Thomas, you have raised some good points. A main reason why I posted my original comments is so they would get criticized -- I am attempting to make money by shorting AIMM, and therefore am interested in finding holes in the logic so I don't lose my shirt (as you probably know, grad students don't earn much!). I am well aware that the clinical trials are double-blind, placebo-controlled, yada yada. I have spent considerable time trying to understand why I was passed this information and why this information was known in the first place. My conclusion is that the odds are in favour of the information being accurate, because of the following reasons:
1) The scientist (NOT the AIMM scientist who relayed the info to him)who relayed the information to me had no idea that I trade, so I look on that conversation as a legitimate scientific one. It had struck me that innate tolerance mechanisms such as clonal anergy or deletion may be an effective weapon against autoimmune diseases including MS. The researcher then told me that it is a good idea in theory and it worked well enough in rats and in small samples, but large scale clinical trials not yet divulged proved to be not statistically significant. Upon request he told me that AIMM was running the trials and one of his colleagues inside the company gave him the jist of the ongoing results. Do I have any reason to doubt the credibility of my contact? He would have no advantage in lying to me, unless he was trying to jawbone the market down, and frankly, divulging said information to a grad student is unlikely to do that.
2) It is completely ethical for my contact to tell me the info. This was a conversation regarding the feasibility of using oral tolerance as a therapy for MS. As for the legality, perhaps he didn't know it was illegal. Is it illegal for me to tell this newsgroup the information that I have been told? I think not. It may be illegal/unethical for the AIMM guy to tell my contact, but then again, scientists and friends are used to sharing data -- is it so unreasonable for this data to be shared?
3) Since I received this news when most of the subjects were finished with the trials (some for a year or more), I think it is reasonable to suggest that most of the results have already been tabulated. Even though the experiments were carried out in a double-blind manner, if most of the results had already been tabulated, then it is possible to pass on this information.
I'm being completely honest with everyone here. As I said, my motivation is to identify the probability that the information is accurate. I'm sure that you guys are trying to do the same thing but are affixing a very low probability of the info being accurate because you don't know who the hell I am. However, I do know my contact well enough and I don't believe that he has any reason to deceive me. I think that it is good for all of us to keep a clear head about this stock, analyzing it dispassionately -- whether we are bullish or bearish.
Sincerely (i mean that),
Mark Organ
p.s. don't be too hard on us with the "colleague" thing. It's the one thing that keeps us scientists-in-training going -- otherwise we would just feel like indentured servants to our professors. |
