Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and to my little group of mates who have recently purchsed, MSB is a Beauty! The price you paid and the time you have been in a stock shouldn't make any difference to your outlook for how it is likely to go in the future, and investing is all about the future. I can see that MSB, or any other stock (or a whole market), can be a source of frustration for years if you aren't getting the satisfaction of a rising price. People tend to blame the company, management, shorters, regulators like FDA, governments and institutions like the RBA for problems in their investments, but the simple fact is that you need to set your risk limits, time frame for investing and expectations of potential payoffs (good and bad) - then invest accordingly. If you truly think nothing is going to happen for 8 months with MSB, and your investment time frame is less than 8 months, then you should act accordingly - to act differently to your risk profiles and expectations is only going to frustrate you more.
One problem may be that your expectations are born out of emotions rather than analysis, and maybe you are hoping you are wrong - that is where a lot of people land, but then they get even angrier if they turn out to be right!
Our group of five active investors acts co-operatively to make an investment and try to cover all the bases of analysis, market timing (yes, including charting and behavioural finance), possible risks and potential upside. We compare potential opportunities across different sectors, and MSB came up as an interesting stock. We then split up the last 5 years of reports, with each person covering one year (Analyst recommendations, MSB announcements and official reports, HotCopper discussions, etc) and compared notes to see if we had new insights. The analysis on HotCopper 2-3 years ago was really excellent and there have been some gems of insight since which led us to our conclusion that MSB has tremendous leverage to a positive outcome with the FDA and that it has very little of this priced in at present. That observation is probably why there are people on here who are frustrated, and that is understandable, but it is advisable to separate the sunk cost and time from the future investment decision.
I must say, there is a lot of dross on HC, so we cut down the task by each person doing a year's worth of posts and only looking at the top posts in any given year. At present, we look at posts with over 20 thumbs up (only 18 with that many votes in the past week), but in previous year's the threshold was higher. We also exclude the most egregious time wasters - once identified they go on ignore. That cuts it down a lot and we end up with some really interesting insights which give us a lot of confidence in the future of MSB. I may be tempted to think differently if we had been stuck in the stock for a long time, but in a way, all that time which has elapsed now just makes us that much closer to the finish line. We found some excellent analysis from @LeftYahoo, @ddwn, @wombat777,@otherperspective, @ecoool2, @benelong and @col69 among many many others - @aquazul is a high rater at present and there have been great insights from@Phaedrus and insightful contributions from @gerzensee and some brilliant and humorous observations from @reginaldp. Lots more - sorry if I've left people out. There was a lot of great information made available at the time of the ODAC committee meeting and this is all available on-line and is really worth reading.
The reason that I include these names is that if you take the time to go through the top-rated posts, even over just the past 3 years you get a much better perspective of the future prospects for MSB (which could be spectacular if one of the blockbuster products drops). If you have a longer term timeframe than a few months, then it doesn't really matter if the company gives an expected timeframe for submission of the BLA and it misses by a few months - as long as you remain confident that it will happen within your own investment timeframe. Traders will come and go, and no doubt traders who were in the stock for short term satisfaction have packed up and left many times - that's where charting and behavioural finance comes in handy. Our recent charting view was that it was going to be difficult to break significantly through $1 and hold that level without a significant announcement, leaving the stock to drift a bit until that announcement was made. Our fundamental view is that an announcement on the final submission of the BLA or a partnering or funding deal is due soon (even overdue) and that any positive announcement in the near term is likely to power the price up through $1 and then it should hold $1 as a major support level. We are happy to wait for this as we judge the potential return as significantly more than the downside risk - just look at the consensus of analysts' forecasts and we also judge that it will happen within our "investment" timeframe as opposed to a "trading" timeframe.
Maybe the next quarterly cashflow statement which is due either tomorrow or maybe Monday will clear up some of these questions and we'll start the next leg up above $1. Meanwhile, it hasn't been a bad run since the June 30 capitulation low of 61c, and the price is doing very well to consolidate at such a high level without a major pullback, especially with such low volumes at present. I take the low volumes to mean the trend since June is intact - ie there has not been a major buying blow-off, nor there has been a big capitulation selloff which might indicate another low - so the trend continues in quite a big and volatile range. Maybe we have the luck to have bought recently in the high 70's, so we have a much brighter outlook on our investment, and I acknowledge the pain of those with losses who have been here a long time - but I'd re-iterate that all that matters now is your view of the future. Good luck.
MSB Price at posting:
93.5¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
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