WGS: $75M ATM Offering to/thru TD Cowen

Very general question, is 3% fee high, normal or low for similar transactions?

So, to clarify....re your shout: the ATM mechanism is not an offering per se, since it usually does not get tapped at once. A secondary is a lump amount, executed at once. Kate is betting that the stock will rise, so she can access capital at lower dilution, something that would never occur to Frost, Jane, Steve or Cookie Doughboy in a million years. Their m.o. is MAX dilution.

On fees, Bill could weigh in, but IPOs can be as high as 7%. Secondaries by definition would be less costly. And ATMs likely below that. I think 3% would be about the going rate.

While long term growth & profitability for WGS are not guarantees, this last year of execution by the lovely Kate has been pretty much flawless. For those focused on meaningless wagers, this is called Management.

After she was hired by Opko, it didn't take her long to realize that GeneDx couldn't achieve the success she wanted under Frost. So she lured him with a deal to sell it, a lure because it was a deal that was primarily stock. She knew gambling was Frost's weakness. I'd bet she'd already assessed that the legacy Sema4 business was crap, and that her new company's stock would suffer through a restructuring. And it did. So, while the reverse split screwed existing shareholders, including Opko, she was confident she could grow the GeneDx business, which was a 'gem' but likely starved by Frost. Salaries, bonuses, poorly conceived clinical trials were his top waste generating priorities. Her company is now worth $407 million , valued at 46.5% of Frosty's Frankenstein, Opko. Opko's sale price of GeneDx is now worth $150 million (the cash, which is gone), plus the original and incentive shares in WGS (~3.13 million shares), worth $49 million.

So, while we MAY realize more over time, Opko shareholders' running total for the sale of GeneDx stands currently at $199 million of value (pre-tax), a company which is now worth $407 million.

This stuff is not hard to understand, but there will be specious talk about counterfactuals etc in response to these realities. Yep, we got screwed, because 1) Frost clearly wouldn't let her invest in GeneDx, and 2) so he rubbed salt in the wound by selling it for way less than it was worth, on terms that were never likely to realize the total original sales consideration. She outsmarted him. And we are left holding Frosty's bag of trash, while he fills his own bags with cash.