Boo! (Which Is All I Have to Say About Halloween) October 31, 2005March 2, 2017 FREE MONEY A zero-percent loan for a year. Just be sure you make the small monthly payments on time and then pay back the balance in full at the end of 12 months, before interest starts to accrue. Thanks, Citibank. Click here. FREE ENTERTAINMENT Ken Ritz: ‘For some terrific, and inexpensive (free, if you don’t count real estate taxes) entertainment, use the public library. Our libraries here in Rockford, Illinois (like everywhere else, I guess) have a Web site where you can reserve a book, CD, DVR . . . and they e-mail you as to when your selection comes in.’ FLU Del Rickel offers this link to an argument that the avian flu threat is purposely overblown for the benefit of some drug companies (including one Donald Rumsfeld chaired before returning to the Pentagon). The author says that if we don’t make our living working with birds, it’s unlikely we have much to worry about. And that even if he’s wrong, billions spent on Tamiflu will do nothing to save us. Instead, he says, we should eat right, exercise, and stay clean. I don’t know whether he’s right, but don’t be offended if I rush to wash my hands after meeting you. TEN MORE PUNS Noel Serrano responded to the Patty Whack and Gandhi puns with a list of ten additional puns, hoping that one or more of them would make me laugh. But (stealing shamelessly from the list he sent), no pun in ten did. SHORT SQUEEZE Jonathan Walter: ‘I notice on Bloomberg that the short interest in NTMD is currently close to 50% of the float. I was wondering what your view is of the potential threat of a short squeeze, and of the future trigger point people might be waiting for to unravel this already reasonably chunky bearish position?’ ☞ The Nitromed pie is divided into about 30 million slices, about a third of which are held by insiders and not traded freely, leaving a ‘float’ of about 20 million. Of these, shortsellers have borrowed about half to sell short. A short squeeze would occur if the stock starts going up and, scared by this (or forced by their brokers to cover their shorts lest they lose more than 100% of their account and cost the broker money), they buy shares to cover their shorts, driving the price still higher and squeezing more shortsellers to cover. There is always this risk, which is why I suggested buying puts rather than shorting the stock directly. With puts, you can lose only what you bet – not more. (There is also the risk that the owners of the shares short-sellers have borrowed will find ways to move those shares from their margin accounts, where the broker is free to lend them to short-sellers, to their cash accounts, where the broker is not . . . or even to demand physical delivery of the stock certificates. In other words, that they will be able to force a short-squeeze. But this doesn’t seem to happen a whole lot. And with about 65% of the stock held by institutions, which get paid to lend out their shares, it’s not clear it will happen with NTMD.) Consider, also, that those who’ve shorted the stock think they have a pretty good reason. As companies go, Nitromed is not enormously complicated to analyze. It has one product. That product is the combination of two widely prescribed, readily available-at-one-sixth-the-price generics. Either it will sell well or it won’t. So far, it is not selling terribly well. And consider, finally, that because they are sitting with profits as the stock has fallen from a high of 27.99 in February to $15.78 at Friday’s close, the shortsellers are in no rush to close out their positions and incur income tax on their gain. Nor may some of them ever have to cover their shorts. One can theoretically stay short a stock forever. Only once the stock becomes officially worthless is the jig up. You then have to report your profit as a taxable event, in effect ‘buying back’ for $0 the shares you shorted for $20 or $25 each. So the shorts have a tax disincentive to cover their shorts before the end of the year . . . while some of those who own the stock, by contrast, may decide to sell their shares before year-end for the tax loss. The company is scheduled to webcast a conference call Thursday at 9am. Bulls on the stock hope management will present good news that will drive the stock back up. Bears are betting the company will report the kind of sales results that do not justify a $500 million market cap. Don’t sell your puts.
