Tiresias: On Traders and True Believers

“For him that has will more be given; and he will have abundance:”

Mark 4:25

My friends,

Tiresias has seen and sees Optiscan has had some developments of late. Tiresias sees more. Tiresias sees multitudes.

Opti scan has been re-rated, a bit. But be not fooled. Tiresias remembers when CSL was floated at $2.40. He recalls some of his medical colleagues rushing to sell when they hit five dollars. They had made 100% plus profit. “Always take your profit soon”; “You never go broke taking a profit”; go some old Wall Street aphorisms. Today, and (before the share split) CSL is over $500 or $600.

Tiresias has seen many traders do exactly what these Wall Street adages say. “Take (small) profits too soon.” Well, some of my friends might be looking at the Optiscan profits today. Nice! They might be even feeling a little buoyed. They might even be a touch excited. They might even feel their trigger fingers twitching. Traders love this. But selling “too soon” is just that, “selling too soon”. Consider an analogy. Consider the story of antibiotics. Consider had Howard Florey, the Australian whose development of penicillin has saved more lives than have been lost in all the wars in all history. Consider if he had patented penicillin, which he did not. Now consider if a company had been floated on the back of the patent, which it was not. If that company had been floated, in the early 1940’s in the heat of WWII. Towards the closing stages of the war those sitting on a profit on the rise of “Penicillin PLC” would have been in the same position as my friends are in Optiscan right now. And some of those holders would have sold, and sold early, and taken a good profit. But they would have been selling in 1944! There would have been lots of justifications to sell. The war was coming to an end. The market for antibiotics would collapse after the war. “You never go broke taking a profit”, they would say. And “they” would have been wrong, dead wrong.

These are indeed early days in the real story of Optiscan. There is a lot lot more to come. Opti scan is a new paradigm in pathology; in cancer screening; in cancer diagnosis; in cancer surgery and cancer treatment. The recent recapitalization, the addition of a commercial board member and a new chairman bring to a whole universe of financial power and market opportunities. There is lots to come. Tiresias knows that Optiscan will join the pantheon of successful Australian medical technology companies. This my friends, is the real thing. This, my friends, is not the time to “Always sell too soon”, nor to invoke that other tired old adage to "You never go broke by taking a profits". As Ecclesiastes says, “to everything there is a season”, and for Optiscan, it is just spring. And spring is the season of renewal and rebirth. And it is still very much the season buy.