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Comment by topicseed | Hacker News Reader

> The results have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, nor has the full data been made available; so the BBC cannot confirm the claims made for the treatment.

How are these claims any different than the few other ones heard over the last few weeks? They always sound incredibly promising..... and then nothing!

Is this different?

edit: typos

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What is worse this is a public traded company:

https://markets.ft.com/data/equities/tearsheet/summary?s=OMY...

Up more than 200% today!!!

Also mentioned in the article: "Stock market rules mean Synairgen is obliged to report the preliminary results of the trial."

Which rules exactly? Plenty of of publicly traded companies keep R&D projects secret...

We're specifically talking about clinical trials.

There comes a time when you can no longer keep something secret even if you try. The next step in getting this approved requires that some people be told about this that you must assume will not keep it secret (ie a journal that goes to libraries for anyone to read). Thus at this point they have to tell everyone who might invest, that way they can't be accused of telling their friends.

To be fair the stock wasn't worth much before today... It's far easier to get big sounding percentages with small numbers.

Still, if you put 100k, you get 200k back.

And just as quickly the other direction, which is the risk with low value/penny stocks and high volatility without a strong base.

Still I'm not suggesting anything is atypical here (besides BBC declaring it a "breakthrough"). If anyone 'deserves' to be well capitalized it's companies doing research in this email to area with real clinical trials. It's hardly the last time people will gamble on preliminary results even beyond COVID, googling "preliminary results" will provide plenty of evidence.

"research in this email to area"

typos? voice transcription errors? no idea what you intended to convey here...

Before tax, also the long train is past, time to short it for the week.

If you use leverage and take options you can put in 1k and get 200k back.

This sounds just like a great Bitcoin opportunity I saw recently in a tweet from Elon!

A large company is guaranteed to have been analyzed very carefully by skilled analysts. If you have a small sum to invest, a big risk appetite and you are willing to do your homework then you are better off trying your luck with understudied companies in inefficient markets.

It follows from the theory of comparative advantage. The big players can extract a lot more than you can from big companies but only a little more from the small ones.

Not really. On paper it works, but in practice your position is large enough relative to the whole that your activity is affecting the price. You won't be able to buy as much as you think for that price because there are not enough sellers, and even if you did, your act of selling drives the price down. Big players worry about this all the time. Small players can safely ignore it. The line between big and small depends on the company in question.

I realize that you were talking about options which have slightly different rules, but overall the same applies, in ways adjusted for the rules of options. (I don't know those rules well)

Options in such stock even if it exists will not be liquid enough you can do that easily . That is you won’t find counter parties for that kind of option for this type of stock easily .

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_base_effect

What do you mean? The specific price per share doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a number calculated from value of the company and number of shares.

If I get my first sale today for $1 and then tomorrow make a sale for $3 I can say my daily revenue is up 200%.

The impressiveness of growth percentages drops off when your base is small.

The argument you’re looking for is that the market capitalization is small. The stock price itself is irrelevant and depends on units of stock extant.

If Apple does 1:100 split and their shares will have new price of $3.89, will that somehow make Apple stock more volatile?

The price of a stock doesn't matter. A company with 100'000 shares that are worth $100 isn't worth more than a company that has 10 million shares that are worth $1.

Well technically dmix says worth not price which to me is more akin to market cap than price.

That's also how I intended it.

But I a dollar stock is more likely to triple than a $100 stock.

As you say, it's the total market cap that matters in how much value a share is actually worth. But there is a floor to how much an individual share can be sold for before they de-list it entirely, resulting in a lot of volatility for very-low-priced stocks.

When a company on the brink gets a bit of good news, it's easier for it to triple in value than a company with an existing, stable business. Such things can suddenly turn into big, quick wins for the people who were there before the news. (People investing after the news are pretty much just suckers, though market irrationality still lets them sell at a profit to even further suckers.)

The company was worth £50m yesterday, that's not chump change

> How are these claims any different than the few other ones heard over the last few weeks? They always sound incredibly promising..... and then nothing!

Cubans, and few other ex-Eastern Bloc countries were peddling interferons as miracle cures in the past.

The reality showed a big part of it being a cargo cult science, except for a few cases when it wasn't, and they actually worked.

The same thing was for the bacteriophage medicine from ex-USSR coutnries. It indeed works, and it is in deed very arcane to most of Western antibiotic researchers, but it's nowhere near the "miracle cure" they peddle it as.

Yea. Releasing such articles is irresponsible journalism, I'd put it in the same category as fear-mongering.

BBC is as much clickbait as any. The days of actual journalism at the BBC pretty much died off a number of years ago.

> Weeks

I'm sorry, but even with things getting rushed through by regulatory agencies, you cannot expect prelim results to convert to treatments in only a matter of weeks.

Which claims are these, could you give some examples, ones from reputable sources please.

Not sure if I can give you sources, but have you followed the Oxford University vaccine story? It seems like they're working miracles while many other scientists are pretty skeptical if a vaccine can be found at all, or at least within such short time frames.

This is anecdotal, but I do agree with the OP, there is a lot of conflicting information available.

We will find out eventually whether the Oxford University vaccine works or becomes an example of "and then nothing". But it is definitely not a "and then nothing" yet.

Several vaccine projects have reported good stimulation of antibody production in trials. The big problem is that we don't yet know what kind of immunity that may provide or how long it might last. But it seems getting people to produce antibodies without making them ill is extremely possible.

From the Moderna Phase I results published recently [1], I'd point out that most vaccine candidates are also performing antibody challenges and T-cell counting, to better characterize the effective immune response generated [2], beyond antibody production.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022483

[2] Via assessment methods in the above: "pseudotyped lentivirus reporter single-round-of-infection neutralization assay (PsVNA) and by live wild-type SARS-CoV-2 plaque-reduction neutralization testing (PRNT)" & "T-cell responses against the spike protein were assessed by an intracellular cytokine–staining assay, performed on specimens collected at days 1, 29, and 43"

There are many vaccine projects showing promising results.

> there is a lot of conflicting information available

That's the nature of science. There is conflicting information because it is unknown what works yet. There are many approaches that show promise.. until they don't.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...

Sounds like this shouldn't even be a news story then.

One key component of getting peer review is by peers knowing about it.

There are forums for that. Not internet forums, "forum" in the original sense of the word. A public broadcast to the masses (the B in BBC) is not the forum for notifying peers in a professional field.

and yet, it also notifies peers in a professional field.

I've never published a BBC (or any journal) article before publishing a paper. As far as I know, the reviewers at Springer Nature could not care less if there's a press release attached to your manuscript, and some reviewers in medicinal journals would prefer groups don't publicize on media like Twitter to avoid biased reviews.

I must have just missed the "mass press release" portion of peer review.

Several new treatments have emerged. I just read ICU survival rates are are down nearly 20%.

Do you mean death rates? vs survival rates?

yes

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