FDR and Gandhi October 28, 2005January 16, 2017 Some of you may be wondering what I think of today’s momentous developments. But because I wrote this column last night, I don’t know what they are – or even if there were any. In the meantime: TIVO ‘WARM SPRINGS’ MONDAY I hope to write at more length about this, but for now, I commend to you an HBO movie called ‘Warm Springs‘ that at least some HBO subscribers can see this coming Monday at 4pm – check ‘your local listings’ to see whether you get it. It’s about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Eleanor, and it is wonderful. It is a story, ultimately, that calls us to (stealing a line from the movie) ‘come together as a family and do what we do best: lift each other up.’ Coming from a man stricken by polio at the age of 39 – who would be unable to walk for the rest of his life, yet go on to be four times elected President to lead us through the Depression and World War II – it carries particular poignancy. Seriously: try to tape it. Failing that (or in addition) read an interview with the author. Don’t get HBO? Have no TiVo? Well, I admire your frugality (and by sharing it in my early years am able to afford HBO and a TiVo). Go find some old guy with HBO and TiVo and have him invite you over to watch it. PLAN B Lorraine: ‘What is Plan B? Did I miss a column? It sounds very important.’ ☞ Sorry, I meant to include the link. It’s a pill to prevent pregnancy after sex that would help to make abortion rare. It’s currently sold by prescription. The FDA staff recommended making it available over-the-counter (because it’s not always easy to get a prescription at 2am on a Saturday night). But then forces from the right flexed their muscles and the Administration blocked it. TAMIFLU Jeffrey Davis: ‘Tamiflu may be ineffective against H5N1.’ ☞ So I guess we may have been wise – or lucky – not to order enough. Monday, I linked to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about bird flu so scary that I was advised by my advertisers not to excerpt more than a few lines. They want you in a happy, shopping mood this holiday season. But then I realized, wait, I have no advertisers. These must be the voices of my imaginary advertisers, and they must have somehow gotten past my imaginary secretary. So at the risk of turning you into an obsessive handwasher this winter, here’s a good chunk of the article, reminding us yet again to have in the stock market only cash we won’t actually need (for things like rent and food) for several years – not because the market will go down sharply, but because it might. (A joke follows.) “We are betting the nation that this may not happen soon,” said Dr. Tara O’Toole, chief executive officer and director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity. “There is still no strategy; there is still no one in charge.” The imminent release of the HHS pandemic flu plan will do little to change that perception, the experts said, pointing out that a version leaked to The New York Times two weeks ago is short on practical details. . . . Whether and how to prepare for a flu pandemic is not a new discussion. The federal government developed its first plan in 1978 and began revising it in 1993. HHS released a 50-page draft in August 2004. Academics and government workers who have been part of the process say rewriting – particularly of the plan’s quarantine provisions – continued through last week. The long process has put the United States behind other industrialized nations such as Britain and Canada that published their plans months or years ago. The lag has provoked impatience: The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office called for a final plan six times in the past five years. The Trust for America’s Health warned in June that the delay left the country vulnerable to wide social and economic disruption if a flu pandemic strikes. Health authorities, including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predict that a pandemic will occur at some near-future point. There have been 10 in the past 300 years; the last was in 1968, and the next is considered overdue. . . . The economic impact of a pandemic could rival the Depression, according to an August analysis by the Canadian investment house BMO Nesbitt Burns. Oil prices and commodity markets would crash; transportation would collapse as countries close their borders; and just-in-time supply chains of food, goods, manufacturing components and medical supplies would be cut, the firm said. Businesses should expect to lose one-fourth of their employees for up to four months, the Trust for America’s Health said in June. Planners are also concerned that the flu’s impact would fall hardest on institutions and governments that are already struggling. Hospitals and emergency rooms are already overcrowded, and state health care is stressed because of budget cuts. Some planners are urging states and the federal government to engage the public and the business community in frank conversations about a pandemic’s likely realities. “We need to assure the food supply, drinking water, heat in northern climates,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, founder of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, who has consulted with HHS on the federal plan. “We need to be make sure we have pharmaceuticals for conditions other than influenza. And we need the capability to process, respectfully and with dignity, the bodies of up to 1.9 million people who might die over the course of a year.” GANDHI David Summers: ‘I enjoyed Patty Whack. My favorite of that type is: The great spiritual leader Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time, causing his feet to be quite sore and calloused. His unusual and spare diet made him physically weak and gave him bad breath [at least for the purposes of this riff]. Thus, it is said of Gandhi, that he was a super-calloused fragile mystic hexed with halitosis.’
