Neither COMPASS Pathways, Field Trip Health Limited(OTCQX:FTRPF), Mind Medicine Inc.(NASDAQ:MNMD), Numinus Wellness(OTCPK:LKYSF), nor Cybin Inc(OTCQB:CLXPF)truly offer a strong comparable approach to the psilocybin space Enter Bright Minds Biosciences (OTCQB:BMBIF), one of the newest players in the space to tap the public markets. Unlike its publicly traded first-generation counterparts, BMBIF is focused on second-generation drug therapies, and this is a massive advantage on many fronts. Perhaps the most important differentiation between first and second-generation therapies is their ability to target specific 5-HT2 receptors. Dr. Alan Kozikowski, Chief Science Officer and Director is a renowned chemist known for his work on Alzheimer's, cancer, and recreational drugs like PCP and cocaine where he successfully developed analogs that decreased harm to users. Dr. Gideon Shapiro, Head of Discovery, has worked to develop a multitude of Alzheimer's and CNS treatments for some of the biggest names in biotech, additionally, he is considered one of the leading commercial scientists in the psychedelics for treatment space. Dr. Shapiro most recently served as Chief Science Officer at Rugen Therapeutics, the industry leader in utilizing ketamine as a therapeutic to correct synaptic dysfunction. While at Rugen, Dr. Shapiro was monumental in securing deals with Allergan, to collaborate on drug discovery for autism spectrum disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as Otsuka to develop drugs for treatment resistant depression. BMBIF-$4.65<-- worth watching.
looks like Lazar issued another letter to My Size stockholders this week and it's a doozy. I guess he nominated some board members ahead of the upcoming meeting, then they responded by dilluting shares and now he's demanding to look at the books. https://saratogaproxy.com/mysz/ his most recent purchase of My Size shares looked to be on May 12 @ $1-$1.20 and May 28 @ 1.30
Well I'm here in the woods and you would think I could relax. Friends are coming over to spend the night usually not a problem. They are bringing their new dog. Great I love dogs. His name is Bruce. Bruce is a cool name. Bruce is some form of a pit bull. Stafashire or something like that-- he's a staffi.... Bruce has had a hard prior life he has some scars. I have been playing referee between Bruce and my Rhodesian Ridgeback Bacchus for two hours straight. You can't turn your back for a second, they are all over each other. Well Bruce is all over Bacchus he just can't control himself-- Bacchus is such a big baby he tries to run away... then it happened Bacchus growled twice... He has only done this about four times in his life but it's real impressive when he does. Things seem to have quieted down for the moment. When does the nap part come?
FUNKO SHORT INTEREST JUMPS OVER 100% Funko (FNKO) The estimated short position held steady through Friday of last week around 25% but has since spiked to over 100%. In the five-day trading period covered, the estimated short position in Funko is up 76 percentage points at 102%, the days-to-cover has nearly quintupled to 3.8, while shares of Funko were down 6.9% in the five-day trading period covered and off by an additional 1.9% late on Friday.
ROOT SHORT INTEREST REACHES 2021 HIGH Estimated short interest in Root (ROOT) has continued its steady five-month-long upswing, accelerating late in the week to its highest levels of the year. For the five days covered, the short position in the stock is up 7.5 percentage points to 37.9%, while days-to-cover ratio is 10% to 4.3 times. Shares of Root were down 3.7% in the five-day trading period covered and off by an additional 3.8% late on Friday.
Facebook turns back antitrust charges, regulatory risk rising, Barron's says 09:27 FB, AAPL, GOOG, GOOGL, AMZN Facebook (FB) got a big courtroom win this past week, when a federal judge tossed out a Federal Trade Commission complaint arguing that the company violated antitrust laws, and dismissed a parallel complaint from a group of state attorneys general making similar claims, Eric Savitz writes in this week's edition of Barron's. But regulatory battles over Facebook and its megatech brethren are just beginning, the author adds, noting that Facebook, Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Amazon.com (AMZN) all face state and federal regulatory, legislative, and legal issues in the U.S. and around the world. Among other things, the House is now considering a package of bills that would severely limit the ability of tech megacaps to expand via acquisition-and could force them to sell some existing businesses. While all four produce tremendous profit and revenue growth, antitrust will likely be a drag on their stocks for months to come, the publication says.
