Institutions may consider drastic measures as Ginkgo recent US$605m drop adds to long-term losses

 If you want to know who really controls Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DNA), then you'll have to look at the makeup of its share registry. And the group that holds the biggest piece of the pie are institutions with 48% ownership. Put another way, the group faces the maximum upside potential (or downside risk).

And so it follows that institutional investors was the group most impacted after the company's market cap fell to US$3.3b last week after a 15% drop in the share price. This set of investors may especially be concerned about the current loss, which adds to a one-year loss of 39% for shareholders. Also referred to as "smart money", institutions have a lot of sway over how a stock's price moves. As a result, if the downtrend continues, institutions may face pressures to sell Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, which might have negative implications on individual investors.

In the chart below, we zoom in on the different ownership groups of Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings.

See our latest analysis for Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings

NYSE:DNA Ownership Breakdown June 28th 2023

Institutions typically measure themselves against a benchmark when reporting to their own investors, so they often become more enthusiastic about a stock once it's included in a major index. We would expect most companies to have some institutions on the register, especially if they are growing.

As you can see, institutional investors have a fair amount of stake in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings. This implies the analysts working for those institutions have looked at the stock and they like it. But just like anyone else, they could be wrong. It is not uncommon to see a big share price drop if two large institutional investors try to sell out of a stock at the same time. So it is worth checking the past earnings trajectory of Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, (below). Of course, keep in mind that there are other factors to consider, too.

NYSE:DNA Earnings and Revenue Growth June 28th 2023

Our data indicates that hedge funds own 11% of Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings. That's interesting, because hedge funds can be quite active and activist. Many look for medium term catalysts that will drive the share price higher. Baillie Gifford & Co. is currently the largest shareholder, with 12% of shares outstanding. Meanwhile, the second and third largest shareholders, hold 11% and 7.9%, of the shares outstanding, respectively. In addition, we found that Jason Kelly, the CEO has 4.4% of the shares allocated to their name.

We did some more digging and found that 7 of the top shareholders account for roughly 52% of the register, implying that along with larger shareholders, there are a few smaller shareholders, thereby balancing out each others interests somewhat.

While studying institutional ownership for a company can add value to your research, it is also a good practice to research analyst recommendations to get a deeper understand of a stock's expected performance. There are plenty of analysts covering the stock, so it might be worth seeing what they are forecasting, too.

The definition of an insider can differ slightly between different countries, but members of the board of directors always count. Company management run the business, but the CEO will answer to the board, even if he or she is a member of it.

I generally consider insider ownership to be a good thing. However, on some occasions it makes it more difficult for other shareholders to hold the board accountable for decisions.

Our information suggests that insiders maintain a significant holding in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings, Inc.. Insiders own US$668m worth of shares in the US$3.3b company. That's quite meaningful. It is good to see this level of investment. You can check here to see if those insiders have been buying recently.

The general public-- including retail investors -- own 11% stake in the company, and hence can't easily be ignored. This size of ownership, while considerable, may not be enough to change company policy if the decision is not in sync with other large shareholders.

Private equity firms hold a 7.3% stake in Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings. This suggests they can be influential in key policy decisions. Sometimes we see private equity stick around for the long term, but generally speaking they have a shorter investment horizon and -- as the name suggests -- don't invest in public companies much. After some time they may look to sell and redeploy capital elsewhere.

While it is well worth considering the different groups that own a company, there are other factors that are even more important. Consider for instance, the ever-present spectre of investment risk. We've identified 3 warning signs with Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings , and understanding them should be part of your investment process.

https://simplywall.st/stocks/us/materials/nyse-dna/ginkgo-bioworks-holdings/news/institutional-owners-may-consider-drastic-measures-as-ginkgo

Organon, Samsung Bioepis launch copycat for arthritis drug Humira at 85% discount

 Drugmaker partners Organon and Samsung Bioepis said on Saturday that they had launched a far cheaper copycat version of AbbVie's blockbuster arthritis drug Humira, while another drugmaker entered the market with a much more modest discount to the branded medicine's list price.

The copycat drug called Hadlima will be listed at $1,038 per month, representing an 85% discount of Humira's current $6,922 monthly price, the companies said.

Swiss drugmaker Sandoz also said on Saturday that it had launched a Humira biosimilar, Hyrimoz, at a 5% discount to the branded medicine's price, as well as an unbranded version of Humira at an 81% discount.

Unlike pills, which have extremely cheap generic copies, complex, expensive biologic drugs made from living cells cannot be exactly duplicated. Their closest alternatives are called biosimilars.

Organon and Samsung Bioepis did not say if they had struck deals with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which negotiate insurance coverage on behalf of large employers and health insurance plans, to secure reimbursement of Hadlima for patients.

Three PBMs -- CVS Health Corp (CVS.N), Cigna Group's (CI.N) Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group's (UNH.N) Optum RX -- together control 80% of the U.S. prescription drug market.

Healthcare experts predicted some Humira biosimilars would debut with a small discount to appeal to pharmacy benefit managers. Some of their fees are a percentage of the savings they negotiate and the PBMs are expected to win significant discounts from the announced prices for health plans.

