Post by luxetvox on Feb 14, 2024 19:10:55 GMT
Ascendis is having a good day. Let me amend that: Ascendis is having another good day. When I just looked, the stock was up $4.24/2.96%, then the next trade was up $4.40/3.10%. Seems like a big jump in consecutive trades, right? It is interesting that the bid-ask can often be $0.35-$0.40, ostensibly a lot, But that's only about 1/4 of 1%. These days, Opko can routinely be quoted $1.01-$1.02, a nearly 1% spread, or four times that of ASND. Seems counterintuitive that a company with more than 10x the outstanding shares could be less liquid by a factor of 4. But the reality is that 1) as I've mentioned, when a buyer wants some ASND, they will drive the price up, simply because there simply ain't much available (still < 60mm shares), and 2) even with relatively few shares around, there is good liquidity in Ascendis. The reason for the latter is that there is great sponsorship of the company, by both the sell side (Wall Street) and the buy side (institutional investors).
I have to chuckle at some of our analysis of Opko when it comes to things like the convert....Frost controlling a certain percentage, whatever that means; how it seems "he made $100M to $150M or more on the deal, depending on Opko's value a year from now", which is even more of a head scratcher. Post mortems like this can be, as it were, fatal to the actual picture of what's going on at Opko. So, allow me to summarize.
Frost entered into yet another toxic financing, and got the personal financial fringe benefit of lowering the conversion price of the convertible instrument he originally purchased to keep the company afloat, and has now been rescheduled twice. In a way, he keeps putting off the inevitable by, as one member might put it, buying time. Which I suppose he's doing, well, because he can. No one has the balls to tell him to sit down, and get out of the way. He's buying time, loaned from shareholders in a way, and using a clock constructed by convertible arbs.....buying time for what exactly? It seems that he thinks he just needs more time to.....figure out what the hell to do. But he hasn't been able to figure it out for nearly a decade at this point, so....does he think he'll have a flash of inspiration, maybe by the time he's blowing out the 90 candles on his birthday cake?
Meanwhile, the stock is at $1.00, while ASND has added one-third of Opko's actual value (not some sum of parts projection) just today. Insiders there are selling a little, can you blame them. And the 13G's are being filed fast and furious. There are TEN institutional holders of ASND with stakes of 5% or greater. Opko has......one.
I have to chuckle at some of our analysis of Opko when it comes to things like the convert....Frost controlling a certain percentage, whatever that means; how it seems "he made $100M to $150M or more on the deal, depending on Opko's value a year from now", which is even more of a head scratcher. Post mortems like this can be, as it were, fatal to the actual picture of what's going on at Opko. So, allow me to summarize.
Frost entered into yet another toxic financing, and got the personal financial fringe benefit of lowering the conversion price of the convertible instrument he originally purchased to keep the company afloat, and has now been rescheduled twice. In a way, he keeps putting off the inevitable by, as one member might put it, buying time. Which I suppose he's doing, well, because he can. No one has the balls to tell him to sit down, and get out of the way. He's buying time, loaned from shareholders in a way, and using a clock constructed by convertible arbs.....buying time for what exactly? It seems that he thinks he just needs more time to.....figure out what the hell to do. But he hasn't been able to figure it out for nearly a decade at this point, so....does he think he'll have a flash of inspiration, maybe by the time he's blowing out the 90 candles on his birthday cake?
Meanwhile, the stock is at $1.00, while ASND has added one-third of Opko's actual value (not some sum of parts projection) just today. Insiders there are selling a little, can you blame them. And the 13G's are being filed fast and furious. There are TEN institutional holders of ASND with stakes of 5% or greater. Opko has......one.