People ask me why you down on Bitcoin. I challenge you to understand any of this. The Bitcoin blockchain has undergone its biggest-ever drop in mining difficulty, as the network’s automatic stabilizing mechanism kicked in following a strict crackdown by China on the country’s cryptocurrency industry. At 6:25 UTC Saturday, mining difficulty plunged by nearly 28% at block 689,471. The steep decline in difficulty led to corresponding plunge in transaction fees, which in turn may have contributed to a $1,000 surge in the price of the leading cryptocurrency on anticipation of a spurt in transactions-?????? What. Plunge in fees = more things that plunge in fees. In recent trading, the price of BTC was at $34,738, up 3.58% in the last 24 hours. Before the reduction in mining difficulty, BTC was about $33,700. Related: Want A Gummy? Get One! Charlie Morris, CIO of ByteTree Asset Management, tweeted hours after the difficulty cut that fees had dropped to $6 from $10 yesterday. The adjustment marks the third straight decline in mining difficulty, the first time such a trend has happened since December 2018. On May 29 and June 13, the mining difficulty dropped by 16% and 5%, respectively, according to mining service provider BTC.com. What is Bitcoin mining difficulty? Bitcoin’s difficulty is measured using an internal score that began at 1 (when Satoshi started mining at the easiest level). It is programmed to increase or decrease incrementally depending on how many miners are competing on the network. It is currently scored at 14,363,025,673,659, down from 19,932,791,027,262. Blocks are added to the Bitcoin blockchain at a regular and predictable rate: one block every 10 minutes or so. Block time measures how long it takes to create a new block, but that pace can vary, depending on the number of miners on the network and the speed of their computers. When there are more miners competing to “find” the next block, and earn the 6.125 BTC reward, -? What. You get a reward for mining. then those blocks tend to be solved more quickly. However, when miners drop off the network, leaving fewer miners to compete, block times can slow down. WTF! That’s what happened as Chinese authorities pushed to tamp down cryptocurrency trading and mining, since the country has historically hosted such a large portion of the Bitcoin network’s hashpower. Local authorities in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Qinghai province and Sichuan province followed the top-down initiative by announcing plans to shut down some or all bitcoin mines. During this most recent difficulty period, the mean hashrate, a measure of total computational power contributed to the blockchain through mining, stood at 87.7 exahashes per second, the lowest since December 2019. That’s down from about a peak of about 180 exahashes per second in mid-May. As a result, Bitcoin’s mean block time slowed significantly, with some blocks taking as long as 23 minutes on Sunday, June 27, though the network appears to have sped up slightly since then. The Bitcoin algorithm is programmed to self-adjust the difficulty level every 2,016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks, in order to maintain a target block time of 10 minutes. So that’s what happened overnight, as the blockchain’s automatic stabilizer mechanism kicked in to incentivize more miners to join the network. Today’s difficulty drop will make it easier for the remaining miners to find blocks at a rate closer to the 10-minute target. Though a decline in Bitcoin’s hashrate means it is slightly less resilient against attacks, the news bodes well for active miners. “Difficulty adjustment has a few interesting properties in the real world too, particularly for miners,” said Will Foxley of Compass Mining. “When difficulty adjusts downwards, you make more bitcoin if you can stay online. When it goes up, you make less as more miners are participating.” “Miners who remain operational are likely to become even more profitable over the coming weeks, unless price corrects further or migrating hashpower comes back online,” Glassnode wrote in a report.