In an interview with Reuters, Organon Chief Executive Officer Kevin Ali said the drugmakers that did not make PBM deals for their Humira biosimilars this year would fight it out over the next six months for insurance coverage in 2024.

"Right now, it's really about what I would consider the race to getting on (PBM) formularies," he said.

Hadlima was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2019, but the terms of a legal settlement with AbbVie restricted the companies from offering it in the U.S.

German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim is expected to announce the launch of its Humira biosimilar later on Saturday.

Thousand Oaks, California-based Amgen launched the first Humira biosimilar for the U.S. in January at 5% and 55% discounts to the branded medicine, depending on the buyer.

California drugmaker Coherus BioSciences said last month that it planned to launch its biosimilar in partnership with billionaire Mark Cuban at an 85% discount.

AbbVie sued the company, accusing it of breaching the agreement that granted Coherus a non-exclusive license to commercialize a biosimilar version of Humira in the U.S. from July 1.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ORGANON-CO-122796891/news/Organon-Samsung-Bioepis-launch-copycat-for-athritis-drug-Humira-at-85-discount-44248207/

Twitter Users Complain About Global Outage

 Over 7,000 people on the Down Detector website have complained about Twitter outages on Saturday morning. A surge of outage reports began around 0745 ET. 

Users say they're experiencing difficulties retrieving tweets, missing timelines, and followers disappearing, according to The Independent. 

Market Watch said, "Twitter has been hit Saturday by a global outage that is preventing thousands of users from accessing the social media platform." 

Users have reported error messages such as "Something went wrong. Try reloading" and "Cannot retrieve tweets" and "Rate limit exceeded error message." 

In a separate issue, one Twitter user last night pointed out that the social media platform now "blocks all requests that are not logged in, tweets can no longer be embedded in most chat apps." 

Elon Musk responded, "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping." 

Here's an exchange Musk has with another Twitter user on data scraping. 

It's not clear what the problem is or how long the outage will last. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-went-wrong-twitter-users-complain-about-global-outage

CBDCs With Expiration Dates, Restrictions Could Target Social Policies, Economist Tells WEF

 by Andrew Moran via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Expiry dates and restrictions on “less desirable” purchases are some of the key advantages behind central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to an economist at a World Economic Forum (WEF) event.

The WEF hosted the 14th annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China, also known as Summer Davos. During one of the 30-minute panel discussions on June 28, Cornell University professor Eswar Prasad explained that the global economy is “at the cusp of physical currency essentially disappearing” and that programmable CBDCs and the technology behind these new forms of money could take the international economic landscape toward a dark path or a better place.

Prasad contended that one of the “huge potential gains” for the digitization of money is the programmability of CBDC units and attaching expiry dates. Governments can also utilize central bank money to socially engineer society.

“You could have … a potentially better—or some people might say a darker world—where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like, say ammunition, or drugs, or pornography, or something of the sort,” he said. “And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.”

The author of “Gaining Currency” and “The Dollar Trap” purported that CBDCs possess unique characteristics and could be employed “as a conduit for economic policies in a very targeted way, or more broadly for social policies.”

“That could really affect the integrity of central bank money and the integrity and independence of central banks,” Prasad stated. “So, there are wonderful notions of things that can be done with digital money, but again I fear the technology could take us to a better place, but equally has the potential to take us to a pretty dark place.”

CBDC Expiry Dates

Integrating expiry dates with CBDCs has already been discussed by various central banks worldwide.

The Bank of Canada (BoC) published a paper in 2021 entitled “Best Before? Expiring Central Bank Digital Currency and Loss Recovery.” The institution weighed the pros and cons of expiration dates, asserting that an expiry date would “automate personal loss recovery.”

“With this feature enabled, digital cash could not be spent after its expiry date. Consumers whose digital cash expired would automatically receive the funds back into their online account without having to file a claim,” the Canadian central bank wrote. “We show that offering the option of personal loss recovery could substantially increase consumer demand for digital cash. However, the length of time to expiry plays a key role. An expiry date that is too soon is inconvenient, but a date too far in the future slows down the reimbursement of lost digital cash.”

China has been exploring expiration dates for the digital yuan, suggesting that it would no longer be usable if not spent in a specific timeframe.

The World Bank studied the effects of expiring money and argued that this could be a “potential monetary policy tool” to stimulate consumption during recessions or pandemics.

“Expiring money would increase both the velocity of money and overall economic activity, similar to applying a negative rate to digital cash,” the organization wrote. “In practice, a carrying fee on money would encourage people to spend it and thus prevent it from being hoarded.”

Indeed, CBDC advocates say digital money can be a flexible instrument to micro-target sectors, regions, interest rates, and socio-economic demographics with real-time feedback.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/cbdcs-expiration-dates-restrictions-could-target-social-policies-economist-tells-wef

Biden Displays Stunning Denial Psychosis Over Student Loans

 by Jonathan Turley

“The hypocrisy is stunning.”

Those words from President Joe Biden after his student loan forgiveness program was found unconstitutional were . . . well . . . stunning. Indeed, they may stand as the greatest example of transference in history.

