SPCEO1 wrote: So, what you seem to be suggesting is it was my fault that Egrifta sales were far worse than anticipated back then, as that was the main reason the company's stock price fell. I don't recall having much to do with that. I also don't recall having anything to do with hiring John Huss, who clearly did not work out. And while I was against that offering that would have allowed the company to survive without going to the brink of failure, it was the board who made the final decision to not proceed, not me as I did not sit on the board. Also, had you sat in on the meeting that Huss did in New York trying to pitch the offering to investors, you would have known right then and there that it was not moving forward. He did a bad job pitching it and there was not enough interest in it from the investors who had gathered to hear his ptich. I was against the deal but I am not sure how much that mattered in the end. I am pretty certain had Huss done a nice presentation and gotten the investors interested that deal would have gone forward despite my objections. I suspect the brokers involved had more to do with pulling the plug on it than any complaint I made. The demand was just not there.
My point at the time was first go out and sell Egrifta and then raise money. Maybe Huss knew their sales projections were bogus and could not say so. But the norm in biotech is to announce good news (approval, clinical success, see the stock price rise and then blunt that rise with a share offering. It seems like a better idea to me to prove you can sell the drug you just got approved before asking for more money but that does involve taking more risk.
And, sadly, that experience likely helped the current board members to panic when they did the most recent offering. The situations they faced then and now were very different, but near death experiences certainly color the way you view the future.
I think to be fair, it is also worthwhile to remember that I believed the convertible offering was a great deal and highly complimented the company for it. Again, sales projections for Trogarzo were way too high and that is the real problem. Had sales of either or both Egrifta or Trogarzo been anywhere near what was expected, none of the issues we investors have faced would have ever occurred. The prinicple problem the company has had is lack of commercialization success, not bad deals.
I expect the stock to do well in the years ahead depsite the bad offering. Over the next few years that success will most likely be driven by clinical developments, not sales success. The stock is transitioning as we speak to an R&D driven one but this is something that sould have been accomplished a long time ago had the messaging been better.
In terms of whether they could have had a better deal, there is actually abundant evidence of that. Just about every other NASH stock, maybe all of them actually, have done deals that were better than THTX's Broaden that out to biotechs in general and you will see lots of better deals being done. Then there is the issue of the company's failure to get the stock to react positively to all the good news they were reporting, in the midst of a huge bull market when almost all other stocks were seeing their share prices rise, sometimes for the most spurious, even fraudulent, reasons. The evidence that they did a bad deal is actually overwhelming. If you want to argue that pricing a deal where it gives no value to all the major clinical success the company had is fair and sensible, knock yourself out, but I, and I doubt any other sensible investors, are going to agree with that assertion.
It was a horrible, no good, very bad deal and there is no way around that fact.
jfm1330 wrote: SPCEO,
I am one of the oldest here, old enough to remember that you were strongly against a financing deal in the US, the first time they went to the NASDAQ, under John Huss, remember him? I think the deal was around 4$ a share for tens of millions of dollars, and it was finally canceled, and you were very happy about that, because again, you felt that the price per share was not high enough, too much dilution for the shareholders. So the deal did not went through, and just two years after that the stock was at 0.25$ and the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. It survived because they got some tax credits payments from the government.
The company was forced to close the labs and almost everything the company had, keeping minimal staff, and all R&D was stopped. You know what? F4 and F8 formulations were already there in 2012, they were developped by Thera's R&D group before this disaster, and they were not pushed forward for many years after that because they had no money to do it. This financing at around 4$ per share would have allowed to avoid a lot of turmoil and would have allowed a lot of things to be done much earlier. F8 is thought today to be a game changer for Egrifta, but the company has it since at least 2012. Think about that.
So there is already one big example where you were totally against a financing, like today, and it turned out you were totally wrong on that. You almost lost all your investment in Thera because of that. But it seems you did not learn your lesson. Sorry, in biotech you take the money when you can, and don't tell me they could have had a better deal. There is no evidence to back that and personnally thinking the SP is too low is not a valid one.
SPCEO1 wrote: JFM1330 - I have never thought you were so foolish as to ignore the reality of what was done to us with that offering (and you in particular since you had just reentered the stock immediately before the offering). You shoyld be more righteously indignant than any of us!