Go Back and Read Mon-Tues-Weds There Will Be a Quiz October 27, 2005March 2, 2017 You’re not going to tell me you read the last three days’ columns in their entirety – they were much too long, and much of that time the web site was down anyway. So go read ’em now. Especially the item about comparative oinkiness. Today, let me just note that one of the firms that has been recommending Nitromed stock, Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., yesterday reduced its forecasts for sales of BiDil, the company’s (only) product, from $17 million in 2005 to $7 million – 58% lower than previously. From $134 million in 2006 to $59.5 million – 55% lower. And from $232 million in 2007 to $134 million – 42% lower. And since sales are not all profit (the pills themselves cost almost nothing to produce, but there is a projected $120 million or so a year in other expenses), the reduction in expected profit in those years is presumably even steeper. So by how much has this firm reduced its ‘target price’ for the stock, given that they think sales will be only half what they thought before? By 10%, from $32 to $29. (They now think 2008 will be the year big profits start to flow.) NTMD closed at $16.32 last night, down from just over $22 when we first started talking about it July 6. Anything is possible, of course. But presuming you went into this with money you could truly afford to lose (as you still could): don’t sell your puts. Oink, oink.
The Latest Borowitz Shocker October 26, 2005January 16, 2017 Verio got its backup system working for six hours yesterday, then went down until this morning. I am sorry if you missed yesterday‘s column or Monday‘s (and glad I am not a hospital or an air traffic controller). Here is today’s: WANT TO REDUCE ABORTIONS? I do. Click here. Plan B is NOT the same as RU-486 (the ‘abortion pill’) . . . it works BEFORE conception. If you care at all about reducing abortion, as most of us do, please add your voice to the call for over-the-counter purchase of Plan B. (I believe RU-486 should be legal, also. But the availability of Plan B should make the need for it all the more rare. Plan B is something both sides should be able to agree on.) PORK Kevin Clark: ‘You’re absolutely right about the need to set priorities. But I’m not sure Democrats are any better at it than Republicans. Would you be willing to report in your column which senators voted in favor of Senator Coburn’s proposal to redirect some pork to hurricane relief? It was defeated something like 85-15. It’s a bipartisan problem and a big one.’ ☞ True. But the number of pork projects has increased dramatically since the Republicans have controlled Congress and, especially, since the Republicans have controlled everything – 13,997 pork projects this year, up from fewer than 2,000 when the ‘Gingrich revolution’ swept the Republicans into Congress in 1994. (The number of Senators and Representatives, meanwhile, remains unchanged at 535. They’ve just gotten 7 times as oinky under Republican leadership.) THOUGHTS ON OUR FOREIGN POLICY Meanwhile, have you seen this (worth reading in its entirety) from Larry Wilkerson, former director of the Marine Corps War College and former chief of staff at the State Department? “If you’re unilaterally declaring Kyoto dead, if you’re declaring the Geneva Conventions not operative, if you’re doing a host of things that the world doesn’t agree with you on and you’re doing it blatantly and in their face, without grace, then you’ve got to pay the consequences.” I do not look for a bull market any time soon. THOUGHTS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES Thanks to Granny Bee from makethemccountable.com for drawing my attention to a piece by University of Michigan historian Juan Cole that helps explain how the New York Times went the Judy Miller route and blew it on Iraq. In key part: Rupert Murdoch, and Richard Mellon Scaife, and other far rightwing billionaires have deeply corrupted our information environment. They are in part responsible for what happened at the NYT. Miller attempts to excuse her shoddy reporting on Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction by saying that “everyone” got that story wrong. But the State Department Intelligence and Research Division did not get it wrong. . . . Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Commission was not wrong. Imad Khadduri, former Iraqi nuclear scientist, was not wrong. “Everybody” got it wrong only in the sense that “everybody” had been brainwashed by Rupert Murdoch. . . . In essence, Murdoch, Scaife and other far rightwing super-rich propagandists succeeded in maligning the NYT and in pushing it off its liberal perch even further to the Right. In trying to defend themselves from the charge of treason, Raines and Keller fell into the trap of using Miller’s shoddy reporting as a rampart. In the end, it was revealed to be not a rampart but a Trojan Horse for the Right. BOROWITZ SHOCKER This just in from my pal Andy Borowitz of the Borowitz Report: DEMOCRATS SEEKING WAYS TO SQUANDER HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY ‘We Will Manage to Screw This Up,’ Vows Dean Given a Republican president with plummeting approval ratings and a Republican congressional leadership that is being investigated, indicted, and in at least one case fingerprinted, Democratic party leaders said today that they are “actively seeking” ways to squander their historic opportunity. At a press conference in Washington, D.C. today, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean reassured the party faithful that the Democrats would stick to tradition and find some way to blow this golden opportunity. “People look at the mess the Republicans find themselves in and ask, ‘How could the Democrats possibly screw this up?'” Gov. Dean said. “I am here to say, don’t worry, we will find a way.” The DNC chief said that the Democrats have already convened a top-level brainstorming session of strategists from the Dukakis, Mondale, and Kerry campaigns to formulate a plan for squandering the opportunity the Republicans have handed them on a silver platter. According to those familiar with the strategy session, the Democrats have already settled on a new slogan for the 2006 midterm elections, “Read our lips – tons of new taxes,” and that most of that new tax revenue would be used to promote the legalization of crystal meth. While it is still early to be planning how to lose the 2008 election, Gov. Dean said that most preliminary discussions have revolved around nominating the Rev. Al Sharpton for President. “We’re only going for Sharpton because our first choice, Jacques Chirac, was unavailable,” Gov. Dean said. ☞ Actually, I am pleased to report, Democrats, with strong leadership from Governor Dean, are hard at work attempting not to squander this opportunity. Recall that it was just SIX WEEKS before the 1994 mid-term election that Newt Gingrich unveiled his ‘Contract with America’ – not 54 weeks before. And that, even now, the latest poll I saw showed voters, by a margin of 48% to 39%, wanting to return Congress to the Democrats. If you’re beginning to think the Republican leadership does not represent your interests all that well . . . that ‘compassionate conservatism’ has somehow morphed into a culture of corruption, incompetence, and cronyism (‘U.S. FACING CRONY SHORTAGE,’ reads another Borowitz shocker: ‘Not Enough Cronies to Fill Government Positions, President Warns’) . . . that even on issues like reducing abortion they may be getting it backwards (see Plan B, above) . . . visit democrats.org and sign up. We need you.
