utenzi

I finally filed my taxes so 2009 is officially over and out the door. *whew* There was some last minute anxiety because one of the stock sales I made in 2009 was of a stock that hadn't been bought in 2009---and so the brokerage year end report didn't include the buy price. I usually only hold on to stocks for a few weeks to a few months so this was unusual for me. And unfortunately that stock was bought in a year that I couldn't immediately find the buy records for. There was some frantic searching but it turned out that I bought the stock in 2007 and lost a lot of money on the damn thing. I think it was something like $4,400. Ouch. That was probably why I held onto the stock for so long---I was hoping that it'd come back. It never did. :-(

I rather enjoy playing on the stock market and prefer politicians to stay out of the process as much as possible. Laissez-faire, you dig? Of course I realize that the financial markets aren't a level playing field. That the "big boys" have a lot of advantages but to me stocks are like buying lottery tickets--so I don't worry about the political stuff. However this recent bailout has made it matter to each and every one of us. With the government tossing around a couple of trillion dollars (over $10,000 in dept to every taxpayer if you assume around 200 million people pay tax in the US) one has to wonder how it'll ever get paid off. Having management at companies like AIG use part of that largess to give bonuses (of over a $ million to some individuals and totaling 165 million at AIG), vacation retreats and raises just seems like an open insult to every taxpayer in the country. Kinda makes Clinton and that BJ thing seem petty in comparison. In that vein, Represent...

Here's another chapter in the story of volatile biotech stocks. I bought Avanir (AVNR) at the end of February when bad news pushed the stock down drastically. I paid $1.52 a share and since then it's been even lower--as low as $1.07, in fact. But as you can see to the left, Avanir has become more friendly to investors as a result of the positive results of their drug Zenvia. Here's an excerpt from an article in BusinessWeek : Drug developer Avanir Pharmaceuticals said Wednesday that a clinical trial showed its drug Zenvia significantly lessened nerve pain in diabetic patients. Avanir shares surged $1.08, or 85 percent, to $2.35 in electronic premarket activity, after closing at $1.27 Tuesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Shares traded as high as $18.14 in February 2006 but have fallen sharply since, dropping to a low of $1.07 last month. In a late-stage clinical trial, patients with diabetic neuropathic pain were given Zenvia or placebo and asked to make daily journals entrie...

Case in point: Adolor Corporation (ADLR). This is a development-stage biopharmaceutical company that is engaged in the discovery and development of prescription pain management products. Adolor has a number of product candidates in various stages of development, ranging from preclinical studies to pivotal clinical trials. Their main drug candidate, Entereg (alvimopan), selectively blocks the unwanted effects of opioid analgesics on the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. That sounds pretty good and that explains why the stock was valued at $25 last Summer. Since there's 46 million shares, at one time this company was valued at over a billion dollars. Too bad that's just a fond memory now. After 3 price corrections--as can be seen in the graph to the left--the stock is now trading around $3.70 a share which puts Adolor's valuation around $170 million. Ouch! I bought some shares today just in case Adolor recovers some of it's old pizazz--but this stock might just be a goner. T...

American Oriental Bioengineering's stock (AOB) got whacked bad a few days ago. That's what it looked like. Pretty ugly, huh? It dropped from $11.50 at Monday's close to $8.50 at Tuesday's close. A $3 drop which, since there's 64 million shares, means that the company lost over $190 million in value. Like I say, ouch. I bought into the stock at $8.69 and I'm expecting to be able to get $11.50 - $12 for it in the next 2 months. The company is interesting. Despite the name, it's a Chinese company, and it's business is selling food supplements in China. They also sell 9 plant extract based pharmaceuticals like Gujinwan Capsules and Biyanling Tablets. But their bread and butter are the food supplements mostly based on either soybean or pancreatic extracts. There's only two analysts following this stock but they're both optimistic. One projects a price of $12.50 for the stock this year and the other analyst is projecting $16. I'd be more than hap...

