Feuerstein's Biotech-Stock Mailbag

Before I get to your email, an Elan (ELN Quote) update: I didn't attend Elan's investor meeting Wednesday in Boston. I wanted to go, but I was denied an invitation. Elan told me the room was too small to accommodate everyone who wanted to be there.

Funny, but several people in attendance at the event told me afterward that the room was half full. There were plenty of seats available.

One New York hedge fund analyst who also requested an invite in advance but was turned down nevertheless showed up at the conference center hoping Elan would let him sit in on the meeting. No way, the Elan officials told him, asking him to leave.

Having nowhere else to go, the analyst decided to sit in the lobby of the conference center building and listen to the Webcast of the Elan meeting on his laptop. After a few minutes, a police car pulled up and a Boston cop approached, telling him he needed to leave the building immediately. (There's a great picture of the cop confronting the analyst, snapped by another Elan meeting attendee, that has made the rounds of Wall Street.)

Caroline Stewart is an analyst for Piper Jaffrey. She has a neutral rating on Elan, in part because she says she's not sure that bapineuzumab, Elan's experimental Alzheimer's drug, is going to actually work. She, too, ran into trouble snagging an Elan invite.

A month or so ago, Stewart was planning to conduct a consulting call with an Alzheimer's expert for her clients, in part to discuss bapineuzumab. Elan wanted to listen to the call live, but Stewart explained that it was a call for Piper Jaffrey clients only. The company, however, was free to listen to the replay.