I stand corrected, page-19

“The problem to my mind is that given your much trumpeted successful track record as an investor, you seem to set yourself up as infallible.”

I accept your criticism; I recognise that my style is not exactly self-effacing.

But rest assured that I am far from fallible. I have made some bad investing mistakes over my lifetime, (some of them quite recently), and invariably these mistakes arose because I didn't know what I didn't know. I would have been far better served if someone had pointed out to me the possible errors in my judgment. Or at least challenged my prevailing thinking.


“Your posts on capital management and risk are valid, however, I would much rather get views on the efficacy or otherwise of the MSB product.”

The reason I don’t comment at length about the product efficacy is that I am not proficient in that area, so I don’t feel I can add any value on the technical side. (The only product programme I have commented on was Bone Marrow Transplantation.)

Cheesy as it might sound, investing in a listed company is like a jigsaw puzzle; the more pieces you have, the clearer the picture becomes. Because each investor has his or her own unique style, each opinion could be seen as a potential new piece of the puzzle.


Because of their unique skills or experiences, some people can unearth pieces that I can't.

So, all I am trying to do is to add a few pieces to the puzzle that people might not know how to find.


I sense that there are people – like Vinn or Dolcevita – who know more than most on the efficacy side, and someone like Fruitbat appears to be very knowledgeable on the regulatory side.

My contribution, if it is to be of any value to anyone, would be on aspects of capital market mechanics, given that is my area of experience and ongoing interest (along with the odd error I make, such as the escrow situation on stock issued to Celgene, for which I duly apologised, and about which you have duly reminded me… and by way of redemptive equivalence, I have to point out to you that your estimate of $24m per quarter of cash consumption is - as I debated with you earlier - too low, as the most recent Appendix 4C revealed. The figure looks to be closer to $30m per quarter, going forward.)


For the life of me I have never been able to understand why people are so vehemently opposed to having the potential warts of their investee companies pointed out to them.


For even less-than-positive viewpoints could result in increased conviction in a stock if the incumbent positive stance on a stock gets challenged by such opposing viewpoint, and is found to remain intact – or indeed reinforced – after such challenge.



“You may pour cold water on the Celgene deal but when I see guys like Bill Burns and Jon Symonds putting their hard won reputations on the line by joining the board, I become a little more interested. Like you, neither man is infallible but it does provide me with a great deal of comfort.”


I think you are misinterpreting me on this deal. I never said it was a bad deal; nor that it couldn’t ever become a good deal. What I said that it was not at this stage a good deal. Not yet.

What I said was that it isn’t the sort of show-stopping deal that some elements of the market may have been expecting. And that we will know in 6 months’ time really how a good a deal – or otherwise – it is.

And it certainly isn’t – as it currently stands – a deal which buys MSB time until “at least the end of 2016”, as you suggested.

But, truth be told, I’m surprised the stock has not performed somewhat better than it has following the announcement of the deal, and I’m at a bit of a loss to offer an explanation why.

I thought the stock price would have been underwritten around $3.80, and the only thing I can think of that might be having an adverse effect on the price is that some followers of the stock who, after waiting for some time for a deal to be announced, might have found themselves underwhelmed by last week’s announcement.

That, or the quarterly cash burn of $30/quarter is running at a higher level than some had expected, especially after the CEO quoted a figure of $25m at the time of the release of the interim result in February.

But who really knows why stocks do what they do on a daily or weekly basis?