Tamiflu – Now There’s a Drug with Legs October 25, 2005January 17, 2017 Verio, which hosts this web site, lost power at its Boca Raton data center as Wilma swept through. Our home lost power, too, but, unlike theirs, our back-up emergency generator worked. Sorry if you missed yesterday. Here’s today: THAT NEW CAR SMELL ‘That new car smell,’ I’ve long held, ‘is the most expensive fragrance in the world.’ Now we learn that ‘recent research links it to a toxic cocktail of harmful chemicals’ as well (thanks, Thor). The smell, it seems, ’emanates largely from chemicals that leach from glues, paints, vinyls and plastics in the passenger compartment.’ Japanese auto makers are hard at work on the problem. But in the meantime, you have two reasons to buy your cars used. GOLD I’ve long held, also, that digging for gold is a waste. After all, gold’s value lies largely in its scarcity. Digging more only makes it less scarce. (We have more than enough already for our industrial needs.) But now, as readers of yesterday’s New York Times front page know, it turns out there is another reason not to dig for it – the environmental cost. ‘Consider a ring,’ write the authors of the Times piece. ‘For that one-ounce of gold, miners dig up and haul away 30 tons of rock and sprinkle it with diluted cyanide, which separates the gold from the rock. . . . [Some] gold mines, have become the near-equivalent of nuclear waste dumps that must be tended in perpetuity.’ Through dumb luck, Charles and I went with platinum. (Well, first I went with silver, bought off a sidewalk card table, ten bucks each, but that went only so far.) Now one of you can write in and let me know that to produce an ounce of platinum, entire ecospheres must be destroyed. NTMD Last week 595 BiDil prescriptions were written. That sounds like a lot – nearly 12 prescriptions in each of the 50 states. But if each prescription is for 180 pills and the company gets its full $1.80 price per pill, that would be sales just shy of $200,000 for the week. The problem is that the company has projected expenses of around $2 million a week . . . and that Wall Street analysts have projected sales of $10 million for the quarter just ended and $20 million for the quarter we’re in now. Twelve weeks at $200,000 a week falls well shy of $10 million, let alone $20 million. Of course, none of this matters if BiDil sales begin to rocket. But while they are likely to rise a good bit, as more new patients begin taking BiDil and those already taking it go to the pharmacy for refills, it’s not at all clear they will rise anywhere near enough. At the end of the day, BiDil is comprised of two widely prescribed generics readily available at about one-sixth the price. And while it’s one thing to pay $8 for a bottle of genuine Bayer-brand aspirin versus $1.29 for the generic – who cares?* – it’s another to spend $2,500 a year on BiDil instead of $400 on its two components. Especially when, if you’re taking BiDil, you’re probably on five or ten other drugs as well. One of the firms that follow Nitromed, SG Cowen, recently opined: ‘IMS Health data suggest Q3 BiDil end-user sales will fall far short of Street estimates, while the drug’s ability to meet longer-term consensus numbers remains uncertain.’ With the stock closing last night at $17.80, the company has sales of around $200,000 a week, expenses projected at around $2 million a week, and a market capitalization of about $540 million. Don’t sell your puts. *I do. THE FLU One drug that is selling like crazy is Tamiflu. ‘Despite warnings from disease experts, nonprofit organizations and its own consultants, ‘reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ‘the United States has lowballed its orders for Tamiflu, the only antiviral drug believed to be effective against bird flu, choosing to stockpile enough to protect 2 percent of its population rather than the 25 percent chosen by other countries and recommended by the World Health Organization.’ Yes, but we cut taxes dramatically for the rich and appropriated $223 million for a bridge to an island with 50 people on it – you can’t do everything. It’s a matter of priorities. That’s what Democrats just don’t understand. Tomorrow: More Stuff to Read
Remembering the Risks October 24, 2005March 2, 2017 Gasoline prices and home heating prices are going up, adjustable-rate mortgage payments may as well . . . how is the average Jane or Joe going to make ends meet? Home equity has stopped going up, limiting their ability to go borrow further against it. A hike in the minimum wage has been quashed by the Republicans yet again – there has been no cost-of-living adjustment in eight years. The economic near term for most Americans, and for many of the businesses that depend on their custom, looks dodgy. (One bright spot: the rich, especially in Houston, are doing great.) Meanwhile, the markets wait for special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The S.E.C. investigation of the Senate majority leader and the indictment of the House majority leader are footnotes compared with what we may see in the next few days concerning the White House. It’s possible, of course, that Fitzgerald will just wrap up the investigation and say he couldn’t find out who blew Valerie Plame’s cover, or anything else worth indicting. But as James Moore writes in the Huffington Post: We know . . . based upon what we have read and seen and heard that someone created fake documents related to Niger and Iraq and used them as a false pretense to launch America into an invasion of Iraq. And when a former