Interesting anecdote
Thanks for all the interesting posts as of late. One of the most recent posters mentioned Loxo as an example of a company that got a buyout for 8b based on a drug for a small subset of tumours, for which all it does is shrink the tumours.
I had a family friend whose child had a progressive metastatic tumour and everytime we saw them the child looked worse and worse. Essentially palliative but in slow motion.
He turned out to have the mutation that the Loxo drug targetted and was started on it. I saw them after he had been on the drug for a month and he was already off his 24hr oxygen and looked a 1000x better. The parents showed me his tumours on a picture on their phone and they were all there but much smaller. He did great. Not cured. Tumours shrunk and are now held in quiescent mode.
So I bought some Loxo.
And watched the stock swing quite a bit. My initial investement seemed to not be going well. The only thing that made me NOT sell was the fact that I kept coming back to the idea that if a company made a drug that could do what I saw firsthand with the family friend, it had to have long term value. I just couldn't imagine how it wouldn't be a good thing and have some place in medicine. Loxo was bought out and I did great.
The only reason I bring up the example is that I'm a medium term holder of TLT and, like all of us, have gotten very confused/annoyed/fristrated by the wild swings in this stock. I keep thinking what if it doesn't play out? Whenever I second guess things I remember the first thing that I heard about TLT was that one single treatment (phase 1b) cured 2/3 patient's who had no other treatment options short of cystectomy. And then I saw the market cap and decided that, no matter what, a company that has a single treatment drug that worked permanently on 2/3 patients like that has to have value beyond 50-60m market cap. Some kind of value. Maybe 2x....maybe 3x...Maybe 10x.
So when there are days like yesterday when 36,000 shares traded (0.018% of shares available) can drop the price 6.56% I try to remember that the science and the opportunity has to be worth more than this very small valuation. A single treatement that cured 2/3 phase 1b patients with severe, refractory bladder cancer!
I suspect that there are many like me that continue to hold our shares while a trivial amount swing back and forth creating this artificial price.
Staying long. Good luck to all.