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Biotech / Medical : GUMM - Eliminate the Common Cold -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Volcano888 who wrote (410)3/12/1999 1:29:00 AM
From: Eric Fader  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 5582
 
My only comment is, Quigley (maker of Cold-Eeze) wasn't built in a day, either.



To: Volcano888 who wrote (410)3/12/1999 4:08:00 AM
From: out_of_the_loop  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 5582
 
<Comments appreciated.>
OK - here are some.

<... For some time now I have been following the posts here and on SI, watching with both interest and skepticism>

Both laudable.

<but I still have a hard time accepting that such a small handful of internet posters are onto something big that has escaped the rest of the investment world and medical/pharmaceutical community.>
1. GUMM has not hyped this and barely has attached their ticker yet to reports about Zicam. The fact that not many trades are occurring is only because investors do not know about this yet because GUMM is not hyping it, or at least has not to this point. Brown Russell, when I talked to him in late January, told me "when the product comes out and people start finding it and buying it, investors will find us."
2. The product has been out for barely 40 days and advertisement on TV just started this week. Maybe you should state a question a bit more succinctly and directly instead of asking for broad comments.
3. There have been numerous TV, radio and newspaper stories about Zicam and a respected academic ENT physician from Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital gave a very positive interview about Zicam. Use a library-check his credentials after viewing the downloadable file from the Detroit Living website that was posted and you have presumably read. Call him if you think it's a hoax. The authors have submitted a clinical study (the same one that Dr. Seidman commented on for TV) to the New England Journal of Medicine. Nothing happens in a day. The release of Zicam this season is the result of a combination of marketing, business, and medical choices.
4. As an investor, you cannot simultaneously get in on the ground floor and realistically hope that the day you buy the stock will skyrocket as the next day your product becomes a household word. The same company that promoted Viagra is promoting Zicam, but on a different level and with a different budget. GUMM is not PFE. PFE is a good investment, too, so why not just go there?

<but I do have doubts -- partially engendered by painful lessons from other small-cap stocks that also supposedly promised a great future.>
A lot of small caps are risky. I, too, have lost bucks in them. GUMM is a reporting NASDAQ company with IR people. Have you called them to succinctly express your questions? Based on your previous post about knowing someone I presume is Brown Russell's relative, you should have no qualms about calling him. Would you care to be more specific here?

<Also: I called three Eckerd's in my Florida location and none has Zicam or is familiar with it.> There have been several posts about Eckerd's and similar problems. Product has ben delivered to their warehouses and it takes time to get people who sell 8 zillion items familiar with another and you may have to forgive the clerks if they don't see the importance of your investment vs. their need to call their girlfriends on the phone while they are supposed to be helping you. GUMM does not & cannot run Eckerd's and can only supply them and hope that the market takes care of the rest, all while they advertise to help that very process. The distribution channels are well-documented on the www.zicam.com site, and I & several others of us here have the product, some of which I personally got at Albertson's and posted scanned images on my previously posted web site to demonstrate that actual humans had touched and viewed Zicam. King Kullen ads for it have been scanned and links posted. You can order some off the website. If you are going to invest thousands of dollars in something like this, that should be a necessary cost of your research, and may be tax-deductible <g>.
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I think that nobody has responded to you because over the past couple of months all the innuendo about:
-the product not existing;
-the product not working;
-nobody able to find the developers' CV in medical searches;
-lack of acceptance of the mechanism of action;
-and many inappropriate (& some appropriate) comparisons to Quigley's product, history, & marketing;
-the lack of product on the shelf so it must not exist
-the fact that it's not a gum-based product so that GUMM has no faith in its core business;
AND many other nonfacts and distortions of fact have been presented both sincerely by interested nonpartisans and biased shorters. Basically, nobody wanted to answer an open-ended question because they did not want to try to figure out what your question was and end up posting a diatribe such as this one. The issues to which you allude have been hashed out, argued, discussed and most of us are just waiting for the publicity to unfold - people have already posted sightings of the commercials on CNN Headline News, Jerry Springer, various game shows, Hard Copy, and others (just to name a few I have read about here and on Yahoo). Carpe Diem, just walk on by, or wait until later. Nobody says if you want to invest in GUMM you have to do it now. You can wait and get in later when it may be either lower or higher.
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So, what specific comments are you looking for and what specific questions would you like answered?

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Also, food for thought. Did advil/ibuprofen/motrin get accepted overnight? Did generic drugs get accepted overnight? There are many other stocks to choose and you have to find your comfort level with what you perceive as the risks.