Keep An Eye On CBLI...

Discussion in 'Stocks' started by stonedinvestor, Feb 14, 2007.

  1. Another explosion?
     
    #31     Feb 22, 2007
  2. another explosion? no. i definitely can't handle the worry.

    so ... since the best (and certainly the simplest!) indicator for a short-term trend reversal is a declining close, and today's last trade of around $12.77 is well below the previous close of $13.38 (by a significant 4.5%) .. i decided that the risk of a down-side break outweighed any potential for a rule-breaking "reversal of the reversal" ... and add to that the aversion of many traders to hold a position over the weekend (made worse by the fact that Barron's comes out on Sunday and it IS true that they like to contradict themselves) ... so .. all of that together made me change my order to sell the rest of my postion that becomes sellable Friday, all of it, ... i decided to change the sell order to a market order for the Open, exactly as StonedInvestor recommended. iIm going "by the book" and selling immediately after a strong rally during the first moment of trading after the sell signal of declining close was given. So i rode it until chart theory told me to expect a trend reversal.

    The broker confirmation is right here: "Your limit order to Sell 1500 CBLI at 12.95 was canceled. Prior to the market opening, your market order to Sell 1500 CBLI will be submitted. The replacement order number is: 2705019499."

    I will NOT be setting my alarm for the open (7:30 AM local time) for the first time this week. And i have no worries if i miss out on a higher price tomrorow. The peace of mind knowing i will be getting out ASAP (and pre-open is out of the question because my broker allows only one order and i am unwilling to pick a limit price as they require for extended trading).

    there was no significant AH action in CBLI today and no price change beyond a penny or two, so there's no reason to believe that any big money players who would want to get out ASAP would be planning on an opening dump. there were shares sitting for the ask at $12.76 and $12.77 after the close that took some time for people to pick up. if anyone was in a hurry to get out at the open tomorrow, they could have sold at least another 1000 shares AH within a few cents of the closing price.

    So i'm out of CBLI as of 9:30:30 AM Friday and as part of becoming a more disciplined trader, i'm basing ALL my trades on a rational basis, which in this case is the old-fashioned chart-theory reversal signal that a sequential decline in the close signals a trend break.

    Yes, it's still bothering me that if i had followed my gut and sold those 3500 shares yesterday when it was over $13.70 (instead of the $11.60 i got by waiting for the Roth talk), i'd be $10 K richer, but the preceding rally that DID start right after the Barron's article was just so unbelievably strong that i thought it was signaling an irrational valuation liek what happened to NRPH where all the great minds of Gradient Analytics who put a sell on it at $40 couldn't have known that Shire would be buying them out and that (my guess) is that the reason NRPH rallied when the C-II status was announced for their lysine-Adderall meant that the two companies could work out the acquisition terms. Before the scheduling, they could not set a purchase price, especially with hydrocodone next in line for their amino-acid trick.

    I just find it impossible believe the this brief fluff piece was responsible for CBLI IMMEDIATELY doubling in price from Feb. 6 to Feb 21. http://webreprints.djreprints.com/31956.html

    What the loss of potential realized appreciation of $10 means for me is that i just need to work harder and stick to my rules. if it were not for the T3 rule, i could have sold the 1200 TFR i snagged at $9.00 for a good profit today but will get out of it tomorrow and will use a tight trailing % stop if it shows any strength.

    Can someone please post ALL the T&S trades in CBLI for the first minute Friday??? as a market order (not a limit order), my trade will not show up in the trading T&S because it will be folded into the opening cross price, but i'm curious to know what happens in that first fast and furious minute that seems to be almost inevitable.

    As to other stocks to play. You guys and gals here seem worth posting for. So the next time my Biggest Loser daily check finds a stock that interests me because it seems that the market was way overreacting to the downside and there's a good chance of a quicjk reversal, i'll start a new thread if it's not already being discussed here.

    Thanks to all who answered my questions and put up with my obnoxious attitude.

    BBF

    P.S. if i reenter a position with CBLI, i'll post here and explain why. finally, the nail in the coffin was comparing CBLI to HEPH. there's no rational reason save for CBLI being "new" and teh market has a chance to have reached equilibrium for such a big disparity between their stock actions. HEPH could get a contract from HHS (and DoD) for Neumune any day now.

