Matt Levine on entinen Goldman Sachsin työntekijä, joka kirjoittaa Money Stuff -kolumnia blummaan ja tämän saa tilattua mailiin.
Mattilta tulee sellaisia kuivan sarkastisia tekstejä, mutta vuosien varrella niitä välillä lueskelemalla olen kokenut oppineeni markkinan logiikkaa, erityisesti mitä tapahtuu verhojen takana, paremmin kun Matt jakelee kokemuksiaan.
Eilen osa kirjoitusta koski tuota Modernaa ja sen rokotetta:
" The basic idea of finance is that you come up with a good idea, and you need money to turn the idea into reality, and so you go to investors and ask them for money, and then you do the thing, and if it works and is good then you will get a lot of money and give some of it to the investors. There’s a lot of other stuff encrusted on top of this, and certainly it doesn’t always work out this way, but this is the basic idea.
If for instance you were a biotech company, and your idea was to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, and you had done some research and found a good candidate and done a Phase 1 trial and gotten pretty good results, but you needed a lot more money to build out capacity to manufacture that vaccine, you would go to the stock market and ask investors for money. And then they would line up to give it to you. Here is maybe the best-timed stock offering I have ever seen:
Moderna Inc. plans to raise as much as $1.3 billion through a sale of shares to fund manufacturing of a coronavirus vaccine seen as one of the frontrunners in the race for immunization against the widening pandemic.
The U.S. biotechnology firm will sell 17.6 million shares priced at $76 a piece, according to a statement Tuesday. The price represents a 5% discount to Monday’s closing price. …
Shares jumped 20% on Monday after the company revealed positive early results from its experimental vaccine for Covid-19, capping off a 309% rally this year.
Here’s the preliminary prospectus. The “Use of Proceeds” section says that they’ll use the money “to fund working capital needs (raw materials, labor and capital equipment purchases) related to the manufacturing of mRNA-1273 for distribution in the United States and outside the United States, assuming necessary regulatory approvals are obtained”[1]; anything left over will go to develop other drugs, general corporate purposes, etc. If I were in their position I would have added something like “also $100 million will be earmarked to throw a party for our staff and executives if this works, and buy them all Lamborghinis, and construct a giant golden throne for our CEO on which he can receive your gifts of thanksgiving,” but I guess they were going for subtlety.
Honestly, imagine a better stock-market pitch, really at any point in the history of the stock market, than “hi we have discovered a coronavirus vaccine and need money to manufacture it, would you like to give us some.” Doesn’t it make you feel good about capital markets? Don’t you imagine everyone at the closing dinner, grinning and high-fiving (on Zoom, I mean, they don’t have the vaccine yet) and saying “boy this is what it’s all about, making the world a better place and getting rich in the process.”
Conversely if the vaccine ends up not working, in about two months look for Moderna in the “Everything is securities fraud” section of this column. If your stock is up 20% on the day that you announce good news on your Covid-19 vaccine trial, and you peel off a $1.3 billion stock offering that day, and then you say “never mind the vaccine doesn’t work, oops,” you will get extremely sued. This is not necessarily fair—this is an uncertain and urgent business, it makes sense for Moderna to raise money to prepare for production even before trials are complete, and obviously Moderna’s offering document includes prominent warnings about how “the positive interim data from the ongoing Phase 1 study of mRNA-1273, our vaccine candidate for the treatment of SARS-CoV-2, may not be predictive of the results of later-stage clinical trials”—but it is a fact of life. (It doesn’t help that Moderna’s chief executive officer has been selling stock on the way up. Under an automatic 10b5-1 plan, but still; you can turn those off if you’re actually bullish.[2])
U.S. stocks gained about $1 trillion of market capitalization yesterday, and while there are lots of reasons why any particular stock may have gone up or down, good news about a vaccine that might allow reopening of the economy seems like a common factor for a lot of stocks. “U.S. Stocks Surge as Hopes for Coronavirus Vaccine Build,” was the Wall Street Journal’s headline, citing the Moderna results. “Broader markets rose as well, with the S&P 500 gaining 3.1% as the confident tone on vaccine candidates from Moderna, the University of Oxford and China added to confidence that scientists have the tools to stop the virus,” reported Bloomberg. It is almost fair to say that Moderna added $1 trillion of value to all the other stocks yesterday; why not take a little bit of that value for itself?
Meanwhile here is a warning that it maybe can’t:
The economics of a Covid-19 vaccine are highly uncertain and charging a high price for one seems far-fetched. … Moreover, there are dozens of drugs under evaluation as possible Covid-19 treatments or vaccines, so competition will be intense.
I guess. You know my theory on the matter. If you own some of the other stocks that were up $1 trillion yesterday, you might want to kick in a tenth of a penny for each dollar that you made as a thank-you gift for Moderna. Developing and commercializing a vaccine may or may not be lucrative for Moderna , or for Moderna’s shareholders , but if it works it will be enormously, enormously, enormously lucrative for shareholders in general , and Moderna’s shareholders are mostly also shareholders in general."