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Kevin Mak

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@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

$SPHR Update on my old friend Sphere. The recent sell off seems to be directly related to some sell-side rerating of the stock based on "soft data". I find that kind of interesting because the data has been soft for many months (see daily ticket sales chart below), and among investors that I talk to, this isn't a "surprise". (Realistically that's why the stock traded down from $170 to $130). So this "surprise, the data is weak, stock rerates down 25%" is interesting to me, but also reminds me: it's always extremely hard to figure out what the market has or hasn't "priced in". The issue with the "soft data" is that my (and many) original projections was that WoZ would trough at around 1.4-1.6m/day of sales in 2027. By the summer we observed levels of ~1.2m so that likely wasn't going to happen. Towards the end of the year, the data has inflected upwards, we're down YoY (expected, given less hype than the launch a year ago). Some of this is likely due to LV weakness in general, but I think that's a relatively small fraction of the story. Personally, I find this data interesting because A) I think it's largely meaningless to value the company B) I think the market overreacts to it I think the Sphere business is humming along extremely nicely. The concert business is consistently improving (higher numbers, better acts, more utilization). The ads and bookings businesses are healthy/growing, there are 2 (and probably more unannounced) additional Spheres working through production. What WOZ did was prove that a "hit film" could generate enormous interest/revenues/visitors to the Sphere. Whether it "levels off" at $1m/day, or $1.2m/day or $1.4m/day, doesn't matter that much because the longer term model is to consistently launch NEW films launch and generate $1.5-$2.5m/day. And they have somewhere between 2-3 new films coming out next year, and probably another 2-3 films in 2028. AI is cutting their speed (and cost) of making films dramatically. Overall I'm a buyer at these $100-$120 price levels (We're long via some short Nov $120P's that are currently in the money). Given recent price action, it's hard to say how the market reacts to the November earnings release, but I think the earnings picture has stabilized from here and the stock is setup for good fundamental catalysts driving earnings growth in 2027.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

$ABVX Interesting data coming from S&P Markit* (daily short interest based on institutional lending data). Looks like someone established a large position over the past 10 days or so, about 2mm shares or $200M. Given people generally don't like to have single name short exposure over 1-2% of their book (often people size shorts as like ~50 bps), this would be part of a really big book or a really big basket trade. Given the current ABVX-specific situation, it feels weird to be directly betting on the stock falling further from these levels, without any known catalysts around. My best guess is this is part of a "short France" basket trade. But I also can't find any other items of the basket with large changes in short interest to corroborate. Retail Fintwit crowding (correlation with other popular bio names) is likely having an effect as well. Plus rates. Plus biotech degrossing. What I ruled out was a world where this could/would be frontrunning ahead of a possible liquidation (There's a fund with a large ABVX position that took a huge loss on LQDA), but the timing on that is off. In fact pretty much the whole short position was established prior to LQDA crashing. My observation is that the list of items above, plausibly causing weakness in the stock, largely has nothing to do with A) Does the drug work, B) Will the drug sell well. That's what I like about situations like this. ABVX is a large position for us, we've spent a long time recently double/triple checking our fundamental views on the stock and still strongly believe that their key drug, Obefazimod, will be successful even without an acquisition. Hope to have a detailed write-up about that at some point. *I find Markit data to be the most reliable among 3rd party short data, but there are still data anomalies for various reasons. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds a long position in ABVX. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

$QURE A bunch has been written about today's AMT130 news by people far more scientifically credible than me, so I'll just summarize to say my opinion is that the data was directionally bearish but only mildly. I think the reaction to the news was overblown. If you gave me the press release and conference call ahead of time and asked me to guess "what does the price trade to", I'd say around $32. Lots of people have complained about the type and quality of disclosure and messaging from the company but I want to highlight something I noticed that I think has been missed. My experience this morning was that the actual press release process was entirely mishandled. Here's what I think happened: 7:05AM ET is the "typical release time" for QURE. So naturally when they setup an interview with Stat News and Bloomberg the night before, they likely communicated this "embargo time". So at 7:05AM, the pre-written articles from Stat and Bloomberg hit the newswires. Bloomberg's article was particularly poorly done, with exceptionally little detail beyond the "-44% not stat sig" datapoint. (They later "updated" their news article to be more robust). But this awful article was essentially first to hit the headlines, and obviously thousands of bots and machines are scraping Bloomberg, and trading off it. Naturally one would want to "check for more data beyond two articles", but for some reason, at 7:05AM, there was no Press Release from QURE. This was likely a mistake (either by QURE or by the wire company). In the screenshot (and link) below, you'll see the timestamp of the official wire including ALL of the data. So investors were "left in the dark" for a full 7 minutes. https://t.co/zp4lmZqFfe Does 7 minutes really matter? To a long term investor, certainly not. But it matters to algo traders, who leave footprints of price action, which affect sentiment, so it does matter. Also, it leaves me unsettled that they're possibly getting some of the most basic things wrong. I get their jobs are stressful and there's a lot on the line here, that's why you have to dot your i's, cross your t's, because everything matters. To be clear, I don't know for a fact who's error this was, but I'd speculate it was the company. (Here's a normal press release from the company timestamped at 7:05AM ET. There are many other examples on the site that corroborate the 7:05 ET pattern) https://t.co/miNzObOZP7 Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds hold a long position in QURE. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

