannkind does not have more international deals; unless the numbers add up for the partner they are not going to be interested.
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Post by matt on Jan 2, 2018 9:18:37 GMT -5
Why is selling some shares and replacing them with call options less risky? The reason an option might be less risky is because it has an asymmetrical payoff matrix. For example, if you buy an option for 20 cents on a stock trading at $3 and the price moves to $3.50 you make 30 cents in profit and in the meantime you can put the rest of your money to work elsewhere. However, if you buy the stock for $3 your full investment is locked up, but you make the full 50 cents profit on the position because you didn't pay for the option. However, if the stock tanks and sells for $2 the call option investor is out the 20 option price versus the shareholder who is out a full $1. Note that few serious option players hold naked options; they use options as part of a portfolio strategy to eliminate certain types of risk. Continuing the previous example, if you thought a stock was going to the moon and wanted all the gain, but were still concerned that bad news would send it south, you could buy the stock for $3 and also buy a put option, lets say at a strike price of $2.80. If the stock goes up, you make the profit you wanted, but if the stock goes down you have protected your downside since you can recover $2.80 of your investment regardless of how low the stock goes. Other people play biotechs and other firms with expected binary events by not holding the stock at all, but buying calls and puts. Those investors lose money if the price doesn't move, but make a profit on either the call or the put if the stock moves out of the range they have estimated. Finally, realize that options are priced relative to the perceived market risk of the underlying security. Black-Scholes and other option pricing models are essentially variants of an arbitrage pricing model and therefore the pricing is strong-form efficient, meaning that you will pay a fair price for any risk protection. There is no such thing as a free lunch in the public financial markets unless you have superior information. The classic text book on options was written by Cox and Rubenstein. It is highly recommended if you have taken several university level finance courses and are comfortable with mathematics. If not, there are better alternatives.
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Post by matt on Dec 26, 2017 13:45:34 GMT -5
Option traders rarely buy or sell naked options; they have some other security in the portfolio and use options to hedge a movement one way or another. When you see option volumes spike, even if they seem to be out of the money, they might just be closing out a position to lock in the profit as of today. Few option contracts are ever exercised; most are sold back to the market, or two off-setting contracts are allowed to cancel each other out. When you look at the option market, you only have half the story and there is no way to know what the rest of the story looks like.
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Post by matt on Dec 21, 2017 10:39:20 GMT -5
The reason is explained in the footnotes:
Interest by region
See in which location your term was most popular during the specified time frame. Values are calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is the location with the most popularity as a fraction of total searches in that location, a value of 50 indicates a location which is half as popular, and a value of 0 indicates a location where the term was less than 1% as popular as the peak.
Note: A higher value means a higher proportion of all queries, not a higher absolute query count. So a tiny country where 80% of the queries are for "bananas" will get twice the score of a giant country where only 40% of the queries are for "bananas".
If one person in Switzerland searched on the term Afrezza and got a hit, that would get a 100 score. In the US, a lot of searches might find Afrezza including practically any site tracking the stock price that talks about the product Afrezza.
Likewise, be aware that just because Google tagged a search as Switzerland doesn't mean the person searched from Switzerland. I connect to a number of academic and corporate proxy servers frequently during the work day so my searches may look like they come from the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, or the US regardless of where I am physically in the world at that moment. All that Google, or any other statistics service knows, is the location of the final Internet hop. If somebody is logged into a proxy server the search show the location of the last server that connected to Google and not the location of the client computer that originated the search.
Even without a proxy, the last server might be a cluster in the cloud, like Microsoft's Azure or Amazon's S3 services, and those data centers are located all over the globe. If the Internet is busy during a peak time in the US, traffic might get rerouted to Asia making it look like the search originated in Singapore or India when in fact the search simply passed through a data center in one of those countries. For this reason, snap shots of traffic for short periods of time have become pretty worthless, but trend information may still be useful when tracked over weeks and months.
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Post by matt on Dec 20, 2017 19:05:30 GMT -5
Company employees routinely are barred from buying or selling shares at their own discretion between the end of the quarter and release of the 10Q or 10K. They are also barred from buying or selling pending major transactions.
Mike would likely be prohibited from buying as of December 31 until release of the 10K in March, and the fact that he is buying suggests no material deals on the horizon.