Ever since President Biden first announced that he would unilaterally forgive roughly half a trillion dollars in student debt, many of us have noted that he lacked that authority under the Constitution. We were not alone: we had Joe Biden himself.

During the 2020 presidential election, Biden admitted that he needed congressional approval for such a massive loan forgiveness. Likewise, as cited in the opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stated the obvious:

“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.”

The problem is that he could not get this measure through Congress and, despite his earlier acknowledgment of the obvious, Biden simply claimed that he could give away hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional authorization.

He is now crying hypocrisy when the Court said he was right all along.

Of course, denial is a common defense mechanism, the “unconscious forms of self-deception we use to avoid anxiety and emotional pain, or to ensure we are ‘acceptable’ to others.”

Transference is a common form of denial when a “fact is admitted to, but the person will deny their responsibility.”

However, in presidents, it is a costly habit.

From the outset, Biden’s use of the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students (HEROES) Act of 2003 was questioned by a wide array of observers given the clear intent before the Act. Congress passed this short piece of legislation to assist military personnel deployed abroad in combat zones. No one seriously argued that Congress ever intended or even contemplated such a massive debt forgiveness program under the Act.

However, necessity is the mother of invention and Biden knew that there was no way that he could get Congress to approve such an unprecedented give-away. Many Americans opposed the proposal. Many elected not to go to college but to get jobs. Others spent years paying off their debts.

Instead of turning to Congress, Biden turned to some of the same experts who have green lighted past unconstitutional programs. For example, the Biden Administration was found to have violated the Constitution in its imposition of a nationwide eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The President admitted that his White House counsel and most legal experts told him that the move was unconstitutional. However, at the urging of then Speaker Pelosi, he called Harvard University Professor Laurence Tribe who assured him that he had the authority to act alone. It was, of course, then quickly found to be unconstitutional.

When Biden faced the prospect of having to negotiate with Congress over raising the debt ceiling, some of the same experts surfaced to assure him that he did not. In other words, he could skip negotiating the raising of the debt limit and unilaterally borrow and spend billions. It was a position that would effectively gut the power of the purse and literally lacked a single supporting case as precedent. Yet, Tribe and others insisted that he could ignore Congress and just start spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

Yet, the has President enablers in his denial psychosis. When Biden faced his past view against unilateral loan forgiveness as well as the view of others (including a prior DOJ memo), he again broke the glass for emergency legal support.

Tribe and others like University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck assured the president or the public that the authority was clear and obvious. It was not even a close interpretive question.

President Biden has now lost again 6-3 before the Court.

Despite his own stated view that this would violate the Constitution, he chose politics over principle. Even the Washington Post said that the move was presumptively unconstitutional, but hoped that standing questions would prevent the Court from striking down the program.

Now that the Court has found that he has again violated the Constitution by refusing to go to Congress, Biden responded by declaring that he would take a “new path.” That path, of course, does not lead to Congress. The problem with Congress is that it requires a democratic vote and the majority oppose this program.

So Biden is turning to Plan B and will try to do the same circumvention through the Higher Education Act of 1965. That was the law rejected earlier in favor of the HEROES Act by the Administration. The law would not support this broad loan forgiveness effort. Even if successful, it would excuse only some of these loans and would take a long time in the rulemaking process.

There is no Plan B under the Constitution. Congress controls the power of the purse and the President cannot govern alone. In the end, the President may want to take a sec with Stuart Smalley and understand that “denial is not just a river in Africa.” The fact is that he was once “good enough and smart enough” . . . to go to Congress.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hypocrisy-stunning-biden-displays-stunning-denial-psychosis-over-student-loans

Musk says Twitter applies temporary limit to address data scraping, system manipulation

 Twitter has applied temporary reading limits to address "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.

Verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that the unverified accounts and new unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts per day respectively.

That comes after Twitter had announced that it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a "temporary emergency measure."

Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data "extremely aggressively", impacting user experience.

Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to train their large language models.

The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk's ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-musk-says-twitter-applies-174038976.html

BeiGene Bernstein Analyst Slashes Forecast By Almost 42%

 BeiGene Ltd 

BGNE-0.16%+ Free Alerts

 declined in early trading on Friday, maintaining its downward trajectory through the week amid weakness in Chinese stocks.

AbbVie’s 

ABBV+1.13%+ Free Alerts

 patent case, which claims multiple infringements, is likely to be an overhang on BeiGene’s stock, according to Bernstein.

The BeiGene Analyst: Rebecca Liang downgraded the rating for BeiGene from Outperform to Market Perform, while slashing the price target from $335 to $196.

The BeiGene Thesis: It takes four to five years on average to settle a case, and BeiGene chances of winning in court “don't look great,” Liang said in the downgrade note.

AbbVie’s claims “seem to stack up,” he added.

“The patent case not only exposes the vulnerability of BeiGene's single-asset-play to external blows, but also casts doubts on their long-presumed R&D leadership,” the analyst wrote.

Besides Brukinsa, there are no major growth drivers for BeiGene, he further stated.

https://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/23/06/33078601/why-this-beigene-analyst-slashes-forecast-by-almost-42