Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewtbham | Hacker News Reader

If you're confident this is true... why not short the stock? if correct, you could make a lot of money.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." The quote itself may be apocryphal, but the meaning is certainly true.

Never short based on the rationality of the market. Plenty of investors have been right and ended up totally broke.

On a personal note the worst investment I ever made was a short position where I was right, but six months too early.

Reminds me of Michael Burry and others in The Big Short, who shorted the housing market, but had to wait a long time for the market adjust.

Never short a stock, use puts. You define your maximum potential loss ahead of time. By doing so you can entirely remove the solvency factor in question. Then it becomes a matter of giving yourself enough time on the puts to be right (assuming your core premise is correct).

You're assuming puts of sufficient duration would be available and liquid.

Exactly Derek Lowe is a classic academic without any skin in the game. Rather than appreciating risk taking he displays the sour grapes mentality. He is always welcome to short the stock. But then this kind skepticism against anyone else becoming rich sells very well in academic circles.

you do realize he works for a pharma company, right? The last time he was an academic was when he was a postdoc. In the mid-80s.

he's discussed his stock positions a few times; the takeaway is along the lines of "i don't have any holdings that could be construed as bias as regards where this blog is hosted; otherwise it's my own business" if i remember right.

Thats even worse. Derek Lowe is playing the classic no one ever went broke being skeptic move. These blogs are written to assuage egos of underpaid academics, who can't stand wealth creation nor understand risk taking. In fact if he really belives it then he must put money behind his words. And then donate earnings to whatever cause he believes in. Untill then its just sour grapes.

Is it public?

From the article:

>It was the biggest biotech IPO ever in the U.S., raising $360 million. It has largely held up, too. Axovant’s shares, which opened at $15, currently trade around $13.25.

and further down:

> When Axovant went public, a columnist at FierceBiotech warned that it should “scare the hell” out of investors

Reply on news.ycombinator.com