Jim Cramer
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The Hunt
One of the things that made me feel that the hedge fund game had gotten too hard was that everything that used to be so darned difficult to find can now be found on home computers. The hunt for the truth about a company like BioTime (BTX Quote - Cramer on BTX - Stock Picks) used to be a tortuous and flawed process for everyone but the institutional player who sat smack in the middle of the information flow in downtown New York and spent a lot of time following the company. FreeEdgar.com, just put in the company name or ticker, click "view filings" and scroll down to the 10-Q and 10-K. They have a great feature called "RTF," which downloads the entire document into Microsoft Word. I always start with the most recent quarterly report, the 10-Q, the annual, the 10-K and the proxy (to see who owns it and who the officers are). What am I looking for? Frankly, I'm looking to see: 1) what the potential for the company's products are, and, 2) if they have delivered on their promises in the past. (That's how I approach biotech, which is all promise. I approach different industries with different metrics.) Here, in the public filings, I see that BioTime has one compound that it's selling right now, Hextend, through a joint marketing relationship with Abbott Labs, and it has a couple of other compounds in development. How big is that product? Determining the answer to this question is the hard part about doing company research. If the company is at all promotional, it's difficult to get your arms around how big the target market will be. For example, I remember when we were starting TheStreet.com (TSCM Quote - Cramer on TSCM - Stock Picks), when I was pitching the idea to venture capitalists, I would rely on data from prediction houses that talked about the growth rate of online trading and investing. Of course, the growth rates turned out to be just plain old prognostication, with little behind them other than guesswork. It's pretty much the same with BioTime's markets. If you can produce a synthetic blood product (which is what Hextend is), have it marketed by Abbott Labs (ABT Quote - Cramer on ABT - Stock Picks) (one of the world's largest medical companies) and then receive a royalty for the product, you could conceivably make a ton of money without much effort. Hence, the greatness of most biotech investments: a discovery that pays off big with huge gross margins once it's in production. Frankly, I personally have no idea how to measure the size of this market. I've long since decided, however, that it would not be my skill set strength to extrapolate that information. BioTime claims in one of its releases, dated April 1999, that the domestic market could be as much as $400 million. Here are the questions I ask myself: How much of that will they capture? How much of it will go to BioTime? The public filings available on FreeEdgar.com note that Abbott will give BioTime 5%, plus .22% for each increment of $1 million in annual net sales, up to 36%. Now here's where my edge comes in. I'm good at analyzing credibility and psychology. What I can do is measure what a company promises vs. what it delivers. That is my most important criterion when I'm looking at speculative entities like BioTime.Click here to read the rest of this article!
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