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Biotech / Medical : Ligand (LGND) Breakout! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hippieslayer who wrote (12924)	1/1/1998 1:44:00 PM
From: Henry Niman	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 32384

FUGAZI, LGND has been pretty close to estimates in the past. They may be a few pennies off, but have generally been in the right ballpark. The street doesn't pay too much attention to a few cents either way for LGND because the numbers really don't vary much, and are largely dependent on established research agreements. LGND's prediction of profitabilty in '99 was a radical departure from previous estimates (of losses in excess of $1.00), and it looks like such numbers are realistic if Bear Stearns is predicting a profit at the end of this year. David Molowa is a pretty good Biotech analyst, and he had put out the most extensive analysis to date when he intiated coverage of LGND with an ATTRACTIVE rating a couple of years ago. He subsequently updated the rating to BUY (their highest) about a year later and has held LGND at that level ever since. If he is predicting a profit this year (4Q), then I think that it is a very good sign and I'm sure many on this board could handle a bit of "irrational exuberance". Many have placed strong bets on LGND and have been a bit surprised by the street's reaction to all of the good news that came out this fall (LGND is about where it was before all the news hit). The street's response has already cost me 2 bottles of wine, and I, along with others, think that its way past payback time. Robertson Stevens didn't expect a profit until 2000 ($0.10), but after that LGND's EPS was projected to grow at more than 100% per year, hitting $14.55 in 2006 (on 50 million fully diluted shares) and I thought that the estimates were conservative at the time. Now that ALRI has been called and a mega deal with LLY has been signed, I think that the long term projections are extremely conservative.