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Message: Re: Activity Alert for MannKind (MNKD)

vd,

Put/call is traditionally a contrarian indicator, and not one that I would ignore. Something like the market going up, up, up, so people get long, long, long, and when the long positions drawf the short positions, the slightest bad news can cascade the market lower (see, Nikkei index).

Again, traditionally, people who buy calls are usually suckers, so once they are too many of them, well, they have been sucked in and are ready to get clobbered.

Now, in the case of a biotech awaiting an important event, the approximate timing of which is known, you can make a bullish case for the preponderance of calls, but that, in and of itself, is not persuasive to me. You see, people lose and lose big on developmental biotechs all the time; remember the two CRL letters, for example. Consider what the put/call ratio was right before each of those letters were made public - I'll bet it was at least as skewed, and likely more so, than it is now.

In this particular case, I would say that the current put/call ratio is irrelevant to our chances of getting good results. It does have some relevance in terms of what might happen to the share price immediately subsequent to either good or bad results. But, let's face it, results other than what we all want to hear, will send this stock into the toilet in the first millesecond of trading after release of that news!

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