diplomat made an honest effort to find out the facts, a plan was hatched to both discredit and punish him by revealing the identity of his undercover CIA agent wife. Patrick Fitzgerald has before him the most important criminal case in American history. Watergate, by comparison, was a random burglary in an age of innocence. The investigator’s prosecutorial authority in this present case is not constrained by any regulation. If he finds a thread connecting the leak to something greater, Fitzgerald has the legal power to follow it to the web in search of the spider. It seems unlikely, then, that he would simply go after the leakers and the people who sought to cover up the leak when it was merely a secondary consequence of the much greater crime of forging evidence to foment war. Fitzgerald did not earn his reputation as an Irish alligator by going after the little guy. . . . We may stand witness to a definitive American moment of democracy. The son of a New York doorman probably has in his hands, in many ways, the fate of the republic. . . . How will the markets react if things become uncertain here for a while? Markets don’t like uncertainty. Then again, markets anticipate, and so may already have discounted the uncertainty. (‘Buy on the rumor, sell on the news’ – or, in this case, sell on the rumor, buy on the news.) But my guess is that confidence has not yet bottomed out. The markets want intelligent, sure leadership. The prospect of having to get through more than three more years of the Bush Administration, with its appointments like ‘Brownie’ at FEMA and Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, and its disastrous mishandling of the war, cannot breed much confidence. (Over the weekend someone sug-jested that, to succeed Alan Greenspan, the President would nominate his personal accountant.) Meanwhile, the alternative prospect, of a period of possible leadership turmoil – if it turns out the President knew all along who leaked Valerie Plame’s cover, and that there was a conspiracy to ‘fix the facts around the policy’ to mislead the nation into war – cannot breed much confidence either. Timing the market is famously difficult. If you are truly in it for the long-term, don’t try. Especially if you are young, in the excellent habit of directing $300 a month into your index funds (say) – don’t break that habit. But if you have ignored advice only to risk in the market money you won’t need for many years, now would be a good time to remember that advice. Not because the market necessarily will go down, but because it might.
Wilma! October 21, 2005March 25, 2012 I could lie and say there’s no column today because I’m moving to higher ground . . . but I’m actually up North already. So I could use the excuse that Amtrak was late getting in tonight . . . but it was only 15 minutes late and there was, after all, power at my seat, had I chosen to plug in my laptop. I could have returned to the Trojan.Vundo virus excuse . . . but Norton finally fixed it (what a mess THEIR customer interface is). So the only thing for it is to tell you the truth: the dog ate my column. Bad dog. On the bright side, this should leave you more time to go out and play.
Our Lack of Preparedness Could Make You Pull Out Your Hair October 20, 2005March 2, 2017 Sorry, no time for anything serious . . . still quaking from listening to former Counter-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke at a DNC conference today. He notes that in four years, our parents’ generation was able to defeat the Nazis and Japan simultaneously, whereas in four years since 9/11, we haven’t even gotten our first-responder communications systems talking to each other, let alone made any significant progress in securing our chemical and nuclear facilities. (There are about 100 chemical plants in America whose lethal plumes could cover population areas of 1 million or more, he notes.) His presentation was beyond gripping. I hope to be able to link you to the audio next week. I just ordered his forthcoming novel, The Scorpion’s Gate, which I expect will be #1 on the best-seller lists in short order. Read it and regift it. POTENTIAL BOREALIS COMPETITOR BITES DUST (Thanks, Paul O’Donnell.) Malaysian Who Pulled Jet With Hair Dies Oct 19 10:38 AM US/Eastern KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia Letchemanah Ramasamy, known to Malaysians as “Mighty Man” for feats that included pulling planes and buses with his hair, has died of heart complications, his family said Wednesday. He was 55. Ramasamy succumbed to a heart valve infection at a hospital in a Kuala Lumpur suburb Tuesday, about two years after he underwent a heart transplant, his son, Thiyagarajan Ramasamy, told the national news agency, Bernama. Ramasamy achieved national fame in 1990 when he used his hair to drag a Boeing 737 aircraft over a distance of nearly 56 feet at a Malaysian airport. In 1999, he towed a double-decker bus over a distance of 98 feet in Leicestershire, Britain. BOB LOBLAW, ESQ. Ed Miske: ‘Of course, I didn’t get it . . . until a split second after I took a mouthful of coffee, which I’ve just cleaned off of the screen and keyboard.’ ☞ It’s even funnier when you hear them say it with straight faces. FRONTAL LOBOTOMIES Jeff: ‘The ‘bottle in front of me . . . frontal lobotomy’ is a classic Tom Waits quote. Another great one: ‘I knew him when he was nothing and he hasn’t changed a bit.” Daisy: ‘I heard it as, ‘I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me than a pre-frontal lobotomy.’ A little funnier that way, doncha think?’ ☞ Yep.
