You may have heard about Dendreon (DNDN), a small money losing biotechnology company that is in the process of getting its cancer vaccine, Provenge, approved by the FDA. Full results from a crucial phase three study were released yesterday afternoon in Chicago, but about half an hour prior to their release, shares of Dendreon fell off a cliff for a couple of minutes and trading was halted for "news pending." Between 1:25pm and 1:27pm ET Dendreon stock fell from above $24 to as low as $7.50, and were halted at $11.81 per share.
Immediately investors were baffled. The most plausible explanation was that the full study results somehow were leaked early, someone learned they were bad and sold their stock, which in turn caused others to panic and sell too. That would have been an odd turn of events, however, because the company had indicated recently that the study results were clearly favorable.
When the news was finally released to the public there were no surprises, which makes those trades just before 1:30pm very strange. The NASDAQ exchange quickly investigated the trades to see if any were made erroneously, but they found nothing wrong and the trades will stand. Today the stock reopened and is currently fetching about $24 per share.
This story only serves to further my personal belief that short term trading in the stock market is so speculative that it is really nothing more than gambling. Evidently somebody somewhere thought they saw or heard something that was negative for Dendreon, others followed suit and sold their shares like lemmings jumping off a cliff, but in reality there was no news at all.
Undoubtedly some investors quickly hit the sell button during those few short minutes yesterday afternoon, fearing that if they didn't their stock would fall even further (Dendreon stock sold for $2 in March, so many people had huge gains). They lost between 50% and 75% of their money for no reason. Other investors surely had large paper gains in Dendreon and had stop loss orders in place to limit any future losses. Many of those stops were triggered as the stock collapsed from $24 to $7 and rebounded to $12 and those investors also lost big time.
As you can see the market is very complex and sometimes things happen that are not rational and should never have happened. Speculating on near term movements of stocks (especially small biotech companies) is a very risky endeavor. All the market needs is a willing buyer and a willing seller to agree on a price in one split second. Reality need not apply in such a case, but millions of dollars can be lost in a matter of minutes, as was the case with Dendreon yesterday.
Traders beware. In some cases Wall Street can look very much like a casino.
Full Disclosure: No position in Dendreon at the time of writing, but positions may change at any time