“It's just baffling that they talk about dealing commercially with partners etc, but don’t know the results”
About one or two months out from P2b results it is very normal for a micro-cap biotech to sense that the market is picking up a baseball bat with which it might give the company a big wallop if the market feels the results are not “good”.
Sensing this danger the company will try and reorientate the market away from idea of good and bad results to a more exploratory type scenario.
And so from the announcement you see the sentence:
“... a number of outcome measures have been included in the study design in order to provide meaningful insights into the efficacy of trofinetide”.
“Meaning insights” equals exploratory in contrast to binary type p<0.05 positive results which equal confirmatory.
The issue arises from market expectations that are out of sync with the reality of chasing small effect sizes in under-powered studies for difficult problems. Which just goes with the territory here.
This discrepancy however is an investor risk point. On HC doubly so because the re-orientation is misinterpreted 180 degrees as you have done (imo) to create a much more positive way of reading the tea leaves. Namely that NEU must have a good grasp of the results and be very confident for it state that it will be contacting commercial partners when it doesn’t know the results.
But “meaningful insights” is NEU saying that if they go exploring they will find something interesting and they are going to talk to rich people about this.
Which is just like what Captain Cook said when he went off exploring. Which is a little bit different to what the next bloke said when he set sail to confirm whether Captain Cook had in fact discovered Australia.
This also possibly explains why volumes are not quite what you are sensing they should be. The “bet” if you like is as much about anticipating the anticipations of others (the market reaction to this re-orientated story) as it is about those results themselves.
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