FATHERS DAY

Bob Ceremsak:  “A friend of mine wrote this YouTube for his dad.”  

☞  Hard not to like.

PRIDE – RATED PG 13

And speaking of homemade videos, it has come to my attention that June is Gay Pride month.

(One reason I know is that the New York Fed had its Pride celebration yesterday, and I got to hold an actual 28-pound 99.96% pure gold bar.) 

(I also found out which cage is kept unlocked – seriously, it is – so they don’t need two people with keys and an auditor every time they want to show visitors a gold bar.) 

(And did you know they have a scale that can weigh 640 pounds of gold yet is so sensitive that even a single dollar bill, which weighs three one-hundredths of an ounce, will tip it?  Or that you have to wear magnesium shoes to work with the gold bars lest you break your foot if you drop it?  Or that magnesium is stronger than steel but lighter than aluminum?  Or that the bundles of 16,000 one-, ten-, and hundred-dollar bills they keep on hand for emergencies weigh 33 pounds each, and that it is the blue-wrappered ones you’d want, because those are the c-notes, worth $1.6 million per bundle?) 

(Or that 98% of the 532,000 gold bars on deposit there, five floors below street level and 30 feet below the subway, are foreign-owned, held safe at no charge – more than in Fort Knox or anywhere else in the world, but still only $250 billion worth?  Or that the door to the auxiliary vault weighs 30 tons, yet is so precisely balanced that I was able to swing it open and shut?) 

But I digress.  It’s Pride month.  A friend wrote, directed, filmed, and played both roles in this four-minute pride video.  It is not for everyone.  But there’s a lot of talent, wisdom – and living – in those four minutes.

The gold bar was worth $1,243 per troy ounce times 14.583 troy ounces to a pound times 28 pounds = just north of $500,000.  They don’t want it to be pure 24-karat gold, because it would be too soft – you could take some home under your finger nails.  Adding just the slightest silver or copper imperfection – 00.04% in the case of my bar – hardens it dramatically. 

Happy Pride.

NBIX

When you have just 54 million shares outstanding, every potential $225 million helps.  They announced another deal.  Guru hadn’t known it was pending, so this just brightens already bright prospects.  With two drugs now, large outside companies will pick up further development costs, make bonus payments for achieving certain milestones, and then – if the drugs are approved – share a significant fraction of the revenue. In the meantime, if I read these press releases correctly, NBIX gets $85 million in cash up front.

DCTH

The company held a 60-minute conference call after Tuesday’s close of trading (available here for 90 days).  Guru reports:

It went great.  Had three doctors on the call.  They reiterated that the protocol has an SPA, met all of its primary and secondary endpoints.  The doctors were enthusiastic.  One doctor said he is getting an email a day from patients asking about the procedure.  Patients have such access to the internet that the patients are now driving demand.  Hospitals will want to offer the procedure or risk losing the patients to one that does. 

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the story that would account for the drop in the stock from 16 to 9 [up from 5 where we bought it].  It’s just that the bears have decided to pounce because of the lack of a survival benefit. 

But the study wasn’t designed to show a survival benefit.  The burden they took on was to show an effect on progression of the cancer – which they did, beautifully.

If they had prevented patients in the control arm from crossing over to their therapy, more people would have died sooner – bad for those people, but good for investors, as it would have shown a survival benefit.  The company chose to help the patients by allowing them to cross over from the control arm of the trial and is now paying the price.  I'm guessing the stock will bottom somewhere below 9.  Will be a great buy – could double in a year.

☞  Or not.  Which is why this is only for money you can afford to lose.