Some miscellaneous updates tonight, in addition to the note appended to the post below. It seems that Sunday nights don't often leave with time for more extensive blogging, and the world events of the last few days have made their claim on my attention as well. This isn't going to be one of those dull years, not that I expected it to be. In fact, I'm not sure when we're going to have one of those again.
Some readers (rather few) may be wondering what's been up with my long-running series of odd experiments, last seen crashing to earth in a rain of feathers and melting wax. I haven't set anything up in the lab since that, but I've been busy working on a presentation to go public (inside my company, anyway) with my ideas. The project, if it's going to work at all, is too big for me to do in the scientific equivalent of my garage. I'm going to make my case for some formal support, and it'll be interesting to see how that's received.
On another front, I wanted to mention that I closed out my short position in Imclone at about $45/share, a nice round loss from the $40 where I went short. I'm keeping an eye on the stock, and if it continues to rise (up into, say, the 60s with no change in the underlying situation), then I'll consider shorting it again. For now, though, discretion was the better part of a capital-gains loss. I continue to think that many IMCL investors suffer from an excess of optimism, but that's one of the engines of the market, isn't it? (I did make up that loss and more by shorting MSO, Martha Stewart's company, though. Write and I'll bore you with the details.)
And the Sanofi/Aventis dance continues, with Novartis hovering over the whole proceedings. This is yet another situation where those who say, don't know - because those who know aren't saying. Most of the public statements are designed to be, well, merely public statements, so their information value is questionable. It's going to be a while before we know how this one comes out, so I haven't been (and won't be) covering every twist and turn. If anything dramatic happens, I'll weigh in.
