On pricing.

A climber looking skywards at the approaching moutain peak, might on occasion wind up in a state of fleeting despair. Mentally prepping for a selfie, they make an unfortunate discovery - it's not the summit: there's still a few hundred feet to go! Many of us have sufferred that mildly dejecting experience with hilly, unfamiliar terrain. Our disappointment, though, doesn't lead to denial or a rejection of the situation. Reality has revealed itself in a way that hadn't been expected or hoped for - that's all: the mountain wasn't raised at the last second to frustrate the climber.

It might be some DIY job, a journey, writing some computer code which had been expected to take an hour that wound up devouring half a day. Our response is one of frustration but not of one without understanding - the terrain wasn't as expected, different to our prior, imagined construction: a herd of cattle broke loose down a country lane, the floating shelf began to bend under the weight of our treasured book collection, the program inexplicably looped.

With admittedly only partial success, I try to view the share price movement as one responding to an autonomous system, mostly decoupled from Sorrento, occasionally re-attaching and responding to signals from the company's releases but one whose terrain will often reveal itself in unexpected, tough to comprehend and reconcile ways.

If we viewed the Sorrento market as a self-contained system, akin to a crypto currency or meme stock, say, one not personally invested, we might look with curiosity at the ebbs and flows, changes in sentiment, the stop loss attacks, fake bull and bear runs. We perhaps don't really see bitcoin value as representing something specific, bounded like a company but instread as a vague bet on a partial present, partial future reality. The picture might be even been cloudier with meme stocks such as GameStore. Nevertheless, the events and patterns formed are meaningful in and of themselves without the expectation of price changes correlating to those of some measurable entity. If AMC goes up 20% it's not beause we believe the outlook for the company has altered accordingly.

Yet when the Sorrento stock swings and is generally buffeted around, we struggle not to hold the underlyng sense the movements are company specific: the market must have adjusted its view, perhaps some inside information is playing out, lack of investor confidence in future revenues has reached critical mass.

When watching the movement of the share, it might be best to try to hold the view that local market conditions are being expressed - not as we may have hoped or expected, an environment partially influenced by Sorrento's activities but also designed or heavily shaped by other forces such as the financial media, sector sentiment, investor psychology, Hedge Funds and so on.

If Sorrento drops 10%, I think, or at least try: it dived 10% - it could, so it did, its just reality unfolding, there was no resistance underfoot when pressure was applied so of course it fell. Our instinctive assumption might be: 'well, if the company was worth more it wouldn't have crashed, buyers would have emerged'. When bitcoin drops $10k that isn't my reflex, the currency is something of a wild casino or strategy game, the $10k drop hasn't much to do with a perceived change in the role of crypto in our future world.

Because Hedge Funds and Short Funds are likely still to benefit from a lower share price (as the flow of money certainly has indicated this year) I assume the price will always be sensing for lower ground - unless there's a pump and dump to exploit or possibly some impending dilution. So when seeing the price go down, I try to think that's just the terain of this market, not as I hoped or expected, but the conditions enabling that recent fall were always there, they've now just surfaced and been acted upon.

u/ScottyRed mentioned earlier this week, that despite feeling nonplussed with the price-demolition he still retained a healthy curiosity at the strangeness of it all. Many perhaps feel the same, there's some weird stuff happening which we may hope to understand and one day profit from.

This morning having surprisingly managed to hold down breakfast, I looked at yesterday's share price/volume and over recent data. Then I realised: the collapse in price over the last few weeks was justified. The confirming evidence was submitted yesterday.

Friday witnessed a volume of 9.8 million shares traded, not since Merck Day on October 1st were there greater shares traded, next stop early July. Looking through the data at yahoo felt somewhat like scanning over the numbers of a drilling project.

Ten million shares traded at around 5 bucks was striking oil. It happened, that it could happen meant there was a good chance it would be made to happen. Perhaps these data algorithms carry out geological survey estimates on the strata of a company's stock price. Who knows? But it's hard to argue against the merit of the price being there given the nigh on 10 million shares (assuming no HF tricks) traded in the low $5s. However, it is not at all hard to contest that the stock market capitalisation that price represents, represents the value of the company - the mistake is to assume that the two valuations move in lockstep but instead to accept that they will at times become almost disassociated.

That said, to state yesterday's closing SP to have been correct is an acceptance within the extremely contrived and manipulative conditions the market and our stock in particular are forced to operate i.e an acknowledgment given the distorted game we're playing. Suggesting the manipulators got it right is similar to someone noting the conman's excellent judgement in persuading the old woman to hand over her life savings - not at the excellence of his moral judgement, but at his proficiency at the art of scamming.

The reasons for yesterday's fall we can only guess at, hopefully, it was an opportunity sniffed out to take advantage of an anticipated biotech tax loss dump. Time will tell.