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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: keokalani'nui who wrote (7517)	12/16/2002 12:34:28 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52153

Wilder, Good question. Wish I could provide a satisfactory answer. I know so little about biotech that it would be foolish for me to express an opinion. IMO valuation is a very subtle art. There are many models and there is a buyer for every seller. I've come here to learn. A personal note: My original academic background is in economic development with a regional emphasis on South Asia. I am also an attorney who has in the past practiced in the fields of securities law and elder law, but have chosen to suspend my law practice for the time being in order to devote more time to the needs of my 86 year old mother and my two children, ages 2 years and two months. I have been interested in investments since I was thirteen, an avocation I learned from my father, who also happened to practise law. I took my first course in securities analysis when I was 20 (from Robert Sobel, a business historian at Hofstra) and trying to decide whether I wanted to stay on Wall Street or go back to India. I eventually decided that it was more important to study economics and try to tackle the problem of poverty in India than it was to help the partner of my firm line his pockets by exploiting the relationship between rainfall patterns in India and precious metals prices. I got my bachelors degree from Harvard in 1980 at the age of 26, after beginning my college education at 15 at Hofstra's New College, and dropping out from 16-19 to go overland to India. At Harvard I was fortunate to be disabused of many of my romantic and idealistic notions of what I thought was meant by economic development. After graduating I got my CFA level 1 and started managing money in Boston and Santa Fe in the beginnings of this last bull market in the 1980s. I was sufficiently shaken by the '87 crash that I decided to get a law degree, just in case the economy and stock market continued to deteriorate. My take-away from the crash was that I paid insufficient heed to behavioral, psychological and institutional factors that are at work in the market, particularly in the short-run. And as we all know, in the long-run, we're all dead. <g> Hope that this rather long-winded response provides some of the context and color for my remarks that you requested. Sam