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Post by matt on Dec 15, 2017 8:13:36 GMT -5
Also, regarding using the auto rebate analogy to one for drugs and health insurers is ludicrous IMO, buying a car and saving money is one thing, getting denied a drug that could save your life and limbs is quite another. No, that is exactly the point. When you are unhappy with a situation you have the right to take it to court, but the first step in that process is to file a pleading. The pleading must state, with particularity, what statute or common law the other party violated or else the case gets dismissed. Auto rebates are an example of a permitted unilateral contract, and it is the unilateral nature of the agreement that makes it so. The fact that the subject matter is a drug or some other life saving treatment instead of a car matters not at all; unilateral rebates are legal whatever the product category, while bilateral contracts are a restraint of trade. PBM rebates are unilateral and that makes them legal. That was my entire point in the original post; please don't read more into it than what I put there. The original poster said that the company should complain to the FTC. Fair enough, but denying a patient access to a particular drug is not something the FTC is empowered to regulate. Don't like your new mini-van? You can't complain to the FDA about that. You might get the attention of the US Traffic Highway Administration or some other agency under the Department of Transportation, but not FDA. Similarly, FTC regulates fair trade which, at the federal level, essentially means anti-trust law, and what drug manufacturers and PBMs do with negotiating rebates passes muster in the courts under anti-trust so FTC has nothing more to say about it. Similarly, you can complain in court that UHC does not cover the drug but they make no secret of that since they publish their formulary. However, if you want to sue for a coverage decision you have to assert the right cause of action in the right court. Getting around an insurance plan is even more difficult that winning an anti-trust case because insurance companies are regulated by each individual state and there is no federal law that dictates what is, and is not, covered beyond the specific mandates in the Affordable Care Act, most of which are about to be repealed as part of tax reform. Which leave you the option of your state regulator or, even better, switching your insurer away from UHC (which I highly recommend anyway; United Health is one of the worse companies out there). If your insurance is through your employer that may not be an available choice, but you do have alternatives. State or federal courts probably aren't on the list of options likely to work.
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Post by matt on Dec 11, 2017 9:35:00 GMT -5
Newbie level question, are the script numbers that IMS and Symphony report actually reporting / estimating the same thing? That is, total scripts filled anywhere? (Originally, way back, I thought they were possibly reporting on scripts filled at different sets of pharmacies.) They may vary in which pharmacies they have data from, but I believe they are both trying to estimate the same thing which is total sales. Each is missing some data but they make estimates for what is missing. Indeed they do have to estimate for some pharmacies, but there are a bunch of ways to improve estimates over time. Remember than virtually all wholesale shipments of pharmaceuticals are handled by Cardinal Health, McKesson, or Amerisource Bergen, regardless of the ultimate destination, for reasons of cost and pipeline performance. So long as the data services have visibility into both the wholesale pipeline and the retail data, no a lot can slip through the cracks. For example, if pipeline shipments increase by 10%, with no change in gross inventory levels, and retail sales only increase by 5% then there are some retail sales missing. Logistics data is very simple to analyze once you understand where the numbers come from, and the quality of logistics data for this industry is incredibly accurate down to where each dose of each lot is physically located. These estimates are highly educated guesses, based on near real-time data.
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Post by matt on Dec 10, 2017 9:51:12 GMT -5
But, I have to ask you one thing. Is FIFO fair? Doesn't it infringe upon a common person's decision making ability? Isn't it something like, if you see a sale (in this case, a LIFO instead of FIFO), you are not authorized to buy it? You misunderstand FIFO and LIFO. It is not a matter of whether you can execute the sale or not, it is a matter of how you will measure the tax consequences. Example: If you buy 100 shares at $1, you have a tax basis in those shares of $100. Then, a while later, you buy 100 more shares at $1.50 so you tax basis in that lot of shares is $150. Finally, the price moves to $2 and you decide to liquidate half your position. Under current law you can track each share certificate or share lot and specify which ones you sold, or you can use FIFO or LIFO or an average. Under FIFO, the IRS will assume that you sold the $1 shares and still own the $1.50 shares, so your taxable gain reportable is $100 and you have a remaining basis of $150. Under LIFO you sell the $1.50 shares, so your taxable gain is $50 and your remaining basis is $100. Under average cost, your average tax basis is $1.25 and your recognized gain is $75, and your remaining basis is $125. Regardless, the remaining tax basis that is not used to calculate gain is there to offset profit a future sale. The IRS would not be controlling if you sell or when you sell, only when you have to report the gain or loss. It has no effect on when you buy or at what price you buy. As for "is it fair" you don't want to open that can of worms. Is it fair that you get a different tax treatment on capital gains than on ordinary income? Is it fair that homeowners get to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes but apartment dwellers do not get a deduction for the interest and taxes their landlord pays to carry a property? Is it fair that actuarial tables are the same for men and women even though women, on average, live longer than men? Is it fair that US corporations pay tax on their worldwide income while virtually every other country in the world only taxes their corporations on their domestic profit? Is it fair that people in some tax brackets pay higher rates than others? Is it fair that Congress passes laws to incentivize certain behaviors, like investing in R&D, and as soon as companies increase their R&D spending and start to take advantage of the credit, the IRS imposes rules that act as a disincentive to claim the credit? Was it fair that the federal government passed Section 936 to create tax incentives for companies to invest in Puerto Rico, and was it fair when they repealed Section 936 resulting in skyrocketing unemployment and insolvency of Puerto Rico itself? The point is that tax policy is not now, and never has been, about fairness. Tax policy is about raising revenue for the US Treasury and it about incentivizing certain behaviors by the citizens (like increasing home ownership and decreasing sales of "gas guzzler" cars) and it is about the election winners rewarding political support. Once you move away from a single rate flat tax on every taxpayer, tax policy ceases to be just about revenue. Whether you think any particular tax incentive makes for good public policy is a highly individual decision.
