Is this thread going to die or what?
RTIN will be listed on the AMEX market in December! IMO
They have another news release today!!!
If interested, look it up.
OPEN is a hot stock!!!
Inet stock.
ANTX will rocket one day!
Read this!!!
<<<Tiny Antex Biologics Wants to Step Up to the Big Time
By Jerry Knight
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 30, 1998; Page F07
On the weekly list of Washington area stock winners and losers, Antex Biologics Inc. of Gaithersburg keeps popping up.
Like a predictable pundit on a television talk show, Antex stock turns up week after week. Way down as often as it is way up, it's a vaguely familiar name that prompts investors to ask, "Who is that, anyway?"
It turns out that the mother of Antex was a Swedish millionaire and the father was an American stock brokerage firm that went out of business last year after tangling with regulators. Their offspring has become the unloved orphan of the Washington biotechnology community.
The company has four drugs in human trials, more than 21 patents, partnerships with two of the biggest drug companies in the world and almost $5 million in the bank. In the past month Antex has been chosen as one of the 50 fastest-growing companies in Maryland by the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche and has completed two deals that should make its shares more valuable.
Yet Antex still can't get a date with a decent securities firm. Despite the market's maniacal appetite for exotic technology companies and a recent resurgence in biotech shares, Antex stock does nothing but oscillate by about 50 cents a share.
One week, Antex shares show up as one of the biggest winners among companies in The Washington Post-Bloomberg regional stock index -- up 30 percent or 40 percent for no discernible reason. The next week the stock is down just as much, just as inexplicably.
The random revolutions of the stock are one of the frustrations of V.M. Esposito, the PhD biochemist who is president and chief executive of Antex.
"Between the spread and the commission, somebody's making a lot of money trading our stock," said Esposito, who has made it a priority to get the stock off the over-the-counter bulletin board and onto the Nasdaq Stock Market or the American Stock Exchange.
Some days the stock doesn't trade at all, but other days find almost half a million shares changing hands, apparently proded by trading firms that make their living buying and selling "penny stocks," which these days means anything less than $5 a share.
Those traders mark up the price of every share they sell by a few pennies and take a discount of a few pennies off the price of shares they buy. When a stock like Antex swings up and down a lot, the traders make even more money. It's the professional, not the individual investor, who is most likely to be selling the stock when it's at the top of its cycle and buying it back at the bottom.
The gyrations scare away most small investors, who don't like the idea of owning a stock with a price that is fickle because they worry that they'll drive the price down if they try to sell.
Penny stocks also are considered off limits by most professional money managers, so Antex has no institutional shareholders and its stock is not followed by biotech analysts at any of the regional investment firms or the other industry players.
Unlike many bulletin board companies, Antex issues regular financial reports, audited by Coopers & Lybrand LLP.
To try to escape the penny stock onus, shareholders voted at Antex's last annual meeting to approve a reverse stock split of at least 4 to 1 and as much as 10 to 1. A 4-to-1 reverse split means shareholders get one new share for every four they now own, which makes the surviving shares worth four times as much.
A higher stock price is all that Antex needs to qualify for listing on the Amex, which has a minimum price of $3 a share, or Nasdaq, where the minimum is $4 a share. But Antex stock has been so erratic lately that it has been difficult to set an exchange ratio that would guarantee a $3 or $4 share price. "The last thing you want to do is a reverse split where you still don't qualify for listing," Esposito said.
Though Nasdaq and Amex are merging, Esposito thinks Amex is the place to go. On the exchange, trading in a company's shares is managed by a specialist whose job is to stabilize the market. Nasdaq remains a free-for-all, where any trading firm can take on a stock and has an economic incentive to let the price swing as wildly as possible.
Antex stock was on Nasdaq for a couple of years, but during the company's darkest days in the early 1990s it dropped below the market's minimum standards.
Antex fell into limbo largely because of its parentage. It was taken public by D.H. Blair & Co., which sold its brokerage business last January after being disciplined by the National Association of Securities Dealers and regulators in several states. In August 1997 Blair paid $4.9 million in penalties to settle NASD charges that the firm charged investors excessive markups on 14 small stocks, which did not include Antex.
Though Blair's brokerage business was sold to Barrington Capital Group of New York, state regulatory actions against a number of the firm's brokers are still pending.
Antex's other parent was a Swedish investor who in 1988 set up a research firm in Montgomery County called MicroCarb -- for microbiology and carbohydrates. It's an old joke, Esposito said, that some people thought the company made tiny carburetors. He changed the name to Antex, combining antibodies and X for the unknown.
The company a decade ago built a $3.7 million sophisticated laboratory in Gaithersburg to research obscure compounds looking for cancer fighters. But the Scandinavian sugar daddy bailed out in the early 1990s and sold the lab for $1 to a group of employees. With only a dozen people, they continued some previous work and did other research on contract.
Esposito, a drug industry veteran, was recruited to be chief executive in 1992, shortly before Blair took the company public. The initial public offering raised $8.3 million, while subsequent public and private stock offerings generated a total of $21 million in capital.
With that cash plus license fees and revenues from joint ventures, Esposito has brought four drugs to the human testing stage and several others are being tested on animals.
A vaccine for campylobacter bacteria, which causes diarrheal illnesses, is in Phase II trials, meaning it's being tested for effectiveness. Two other drugs to treat bacteria that cause ulcers and earaches are completing the Phase I trials that determine whether they are safe and produce the desired response.
The earache medicine has been cleared for adults and is now being tested on small children. Another ear infection drug will go into safety-testing next year.
Three of the products are part of a $30 million joint venture with Belgium-based vaccines division of SmithKline Beecham PLC. Work on the fourth product is being done in conjunction with Pasteur Merieux Connaught of France.
The SmithKline work is the principal source of the $3 million in revenue that Antex reported for the nine months ended Sept. 30. Like most biotech companies, Antex loses money -- $1.2 million from operations in the nine-month period. It also wrote off $1.7 million for a complicated transaction to dispose of a big block of warrants that were a holding down the stock price.
"We'd have to consider any opportunities to enhance shareholder value," Esposito says, acknowledging that the company could easily be taken over because no one shareholder owns 5 percent of the stock. Esposito holds options on about 10 percent of the stock, but with the stock trading at less than $1 a share most of the shares are worthless.
With just 31 people on its payroll Antex remains one of the Washington area's tiniest public companies, and its total value fluctuates from $10 million to $15 million. "We're a micro-micro-cap stock," Esposito said. But unlike a lot of companies with stock that sells for 50 cents a share, it's a real business.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company>>>>
Happy investing!
KZAP |
