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

To: Roland Batson who wrote (27740)	1/31/1999 11:18:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Respond to of 32384

Actually, if you looked at the tape that day, you would see a rather disproportionate number of trades at the ask price. Since volume topped 900K and there were over 900 transactions, it would be rather difficult to define "the OTHER party" since there were hundreds of sells that day. LGND is rather complicated and with about 40 million shares outstanding and almost 1 million trading that day, it would be hard to come up with a universal "OTHER party" reason, but its rather obvious that the pressure on Thursday was on the BUY side.

To: Roland Batson who wrote (27740)	1/31/1999 11:54:00 AM
From: Henry Niman	Respond to of 32384

If your question is addressed as to who might be a seller at $13 something, I could come up with a few categories. The easiest category is of course "profit takers". Although there was quite a bit of buying on Thursday, there was some buying on Tuesday and Wednesday, which pushed the price up from just over $11. I suspect that some of this buying was by day traders who knew that there would be another wave of day trading buying, so they sold into strength, and took their short term 1 to 2 point profit. Others may have bought in August around the time that LGND was touching its all time low of 5 1/2. Those who bought a 5 or 6 something in Aug might have felt that a sell at 13 something 5 months later was a profit worth taking. Others might have also sold on LGND's strength because both price and volume were considerably higher than normal. The first two blocks that traded were at the bid price, and these could have been sellers looking for sufficient volume to cash out their blocks. What I found most interesting about Thursday action however, was the large number of big blocks that followed, almost all of which were at or above the ask price. These trades at 13 3/16 and 13 1/4 seemed to put a lid on LGND's price rise (the MMs seemed happy to continue to fill large blocks at this price). In any event, it will be interesting to see what happens when the final approvals come, which I suspect will begin this week.