    P.P.S. After listening to the Rocth talk again, it's clear that Mr. Fonstein is a con artist. Hematopeoisis is what kills people from the radiation of a nuclear weapon, not GI syndrome. For almost every radioisotope of concern i can think of, the only way to get a higher dose to the GI tract than to bone marrow is if someone EATS the DAMN STUFF. So, since food can be very easily monitored for radioactive contamination (and if yoru dosimeter alerts) you just don't eat that radioactive sushi (i.e. if you're eating with an enemy of Validimir Putin) i am now of the belief that CBLI's stock price rally to $13.99 is based ONLY on smoke and mirrors. The good people at AFRRI are not so stupid as to fall for it, but Wall Street apparently is. The idea that Protectan can eventuallybe the Holy Grail of cancer prevention and treatment is YEARS away until they get it into human clinical trials. The Animal Efficacy rule is only valid for emergencies. Fonstein was very deviosuly deceptive in implying that "taking it to market" in 20 months (or 14 months if they're lucky) is something that HEPH has been working on for at least three years and HEPH is ahead of CBLI by a long shot, both for the radioprotective applications as well as the marrow stimulant properties (where the two companies DO have overlap and WILL be competing).

    I would put more money now on HEPH if anyone wants t play this sector. They could get the HHS procurement for Project Bioshield any day now. And DoD is exempt from FDA for protecting the miltary, so Neumune could see an DoD procurement ANY DAY NOW! Which would be impossible for CBLI. If HEPH sold Neumune to US DoD, you will be seeing Israel and South Korea also placing orders and then the pressure from civilians wil increase, getting HHS off their butts. But we can discuss that elsewhere and another day. I am an HEPH shareholder and after the Friday open i will not be a CBLI shareholder.
     
    #32     Feb 23, 2007
  3. Biobottom you have emerged from this a better person and investor. First off- props to you for having such nice size on CBLI. A debate on when to get on or off with 700 or 1700 shares is a much harder decision. Secondly the points you make about the conference are very true regarding this company it is as if they have started reading about themselves in the press! They seem to be completely freewheeling now and you have to speak in a much more toned down way to catch the ears of these investors at the conferences. That brings up another interesting point- these conferences so often I am holding out at them being the be all and get all for investing. For without earnings releases and these conferences how else to we get a stock rolling? But the exact opposite can happen and has happened to me-- you can get a room full of analysts who leave shaking their heads and phoning in sell orders to home,e base. I think that is what's happening here to CBLI.

    Your point about having to ingest the radiation is one I was really toiling with myself it just doesn't make sense... Russia is going to poison all of us? What is their target patient population? Three?

    I don't know HEPH but I'll take a peek. That one as I remember you picked up off the biggest losers list but not CBLI? So perhaps you can merge your filtering system to include other variables besides the overreaction big swoon-- which I agree is a constant scalping money maker but maybe not the best way to stay leader of the pack-- which is important in biotech.

    Welcome to ET!
    ~stoney
     
    #33     Feb 23, 2007
  4. stoney,

    Thanks for your kind words. It's people like you who make me feel it worth posting on a message board. FWIW, my CBLI position was huge! 5000 shares. That's A LOT of Valium to watch it gain 18% for NO REASON!

    And you seemed to infer only part of my stock picking method, which is NOT limited to Biggest Losers. Once i start looking at an interesting stock, which could be from news storys on Reuters Health newsfeed, or a COMPETITOR of a stock i find as Biggest Loser, i will decide if THEY are worth following.

    At any time, i keep a watchlist for real-time quotes and stats on up to ~30 stocks at a time. That's at my broker so i can trade them quickly and watch L2 anytime with a click. I also have that same list (more or less) because it's always changing at my home page at Yahoo Finance, which shows all their news stories and delayed quotes and gives me quick access to their mostly-basher message boards, but is sometimes useful there when people post links to documents, etc., like government RFP sites that i can't follow.

