I publicly repented of shorting in late December last year. My account has been going up ever since. Most alpha I've ever witnessed in my pathetic trading career since the curse was lifted. https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...re-unclean-animals-shorting-is-unholy.382584/
I bet today was a good lesson on why to not go short. Did you lose money today? Of course you did. But you are a pussy and will not post your losses.
Correct. I worked in Pharma IT for 20 years ending in 2012 and in the early 1990s there was a book about the cost & complexity of a drug going to market to Phase V -- The Billion Dollar Molecule. I'm sure the cost has only risen since then. Drug discovery and time to market I think historically was 23-24 years on average. That's one of the reason for high drug prices since the patent starts right after Phase 0 which is the drug synthesis stage. The last mile is usually done by large Pharma companies since they have the capital & facilities to produce it in bulk. Look at the current rivalry between Eli Lilly & Novo Nordisk. Novo is tiny compared to Lilly and doesn't have the capital or production capability so in the end will lose to Lilly. There a few Biotechs working on rival weight loss drugs but in the end they will be bought by large Pharma since small Biotechs don't have the capital to pull it off. In my recollection only Amgen & Gilead made the transition from small Biotech to large Pharma and Gilead is still up in the air whether they will be anything more than a Hepatitis C shop. I guess Genentech made the transition too but it was bought by Roche a long time ago. Really Genentech benefited from one of their employees creating a revolution in Immunology when he came up with the Polymerase Chain Reaction to improve the speed of assay analysis. It changed the way law enforcement went after cases via inexpensive DNA analysis.
I traded the biotech vol book until 2011. You are right. Basically all the startups get acquired or blow up and that’s after they figure out a drug.