I am being fairly cautious posting here in case I get pummeled...

I am being fairly cautious posting here in case I get pummeled from a few who would think I'm posting to say 'I told you so' – I am not. Firstly, I wasn’t 100% confident the trial would be unsuccessful, if I was I would have shorted everything in my possession – my professional opinion was that the chance of a positive result was very small. Looking at the graph of weight loss in all subjects with the different dosages I could not have imagined how the results could actually have been 'worse' than what I thought. As MBP stated, if the drug does have an effect independent of weight loss and exercise, then it is likely too small to detect in clinical trials and probably of not much benefit to advancing waistlines of the world when there are other options around.

Now, a word of warning to those perhaps still thinking of holding for the long-term with this company: yes, all holders are going to take a big hit today so after that the open it would be your decision if you cut your losses and take the pain of a big loss or wait for several years just for the chance to get back to even. I raised many concerns with how MBP presented and spun their data from the first phase II trial, and even in these results today, will all future trials for the drug suspended, they are still spinning. You would have noticed the graph 'indicating' a benefit for the drug in women who lost less than 2 kg in the 4 weeks run-in stage of the trial. This is the one of the most blatant cases of 'data mining' (technical word is subset analysis) I have seen.

Anyone with a large data set who looks at it closely enough and breaks it down into subcomponents is likely to find some 'interesting' data or even some statistical significant difference. They did this in their first trial by harping on about the 'rate of weight loss' and indications that it was better in men and also a greater percentage of people loss more than a certain amount of weight at some dosages. The failure of this trial really shows that this was just 'noise' and not a real effect and the latest 'finding' to do with women who lost less than 2 kg before the start of drug administration did better is just a bit of 'noise' as well – classic data mining that they spin to investors. In this case, it has no bearing on the company SP as the drug is finished and the shares will dive at open. Why am I posting this? This is a big warning to anyone thinking of holding that in the future you will likely keep dealing with these sort of happenings with how MBP present their results and how they misrepresent these to investors (most of who are not experts in the field) hence you should be prepared that by holding you could get stung again.

I doubt if anyone will be getting stuck into me for recommending this on the board as I hope that my postings before the release of the results showed that I have very valid concerns and I wasn't down-ramping – I am genuinely trying to educate a few investors in this tough segment of the market and actually try and save them from losing their shirt (at least with MBP).