    I SLOWLY accumulated 5000 shares of CBLI @ ~$6.09 and it was making me eat a LOT of Valium when it rocketed up past $13 the other day, up intra-day 18% for no reason. I was comfortable with the risk of holding that many shares at the lower price basis because the market cap seemed resonable for a seemingly unknown stock which i (STILL) believe has at LEAST a 5% chance of having one of their drugs get to market for annual sales of at least $100 M. You can do the math on 11 M shares. I was also motivated by the delayed IPO effect where it takes time for people to find out about stocks with no hype and no news. Well, the WSJ on 1/25 and then Barron's on 2/5 changed that equation, didn't it?

    Oh. Check out what Jim Cramer did for PTIE when he popped it from around $7 to $11. I was involved in that, at least indirectly, because a friend of mine wanted to call it in to the first Lightning Round where Cramer panned it. He didn't know what to tell Cramer so i coached him. But Cramer panned it saying OxyContin was bad news. The stock took off a few weeks later when Cramer issued a public admission (free to all) that he had erred and that PTIE/DRRX/KG's Remoxy was the Holy Grail of pain killers. Boy oh boy. I made money on that one. Hype does not hold up a stock forever (unless like in NRPH's case there's a buyout in the works).

    I also was motivated by the NASA GRANT for CBLI (that most people seem to be not seeing) to develop a cancer-protectant drug for astronauts because i KNOW about the public's fear of radiation and we can discuss that sometime in the future on Skype because it's way too complicated to write: but pick up a copy of the excellent book Nuclear Fear by Stephen Weart if you want. Working as did at a national lab for over 20 years, i KNEW why the public was afraid and was lucky to let it be used in my work, which led to a published DOE report.

    But back to CBLI. My remaining T3 lockup shares were sold at the open at $8.80 and then a few shares went off at $12.99 and now it's looking like my sell point is becoming "tick resistance."

    Back to today. I woke up rested without an alarm and made my coffee before the market opened and had a trading screen opened with the L2 and TS for CBLI and the intraday RT chart filling up a second monitor, so i know the opening action. In fact, because the coffee had not yet kicked in and i saw the market order to sell 1500 shares i panicked, thinking (wrongly) that i had 3500 shares, not 1500. so i FRANTICALLY tried to change the order sie to 3500 shares but it wouldn't let me so i (in pre-coffee mode) cancelled the order and tried to re-enter it and i got my second market order acknowledged as open just a few seconds before the open. Boy, that was too much. But i'm glad i sold 3500 @ ~ $11.55-$11.65 yesterday with a few limit orders (i didn't just DUMP 3500 shares at market, but sold at market when it was like 1200 shares left) and am VERY glad for your GOOD ADVICE to sell at market the first momeny i could today, which was the open. and no messing with limit prices either because "a market order guarantees a fill, but a limit order only guaranatees a price ... yada yada. but i do admit i looked for pre-market hours trades and found NONE (unlike yesterday when there were 2 i think).

    anyway, thanks again. i COULD HAVE gotten more than my $11.60 yesterday and $11.80 today for my CBLI, but if the indicator of a broken trend is a declining close, it's IMPOSSIBLE to predict BEFORE it happens. By the very nature of the signal.

    The "i can't believe it's so high" "signal" is non-objective and not science-based. It has the has the VERY apparent SERIOUS flaw that it got you guys out of CBLI the week before it REALLY took off. But when you gusy thought that $9-ish was unsustainable, i was thinking inside $13. So when it DID crash right through $11 and then $12 and then $13 i should have STARTED selling. and i SHOULD HAVE used trailing stop % orders to try to at least come near the top by selling it in 500-1000 share blocks set at different stop percent-points.

    but to reiterate. i find out about stocks any way i can. sometimes one Big Loser leads to something totally off the wall.

    but i will list a few biotech Biggest Losers that made me good money when their stocks tanked on market's overblown fears of generic competition for drugs that cannot be evaluated with the FDA's "mixer machine" and avoid human clinical trials at least for bioequiavelent phharamcodynamics: look up the crash in VPHM when it went from like $18 to $7 for fears over Vancocin competition. Well, how can anyone prove something is bioequivalent if it dissolves in the mixer machine when Vancocin acts LOCALLY in the gut? The whole value of the Lilly pulvule design (proprietrary, so patent won't expire) is that the capsule SURVIVES the human mixer machine of the stomach and gets to the colon where the infection is and it asct locally from INSIDE the person. I got in VPHM and got out at $12. It's been up to $18.

