Lorus Thearpeutics was mentioned in a the article below on street.com If there's any truth to Lorus getting acquired by a big name biotech were going to be rich.
The Perfect Tell
By Laurel Kenner and Victor Niederhoffer
Special to TheStreet.com
3/2/00 6:31 PM ET
thestreet.com
In our column on the "excessive productivity" indicator unveiled by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in congressional testimony, we challenged readers to come up with the perfect tell, one that would provide a rudder for investors in the storm of last week's market.
As usual, readers responded in heroic fashion. Some readers fingered Greenspan as a contrary indicator ("irrational exuberance -- predictive of pleasingly higher stock prices," wrote Robert W. Elliott).
Almost magically, within a few points of the market bottom, we received a missive from S.H.:
I am a broker. So I speak with quite a few people on a regular basis. But the best indicator I have seen to date is what I call the "Just Sell Everything" indicator. When the majority of calls I receive on a given day begin with, "Just sell everything," it's undoubtedly a short-term market bottom. If it happens to coincide with a spike in the volatility index, huge put/call ratios and a large venue of bears interviewed on CNBC, well, then that's just gravy. Green light. Green light with a police escort.
S.H.'s phones must have been ringing off the hook on Thursday, Friday and Monday, when the Dow kept dipping below 10,000.
Tells are appropriate at all times, but the perfect tell should speak a universal language, like music. Rising to the occasion, Brett Steenbarger, a Ph.D. in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, came up with the best cultural market indicator we have come across in our combined 100 years:
I hypothesize that there is a positive and significant correlation between the beats-per-minute of popular music and price changes in the stock market. From post-Depression blues, '40s crooners, '50s/'60s rock 'n' roll, late '60s /early '70s psychedelia, late '70s disco, '80s New Wave and now the electronic dance raves (150 beats per minute de rigueur), we've seen a steady ramping up of acoustic adrenaline.
Most of life proceeds to a beat of roughly 120 beats per minute, which is the average pace of walking. An accelerated pace is experienced as upbeat; a slowed pace is quieting. Good traders read the nonverbal streams of markets ... their shifts in pace. That's also what good psychologists do.
The Nasdaq's volume records this week support Steenbarger's hypothesis. And speaking of volume, we know traders who like to call their brokers in the Chicago futures pit because they can tell from the noise level where the market is going.
Patience, Patents, Science
Frank Linet's submission goes right to the core of individual stocks that investors should focus on today:
The rational mindset dictates that as investors, we must watch the S&P, the Dow, the Fed and Mr. Greenspan. I watch the progression of science and the issuance of patents that pertain to my portfolio. Should Axys Pharmaceuticals (AXPH:Nasdaq - news - boards) or Genelabs Technologies (GNLB:Nasdaq - news - boards) nose dive, they have patents that are worth millions. I also know that the big boys will acquire and pay premium dollars for a Targeted Genetics (TGEN:Nasdaq - news - boards), Axys (AXPH:Nasdaq - news - boards), Geron (GERN:Nasdaq - news - boards), Lorus Therapeutics (LORFF:Nasdaq - news - boards), Genelabs (GNLB:Nasdaq - news - boards), etc. Forget everything you think you know and invest in patience, patents and science.
Mark M. McNabb, a Ph.D. at Virginia Tech University and an NASD securities arbitrator, wrote that analysts can't be relied on anymore for guidance, as "They really have become touts for corporate finance and investment banking units." McNabb compares equity to a call option -- "bits and drabs of stock laying around waiting for the next glowing piece of journalism."
Our fourth prize goes to Paul, who has developed an original indicator based on the number and type of "corner crazies" on and around Market Street in San Francisco. We will give the details in a subsequent column devoted to street-level tells.
We're sending Steenbarger and our other winners canes from the shop of Stan Novak in New York's garment district. The world's cane makers have not been putting bulls or bears on cane heads lately, so we chose one with a horse for Steenbarger, good for rides in either direction.
He already has received far better recognition, however: acclamation from daughter Devon, 10, and son MacRae, 8. After we notified him he'd won the contest, he wrote that, on returning home: "I opened the garage and there, greeting me in bright colors, was a large sign hand-drawn by my two little ones. It read: 'Congratulations Cane Winner!' That's enough to melt even the most wizened trader's heart!"
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