Great reading your optimistic overview of biotech prospects. I am a lifetime subscriber to your former Brownstone Research service, and after your departure, they literally dropped your Early Stage portfolio and will not provide any updates. Is it possible for you to periodically update your former catalysts overview of the old portfolio positions in your new service? — Adrian N.
Hi Adrian,
Thanks for writing in with the suggestion and letting me know. I most certainly wouldn’t have done what was done had that been my decision.
While that decision was completely out of my control, I would have maintained that portfolio and continued to provide guidance and updates on the portfolio, as things can change very quickly in the biotech space.
I’ll give you a perfect example.
Harpoon Therapeutics (HARP) was one of those portfolio holdings. It is an extremely promising early stage biotech company focused on cancer immunotherapies.
And like almost every early stage biotech company, it suffered from the pandemic policies, and then ultimately the record number of interest rate hikes that we all experienced.
But that didn’t mean the company was dead.
As I wrote earlier this week on January 23 in Outer Limits, there has been a price discovery problem in the early stage biotech industry.
The valuations have not been representative of the real value of these biotech companies. There has been a bit of a stalemate between possible acquirers and the biotech companies.
Fortunately, we’ve started to see M&A activity heat up, a strong sign that prices and valuations have started to snap back.
It’s still early, but deals are getting done. One of them was Harpoon Therapeutics.
On January 8, during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Merck announced that it acquired Harpoon Therapeutics for $23 a share, representing a $680 million buyout. Here’s what happened to its share price:
From a low of around $3.29 in October, Harpoon Therapeutics is now trading around $22.50, just shy of the $23 per share buyout. That’s a jump of about 583% in just a few months.
As for your specific question, I don’t have any plans at the moment to actively track any past portfolios.
In order to do a proper job of that, I’d need to be watching that entire portfolio daily and noting changes and catalysts for each individual portfolio holding. I’m not staffed up to do that kind of thing right now, unfortunately.
And if I can’t do it right, I shouldn’t do it at all.
I’ve been providing individual company reassessments for quite a few companies in the weekly Ask Me Anything (AMA) issues.
We covered the latest developments for Homology Medicines (FIXX) recently, and Harpoon Therapeutics above. I’m sure there will be others.
I’m very excited to dive back into the early stage biotech space, and I’ve been doing a lot of research and thinking about both timing and what that research product will look like.