Latest ransomware attack sweeps the globe – may affect ‘tens of thousands’ Hackers by Associated Press — July 3, 2021 . Businesses around the world rushed Saturday to contain a ransomware attack that has paralyzed their computer networks, a situation complicated in the U.S. by offices lightly staffed at the start of the Fourth of July holiday weekend. It’s not yet known how many organizations have been hit by demands that they pay a ransom in order to get their systems working again. But some cybersecurity researchers predict the attack targeting customers of software supplier Kaseya could be one of the broadest ransomware attacks on record — even after a scourge of headline-grabbing attacks over recent months. “The number of victims here is already over a thousand and will likely reach into the tens of thousands,” said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank. “No other ransomware campaign comes even close in terms of impact.” Tired when you wake up? Me too Try A Slow Burn. The cybersecurity firm ESET says there are victims in least 17 countries, including the United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada, Argentina, Mexico and Spain. In Sweden, most of the grocery chain Coop’s 800 stores were unable to open because their cash registers weren’t working, according to SVT, the country’s public broadcaster. The Swedish State Railways and a major local pharmacy chain were also affected. Cybersecurity experts say the REvil gang, a major Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate, appears to be behind the attack that targeted the software company Kaseya, using its network-management package as a conduit to spread the ransomware through cloud-service providers. Kaseya CEO Fred Voccola said in a statement that the company believes it has identified the source of the vulnerability and will “release that patch as quickly as possible to get our customers back up and running.” <-- thanks! Voccola said fewer than 40 of Kaseya’s customers were known to be affected, but experts said the ransomware could still be affecting hundreds more companies that rely on Kaseya’s clients that provide broader IT services. John Hammond of the security firm Huntress Labs said he was aware of a number of managed-services providers — companies that host IT infrastructure for multiple customers — being hit by the ransomware, which encrypts networks until the victims pay off attackers. “It’s reasonable to think this could potentially be impacting thousands of small businesses,” said Hammond, basing his estimate on the service providers reaching out to his company for assistance and comments on Reddit showing how others are responding. At least some victims appeared to be getting ransoms set at $45,000, considered a small demand but one that could quickly add up when sought from thousands of victims, said Brett Callow, a ransomware expert at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Callow said it’s not uncommon for sophisticated ransomware gangs to perform an audit after stealing a victim’s financial records to see what they can really pay, but that won’t be possible at this scale. “They just pitched the demand amount at a level most companies will be willing to pay,” he said. Voccola said the problem is only affecting its “on-premise” customers, which means organizations running their own data centers. It’s not affecting its cloud-based services running software for customers, though Kaseya also shut down those servers as a precaution, he said. The company added in a statement Saturday that “customers who experienced ransomware and receive a communication from the attackers should not click on any links — they may be weaponized.” Gartner analyst Katell Thielemann said it’s clear that Kaseya quickly sprang to action, but it’s less clear whether their affected clients had the same level of preparedness. “They reacted with an abundance of caution,” she said. “But the reality of this event is it was architected for maximum impact, combining a supply chain attack with a ransomware attack.” Supply chain attacks are those that typically infiltrate widely used software and spread malware as it updates automatically. Complicating the response is that it happened at the start of a major holiday weekend in the U.S., when most corporate IT teams aren’t fully staffed. That could also leave those organizations unable to address other security vulnerabilities, such a dangerous Microsoft bug affecting software for print jobs, said James Shank, of threat intelligence firm Team Cymru. “Customers of Kaseya are in the worst possible situation,” he said. “They’re racing against time to get the updates out on other critical bugs.” Shank said “it’s reasonable to think that the timing was planned” by hackers for the holiday. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it was affecting hundreds of businesses and was “another reminder that the U.S. government must take the fight to these foreign cybercriminal syndicates” by investigating, disrupting and prosecuting them. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement that it is closely monitoring the situation and working with the FBI to collect more information about its impact. CISA urged anyone who might be affected to “follow Kaseya’s guidance to shut down VSA servers immediately.” Kaseya runs what’s called a virtual system administrator, or VSA, that’s used to remotely manage and monitor a customer’s network. The privately held Kaseya is based in Dublin, Ireland, with a U.S. headquarters in Miami. REvil, the group most experts have tied to the attack, was the same ransomware provider that the FBI linked to an attack on JBS SA, a major global meat processor forced to pay a $11 million ransom, amid the Memorial Day holiday weekend in May. Active since April 2019, the group provides ransomware-as-a-service, meaning it develops the network-paralyzing software and leases it to so-called affiliates who infect targets and earn the lion’s share of ransoms. U.S. officials have said the most potent ransomware gangs are based in Russia and allied states and operate with Kremlin tolerance and sometimes collude with Russian security services. Alperovitch said he believes the latest attack is financially motivated and not Kremlin-directed. However, he said it shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin “has not yet moved” on shutting down cybercriminals within Russia after U.S. President Joe Biden pressed him to do so at their June summit in Switzerland.