    And then there was ENDP which is less volatile than a VPHM, but the selloff due to fears of their lidocaine patch having generic competition due to FDA putting the skin patches into their mixer machine made NO SENSE. so i bought. and i had to wait ... and wait .. and wait ... but it finally returned. Eventually the market figures out the stupidity, and VPHM was hit by a coordinated short attack that only makes sense if it involves FDA involvement w. insider trading, but that is just speculation. The short attack was coordinated by Gradient Analytics. Recently here i confused Gradient with Think Analytics, which put out the Sell on NRPH because it's high price was defying logic. well, gotta go. my T+3 has expired on the 1200 TFR i picked up at $9.00 Tuesday and it looks like i can make about $500 on that. so that's my trading style for ya.

    take care. if you want an e-mail that will reach me, send me a PM. we could talk using Skype if you want.
     
    #34     Feb 23, 2007
  5. P.S. re trading by your gut ... it defies the SCIENCE of behavioral finance (my guide to trading, remember?) which says that market ALWAYS overreacts. well, that overreaction is more frequently to the downside than to the upside, but with CBLI we had Irrational Exuberance to the upside. unusual, but very enjoyable!
     
    #35     Feb 23, 2007
  6. The market does overact both ways but it is also a discounting mechanisms which always is right. It's fascinating when you think about it but if you allow two opposing sides (greed & fear) to each overdue it you will find your balance> I'm sure this is true in life as well as stocks.
     
    #36     Feb 23, 2007
  7. Well, to address your first question. There are three conventionally recognized mechanisms of "early fatality" for ARS, which i'll refer to by target organ and respective approximate LD50 (in Gy) in their usual order of importance (assuming no treatment) for "PROMPT" internal and external radiation doses (more on that later): 1) bone marrow @ ~4 G, 2) GI @ ~8 Gy, and 3) lung @ ~12 Gy.

    For any conceivable exposure to the usual mix of fission products created by the literal "splitting" of uranium and plutonium atoms in what would be released from a reactor accident or a nuclear yield from a criticality or a nuclear weapon detonation (and this includes both internal and external radiation), the almost TOTALLY dominant mode of death is due to bone marrow damage. That is what HEPH's Neumune drug is used to treat. It's a non-androgenic steroid which raises the LD50 to marrow by roughly 50%.

    Now, if it's external penetrating gamma and neutron radiation, all organs (except ... ahem ... testes?) get around the same dose, so it's obvious that the deaths you'd see would be due to bone marrow dose with an LD50 of ~4 Gy. Sr-90 is an important fission product (go back to atmospheric weapons testing and all the talk about Sr-90 in milk) and take account of the fact that Sr is in the same column of the Periodic Table as calcium, and the body will metabolize Sr the same as Ca and it will go to the bones, but actually it's going mostly to BONE SURFACE, not the marrow, and Sr-90 is a beta emitter so even inhaled (or ingested) Sr-90 may not be that important for its internal dose to the bone marrow.

    Well, maybe i should cut to the chase. Go up above to the 1-2-3. the bone marrow LD50 is the lowest so unless there is something that "seeks out" another organ (such as radioiodine to thyroid), "bone marrow death" will be clearly dominant over GI and lung.

    For GI death to occur (and it takes longer than bone marrow death) so if someone gets the respective LD50s to both organs (marrow and GI) you would need to have something either inhaled or ingested that is an alpha or beta emitter. Both have short range of travel and are shielded by a thin layer of tissue.

    So for ARS to kill someone by GI syndrome, they would have to ingest something like the Po-210 of the unfortunate Mr. Litvivenko. Mr. L. is dying (apparently) of GI or lung syndrome and not marrow (hematopeoesis) because he ingested an alpha-emitter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium . So his bone marrow was a smaller fraction of its LD50 than for the other two modes of death.

