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Biotech / Medical : Pharmos (PARS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ariella who wrote (399)	1/5/1999 8:21:00 AM
From: Ariella	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1386

We're not alone (said ironically) <<Biotech Investor Shares Dreams, Frustrations of Little Companies>> By RALPH T. KING JR. Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- "I'm about to jump off the roof," the investor says. The investor is Gerald Larson, and there is a reason for his rather extreme sentiment. He is a biotechnology investor. The stock market was up 23.43% last year, as measured by the broad Wilshire 5000 index, and more than 16% a year, on average, for the previous dozen years. Mr. Larson could have profited fully from that, having inherited a nice nest egg in the 1980s. But he followed one of the sweetest siren songs ever to waft through Wall Street: the promise of fabulous genetically engineered breakthroughs, followed by fabulous stock-market riches. Many an investor has followed that lure for a year or two, giving up quietly after enduring just too much disappointment. The stocks they finally relinquish have names like Alteon, Amylin, Cephalon, Immulogic, Xoma -- little companies based on brilliant-sounding ideas and staffed with brilliant scientists, but with never quite enough money, and luck, to turn their dreams to reality. Now and then one of them breaks through to fortune, as Amgen, for instance, did. Indeed, a few established biotechs with actual earnings and some size have turned in stellar stock-market performances of late. The shares of Amgen and Biogen, which have drugs for sale, roughly doubled last year, behaving more like pharmaceutical stocks. But for every biotech that breaks out, there are dozens upon dozens that muddle along -- inadequately capitalized, giving convincing and even inspiring explanations of their science, but then having to cull another project every so often to make their dwindling money stretch further. At the annual meetings of these little companies, chairs stand empty, doughnuts go uneaten. Few securities analysts show up. Yet like die-hard fans of the Chicago Cubs, a coterie of immensely knowledgeable and long-suffering supporters keep coming to the game. Among them are investment pros like Liz Greetham of Weiss Peck & Greer, an investment manager, and Nicholas Metcalf of Newburyport, Mass., an independent investor, who sometimes writes reports about the biotech companies he visits and sends them to his friends. "Some say it's an exercise in masochism, but I don't like to quit once I start something," Mr. Metcalf says....>> continued in your local WSJournal.....