Ronald Reagan struck a nerve during his 1980 Presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter when he asked Americans: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" I was reminded of that political quote today when the Fed came out with their quarterly net worth report. Here's a portion of it: The net worth of U.S. households climbed to a record high in the final quarter of last year, boosted mostly by gains on stocks, the Federal Reserve reported Thursday. Net worth — the difference between households' total assets, such as houses and bank accounts, and their total liabilities, such as mortgages and credit card debt, totaled $55.6 trillion in the October-to-December quarter. Stocks gains helped fuel the increase in net worth, although real-estate gains played a role, too. For all of last year, households' net worth rose by 7.4 percent, a slower pace than the 7.9 percent increase registered in 2005. Household debt, meanwhile, grew by 8.6 percent in 2006, down f...

Yesterday I did some bargain shopping. First I went to Kohl's online store and picked up a hooded sweatshirt, crew neck sweatshirt, a t-shirt, and a fleece pullover and it all totaled up to $22.50 --before tax and shipping, anyway. I love bargains! Most of the stuff was 80% off. Speaking of bargains, Wall Street had a big sell-off yesterday. The stuff I had was all small companies that weren't affected much. I dropped around $150 in value. I couldn't constrain myself from buying more tho--and now my cash balance is practically nil. But at least I didn't stretch out and use margin. I've done that in the past and got burnt bad. Charred limb type burns. I can't say that I've learned my lesson since I was out on margin just a few weeks ago but at least I'm a little more cautious now. Anyway, the lovely stocks I picked up are PCYC and THLD. The first company, Pharmacyclics, is a pharmaceutical company that is developing drugs to treat cancer. Their drugs are...

I've been watching Onyx Pharmaceuticals for 6 months now, ever since I bought a few shares of their stock. I posted about it at that time. As you can see from that link, the stock was sharply down on some bad news and I bought my shares at the corrected price. That was due to my feeling that the stock had been unjustly punished by the market for news that didn't really hurt their core business very sharply. Today the stock is soaring on good news. To wit, a report that stated that their Nexavar cancer medicine, which they share with Bayer, helped patients with liver tumors live longer. While it is certainly good news for the company, I don't think it's good enough to warrent the stock moving up 80%--yet that's what has happened. Biotech stocks really do move irrationally. It's like watching the mood swings of a 13 year old girl. And oddly enough that's half the fun of investing in biotech stocks. Go figure. (and in case you're curious--I did sell it, I ...

Nexavar is a drug taken orally that targets both the tumor cell and the tumor vasculature. Nexavar targets members of two classes of kinases known to be involved in both cell proliferation and angiogenesis, the processes that enable cancer growth. These kinases include RAF kinase, VEGFR-1, 2, and 3, PDGFR-beta, KIT, and FLT-3. Several of those genes are ones that I find pop up when I run microarrays on my tumor samples so the action of this drug interests me. However my work is on breast cancer and Nexavar is used to combat advanced kidney cancer. But that's all beside the point--the reason for this post is that I bought a thousand shares of Onyx today. As you can see in the chart to the left, there was a huge drop in price between last Friday and today. You see, Onyx had some bad news last week. After the close of the stock market in NY it was revealed that the Phase 3 clinical trial of Nexavar in patients with advanced melanoma did not meet its primary endpoint. As a result the p...

This is one of the products of a company named Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation . They're a leading designer and manufacturer of innovative silicon solutions used in the networking, communications and storage industries worldwide. Vitesse is headquartered in Camarillo, California, and is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol "VTSS". Vitesse completed an initial public offering in 1991 and has been a very volatile investment for much of the time since then. This is a chart I printed out at the end of trading today. It shows todays trading, yesterday's non-trading, and the trading on Monday. The non-trading part of my statement should get some attention. That's the gap in the chart to the left. It doesn't happen very often but occasionally when news occurs that really affects the value of a company, Wall Street will halt trading of that stock until the dust settles a bit. That's usually an hour or so. In this case they shut down trading for over a day....