Bulls, Bears, and Woodpeckers October 19, 2005January 17, 2017 So I was paging through the September 29, 2003 issue of the New Yorker (I never seem to catch up) and came to a cartoon with a big wooden ship sinking below the water line in a drenching rain. Couple of giraffe necks sticking up above the deck. Caption: ‘I knew the woodpeckers were a mistake.’ Point one: You can have this New Yorker cartoon – or any other – made into a box of custom note cards to give to someone you know who breeds woodpeckers. Or click here for some free stuff and ideas on what to get those on your holiday gift list who don’t breed woodpeckers. Like this one for a cat lover. Or this one to send those nice people whose beach house you visit. Or this one for your law student nephew (‘My fees are quite high, and yet you say you have little money. I think I’m seeing a conflict of interest.’) Point two: The woodpecker cartoon argued strongly for holding Borealis shares and Nitromed puts (if, in each case, they were bought with money you can truly afford to lose). Because at the end of the day, sometimes in a complicated situation (it was pouring! there were hundreds of species of animals on that ark! imagine the noise! the smells! the chaos!), one fact stands out as critical. This certainly isn’t always the case. But sometimes it is. In this case, it was the woodpeckers. In the case of Borealis, it is that the plane moved. This company, selling these days at an overall market valuation of around $70 million (5 million shares at $14 each), has a technology that allows an electric motor the size of a watermelon to drive a fully loaded 767 around the tarmac like a golf cart. Might a much smaller version one day drive much smaller things around like golf carts? (Like, say, golf carts?) And in the case of Nitromed, it is that the company makes a pill (and only this one pill) that is the combination of two readily available generics available for around $400 a year instead of $2,500. Now, I will grant you that the woodpeckers might have pecked only interior, non-load-bearing parts of the ark. (Indeed, as Noah survived, they probably did.) Or that Borealis may fail to turn what appear to be extraordinary, patented technologies (and a supposed $1 billion iron ore deposit) into a real business. Or that Nitromed may persuade insurers to pay the $2,500 instead of the $400, and doctors to prescribe BiDil more widely than my medical guru believes they will. That’s why I keep stressing these are not sure things and you should only hold them if you can afford to lose your money. But woodpeckers tend to peck. And the plane moved. And BiDil is composed of two readily available generics. (‘Cohn could not get what is known as a ‘combination of matter’ patent because the combined form of these two generic drugs did not act differently than using each separately,’ reads one of the key sentences in a lengthy article in the current Health Affairs.) I see no change in the case I made for BOREF a couple of months ago. And the 7-day rolling average for BiDil prescriptions was a modest 57.7 on October 16 . . . yet the maker, Nitromed, is valued at $550 million.
Priorities October 18, 2005March 2, 2017 PRIORITIES We are so deeply in the red now with Iraq and tax cuts and Katrina, even the Republican Congress is getting concerned. Their solution? Cut health care for the poor, food stamps, and student loan programs. It’s what Jesus would have done. PLAME It’s about way more than Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame, argues the author. ‘No one should forget the trips Cheney personally made to Langley in order to wring war-supporting evidence out of the analysts.’ Especially if you missed Frank Rich Sunday, this is one to read.