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Post by matt on Dec 9, 2017 16:37:11 GMT -5
IMS and Symphony report a lot of numbers, and in far greater detail that are discussed on this forum. How do you think pharma companies know how much bonus to pay salesmen in a particular territory without detailed reports on which offices are writing scripts? Ditto on the impact of pricing deals cut by competitors and the impact of managed care formularies. Similarly, when there are packaging variants as with Afrezza the reports tell which dosages are selling or not selling; the reports are far more detailed that a just a single script number. Purchasing groups and PBMs have the data as well which makes it nearly impossible to sell the same product at a different price in different geographies (it used to be possible!).
That data is not publicly available without a subscription, and the subscriptions are very expensive. However, rest assured that those who need the data pay for it and they don't have to wait until Friday morning to get it.
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Post by matt on Dec 7, 2017 11:15:13 GMT -5
I am not sure what the status is at the moment, but I recall reading that the Senate version of the tax bill changes the rules for recognition of gains and losses on securities held for investment. At present you can identify particular share certificates, particular share lots, LIFO, FIFO, or the average cost method. The proposed rule makes FIFO mandatory for both gains and losses. If you have large unrealized gains or losses you might want to crank through the math to see how the law change would apply to you if you don't take action before December 31. The proposed law retains the 30-day wash sale rule so be aware of that as well. Note that this was proposed law in one version of the tax bill, but I believe this change made it into the final version. If you have many layers of investments at many different price points, you might want to do a bit more homework, and do so very soon as Congress has a nasty habit of making committee modifications retroactive to the effective date (i.e. the date the bill is signed or is referred to the president for signature). In other words, you may have just a few days to act instead of until December 31. I know its off-topic.. What are the chances of this (only FIFO) going thru? What exactly is being accomplished by this crazy rule? Just when the rule of brokerages providing the cost basis became the norm (which is good), a new crazy rule.. I have so much losses here (I sold some about a month before approval for 5 digit losses (only about 40% of total :-( ), got in and out after approval to make some money, and again bought some for longer term). If a former life I was a full-time tax professional, although focused mainly on international taxation of multi-national corporations. The only way to know what is in a pending bill is to get the latest mark-up from the Congressional Register and read it, and that is beyond the ability of all but the most masochistic tax lawyers. From what I know, and admittedly I have not read the latest markup, this provision is still in the bill and based on my experience I would say that it is likely to make it into the joint committee reconciliation version. Likely = educated guess, not fact. Since most stocks tend to increase in value, forcing all taxpayers to use FIFO will increase revenue to the US Treasury since first-in shares tend to have a lowe tax basis. This provision partially off-sets the revenue declines buried elsewhere in the tax reform provisions. Remember that the Senate has rules that require budget neutrality in any tax legislation even though they manage to break that rule on a regular basis regardless of which party is in the majority. As there is no appetite to increase the deficit on either side of the aisle, I expect the final bill will contain the FIFO requirement. The IRS likes the FIFO requirement because they really don't have a good way to track the original tax basis of shares accumulated over time, and this is especially so if a company has gone through mergers, spin-offs, splits, reverse splits, and so on. If everybody has to use FIFO, then the IRS can easily build a database of all stock transactions so they will know exactly what your basis should be as a way to detect cheating. This is one of the last unplugged loopholes that wealthy individuals take advantage of on a regular basis, and with the individual AMT going away as part of reform, they want to be able to collect every penny they can from wealthy taxpayers.
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