    But ingestion is not the ONLY way to get a GI dose from an alpha or beta emitter. Dependiong on particle size, the mucosal layer of the breathing tract will trap some particles and they're "cleared" to the stomach and then pass through like other things ingested. Basically, we swallow mucus and it goes into the GI. So you can die from inhaled material via GI syndrome but it would have to be an alpha or beta emitter (and also be an element that is not a "bone seeker").

    So that concludes today's lesson in health physics as it applies to ARS, and how that affects CBLI versus HEPH and Neumune versus Protectan. I don't understand why DoD is as interested as Fonstein is claiming for a protection against GI syndrome unless, as you say, they expect the military's food to be radio-contaminated (at levels so high the food truck would never make in onto a military base!).

    Fonstein yesterday didn't seem to actually understand all of that, which was frightening to me.

    And as far as my finding HEPH, i became aware if its news releases pertaining to RDDs, which i was working on professionally at the time. I became interested in it as it pertains to public safety from radiological terrorism. So i added the stock to my watchlist. Then, i'm certain, one day some news came out and it hit the Biggest Loser list and i read the story and of course it was already on my watchlist, so it didn't take me much time to figure out that it was a good time to buy, which it was. And then news came out which made it go up, which as usual was an overreaction, so i sold. And then it fell again and was consolidating so i accumulated. And then some news came out that made it goi up so i sold. And now i have a relatively small position but would add to it if any bad news comes out that makes it tank unduly. Get the picture?

    Anyway, i'm STILL BEATING MYSELF UP over not selling my CBLI when it was over $13.

    Is there ANYTHING that could be seen with a technical indicator of the attached 4-day minute-by-minute chart of CBLI that SHOULD have told me to sell when it reached $13 and kept going or when it hit $13.99 and started falling????

    Any technical analyst chart readers???????

    Gee whiz. I made a JPG but how do i attach it to a post here?

    And, finally, as far as staying "at the top of the pack" per what SI said in the quote above .... that may be your style, but it's not mine. Remember what my handle here is? it has "BOTTOM FEEDER" in it. i'm interested in buying low and selling high.

    if a stock is up already, i'm simply not interested in it. period. if i buy a stock cheap and then it keeps on going .... hey ... like CBLI did ... i held on to it. but i guarantee you that if i looked up my original trading, i was buying it on DIPS, not rallies.

    I forget how long i watched it before buying. It doesn't matter. I don't buy stocks that are flat-lining.
     
    #37     Feb 23, 2007
  8. 4-day chart of CBLI top. what could have told me to get out at $13 that is an OBJECTIVE indicator, not just a gut feeling that it's "too high"???????

    it's driving me CRAZY because i could have had $10 K that literally was in my hands and i let it evaporate away.

    i'm coming here and posting the question because you guys are traders and, like i said, going by the gut feeling is not what a scientist should depend on. ok engineer then. most of the scientists i worked with degrees in engineering.

    what would you tell an ENGINEER who wants OBJECTIVE DATA?
     
    #38     Feb 23, 2007
  9. re:
    But ingestion is not the ONLY way to get a GI dose from an alpha or beta emitter. depending on particle size, the mucosal layer of the breathing tract will trap some particles and they're "cleared" to the stomach and then pass through like other things ingested. Basically, we swallow mucus and it goes into the GI. So you can die from inhaled material via GI syndrome but it would have to be an alpha or beta emitter (and also be an element that is not a "bone seeker").

    Don't think you can aerosol it.

    The whole economic impact of a dirty area after a dirty bomb might be worse than the actual deaths. the Thyroid does have a way of getting involved though...

    Al of this talk just makes me want to cash out and live in the Caribbean...

    Re the indicators.. I held the stock a while it went up and up in an orderly fashion then it suddenly for no reason gained 20% or $2 by far the biggest one day gain... that was my indicator that new money, less sophisticated money was getting involved and my signal to get off. In retrospect I should of waited one more day for there was a following $2 spike as well!
    When a stock just starts acting different ( $2 moves vs 70 cent ) it's time to narrow your focus and be ready to rotate....
     
    #39     Feb 23, 2007
  10. It's obvious you know nothing about that subject. Bomb? What happens when there's an explosion? It makes aerosols.

    Duh. I worked on that stuff for over 20 years.
     
    #40     Feb 23, 2007