Apologies for the late appearance of this week’s report. I saw a suspicious (in an algorithmic sense, not legal) activity in one of the selected Stocks, which I finally resolved by finding news of a “stealth” split, in the sense that Yahoo Financial’s News Feed on the symbol didn’t say “boo” about the stock this week, let alone mention a split. Read on to learn more details.
Well… this week is pretty much a replay of the week before (cue very sad trombones), only this week the biotech indices showed a worse performance than the NASDAQ composite (and that’s to say, very bad indeed).
This week, I’ll at least say something about an individual stock (well two stocks). The top winner was GNCA with a return of the week of 70%! GNCA … GNCA … why does that seem familiar? Holy zombies, Batman! That is the listing that refuses to die! Four months ago it posted press releases that laying off 70% of the staff wasn’t enough, so that they were completely closing up shop, and (here’s the thing) delist from NASDAQ. But Yahoo has continued to report on it. I had expected it to show a price of $0.00000000 months ago, but no. Last week showed a weekly loss of 20% (not bad enough to qualify for the worst five club, but it was a bad week), closing at nine tenths of penny. I had figured that there must have been a few delusional holdouts that finally decided to sell, and fortunately there were still others who hadn’t come to their senses so that the seller could get a tiny bit of their money back.
This week, things clearly perked up, not only with a net upswing in price but volatility, and lots of trades, some as large as about 1 per cent of the float. How Yahoo fills out its report page for the stock shows that this is an … unusual … stock. The closing Bid and Ask says that someone was looking for a buyer of 45900 shares, but the most interest that could be generated was only 800 shares (remember, less than $10). But the prices for bid and ask were 0.0000. Yahoo goes on to report values for market cap beta, and EPS, and mentions an upcoming Earnings date of Halloween (Oh how appropriate), It does show its “value” thermometer as pegged all the way to the right in the red, with the notation “Overvalued”.
As a compensation for this week’s delayed report, I can tell you that Monday and Tuesday of this week GNCA has somewhat quieter, but still looking a lot more liquid that some of our other choices. Today (Tuesday) looked … odd, in that there were five repetitions of a call and response. It opened at 1.5 cents, then at 10:00 am (exactly) dropped to 1.2 cents. Futzed around there for a few trades ending at 12:30 with the biggest trade of the day: 175.86 thousand shares at 1.2 cents, worth all of a bit over $2k). Then at 12:40 a trade not even one percent as large was able to goose the price to 1.49 cents. Not for long six minutes later an equally small trade dragged it back to 1.2. This up and down seesaw occurred two more times, but a trade just at the close established the $1.49 price. Honestly I have no idea what’s going on here. I would have said “money laundering” except the values are tiny. My theory? There are a few computers running programs that are still including GNCA on their watch list, and all we are seeing is a sort of ghost conversation. Because the values are so small, the owners of the computers haven’t looked closely at what’s happening to pull the plug. This is not a good advertisement for AI. (I would heavily regulate computer/high speed trading as it generates not so much liquidity but froth.)
The second stock is that split. CBIO was showing a big drop, over a factor of three, and when I looked at the Yahoo page I could only hear crickets. I did think it might be a split, but I couldn’t find a press release, and the ratio was strange. Finally, today, I went over to the nice folks at splithistory.com [no space between “split” and “history,” but explain that to the spell checker…] who told me that on Sept 21, 2022 CBIO had its third split in its corporate history a reverse split of 3803 shares for 1000 shares. This seemed an oddly specific number, certainly compared to a more typical, say, 5 shares for 1. What’s going on here? Other than generating a taxable event for those who don’t a position that is a multiple of one thousand, the only thing I can figure is that for the day of the split and the day after it had been pushed just over the threshold of fifty cents a share. So all I can figure is that the officers of the company had some positions (puts? calls? that stuff is all voodoo to me) with triggers of a half buck a share. I hope it was only mattered for the Wednesday and Thursday, because afterwards the price has stayed pretty much less than the magic number. Why they didn’t go for a 5 for 1in this picture guaranteeing meeting that threshold , I have no idea, unless they are idiots or wanted to live dangerously (or both). Or that the trigger was for exactly .50 cents a share. (I am not a stock savant, and don’t even play one on TV … or the internet).
So, were you entertained? Well, come back next we… what? You wanted to see the report? Oh well. Suffice to say none of the contest portfolios managed to have a gain this week, though some did manage to beat the S&P biotech composite’s result of an -8% loss. Many of the least bad performers were also in the YTD top ten. Welcome back HORSEINALFALFA to that list, after a two week vacation, thanks to having the best portfolio in the contest this week, a loss of only -1.8%.
Here it is, in all its glory:
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Report Time Ranges
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From
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To
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Recent
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9/16/22
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9/23/22
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YTD
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12/31/21
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Index Performance
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Symbol
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Recent
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YTD
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^IXIC
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-5.07%
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-30.53%
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^NBI
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-5.92%
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-21.93%
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^SPSIBI
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-8.02%
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-31.53%
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Share Performance
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Recent
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YTD
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Top 5
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Bottom 5
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Top 5
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Bottom 5
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GNCA
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70.337%
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SPPI
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-60.426%
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OPTN
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115.43%
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GNCA
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-98.69%
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WVE
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21.429%
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CASI
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-38.208%
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CBIO
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103.63%
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PTE
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-94.93%
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FENC
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18.457%
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HARP
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-36.846%
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FENC
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77.95%
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VLON
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-94.90%
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HRTIS.HE
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11.918%
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NCNA
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-34.347%
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STSA
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62.67%
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PLXP
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-93.49%
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TARS
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8.176%
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INZY
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-33.163%
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RVNC
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53.31%
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ATHX
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-92.76%
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Top 10 Portfolio YTD
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YTD(Portfolio - SPSIBI)
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Rec
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Rec(Port. - SPSIBI)
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DIEGOSAN
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-4.37%
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27.17%
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-3.641%
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4.382%
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DEW DILIGENCE
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-13.59%
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17.94%
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-5.334%
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2.689%
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TECHNETIUM
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-18.07%
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13.46%
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-5.176%
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2.847%
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BIOSCIENTISTSA
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-25.48%
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6.05%
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-7.558%
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0.465%
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BRENDAN_49
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-26.59%
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4.94%
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-10.992%
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-2.969%
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GENEGURU
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-28.16%
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3.37%
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-9.311%
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-1.288%
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ROCKY9
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-28.80%
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2.74%
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-3.779%
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4.244%
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KMASTRA
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-29.12%
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2.41%
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-6.139%
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1.884%
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A.J. MULLEN
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-29.56%
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1.97%
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-7.709%
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0.314%
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HORSEINALFALFA
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-32.10%
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-0.57%
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-1.837%
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6.186%
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Average and Median Portfolio Performance
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Avg Recent
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Avg YTD
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Median Recent
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Median YTD
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-$6,018
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-40.77%
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TWOONE1
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-$5,895
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MOPGCW
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-42.55%
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-9.62%
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ERIK
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-10.084%
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