At the risk of "trying to hard to read the tea leaves", when I saw the jury question, my thought was: "They're trying to aggregate the voting blocs" i.e. the jury is split between three possibilities a) $0 no breach b) $1 breach c) $XXX dollars breach and they're trying to figure out if the first two "should be the same group" or not. The real answer is it's impossible to know, it is directionally bearish/informative, but it's also an easy ~$250k PnL trade if you have someone in the courtroom relaying the info to you in real-time and you short off of it.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

$NKTR Lots of funky action in this name the past few days, some specific to the ongoing court case and some from bio as a whole. Let's unpack it. The jury note, paraphrased as "Is there a difference between breach + $1 and no breach + $0?", spooked the market and sent the stock down sharply. Two sides to this. First, the note is informative, but only a little. It tells us at least one juror sees the $0/$1 outcome as part of their possible resolution space. Where I think the market (or at least fintwit) got it wrong is treating the note as the voice of the entire jury. It could reflect the whole panel, or it could be a single juror's question. It doesn't even tell us direction: it could come from a juror looking for a way to find breach despite doubting the damages case. The price action implied the whole jury is now choosing between $0 and $1, which I think is a big overread. Second, this is NKTR: a retail/fintwit-heavy, relatively illiquid SMID-cap biotech that moves 5% on a random Tuesday with no news. A 10% move on this headline looks extreme, but near-term price action here mostly reflects value-agnostic traders playing local news and liquidity flow, not a considered repricing of long-term value. The bigger picture: the case is largely a distraction from the real value, which is Rezpeg. I'm not a biotech expert, but the sell side and most biotech specialists I respect see it as a likely viable commercial product that's underpriced here. If anything, the case matters mainly as an overhang. An uncertain $0-to-$1B+ claim is hard for any acquirer or partner to price, so resolution in almost any direction clears the path for corporate action. The distraction is creating the opportunity. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds a long position in NKTR. Views expressed are current opinions for information only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

$ABVX We've been here before, about three months ago. Price is controlling the narrative again. In June people extrapolated a handful of malignancy cases into a broken thesis, the stock fell 43%, and then erased a month of losses in a single day when the next data landed. Nothing about the asset changed in either direction. I think the same thing is happening now. The price is lower, so people have decided shareholders are doomed and nobody is ever going to buy the business. The fair argument against me is that the probability of a takeout has fallen, because it hasn't happened yet. List your house, get no bids in 60 days, and that tells you something about your asking price. Silence is information. But big pharma M&A is a market with half a dozen real buyers, competing priorities, and internal politics. Deals come together in weeks or in years. The signal from "no deal yet" is extremely noisy, and people are treating it as a clean efficient market. I think the bigger problem is what shareholders were assuming in the first place. If you expected a $180-200 takeout within three months, at today's price that is a 78% return in a quarter. Call it 50/50 to be "conservative" and you are still assuming roughly 39% a quarter or 270% annualized. (Change the numbers to levels a month ago and you still get the same directional craziness) So the problem was never the price target. Targets have a defensible basis. The problem is the clock. My view: $150-200 over the next 18 months, either from a buyout or from a credible launch trajectory. From here that is 25-50% annualized, which is a number a portfolio can be built on. Roughly the same price everyone else is talking about. I just don't have the same timeline expectation. If a buyout comes sooner, that is the better outcome, not just the faster one. The asset is worth more inside a company that already has a GI salesforce than it is standalone. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds hold a long position in ABVX. Views expressed are current opinions for informational and educational purposes only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future results. See the disclosures link in bio for more important information.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

I think the main consideration with the CDER appointment/publication is that it narrows the gap about "Does COMP360 get approved?" Basically the situation gets de-risked by some %. I've seen some analysts suggest the probability of approval is around 75% (which I think is way too low), my estimate is in the 90%+ range. It would be extremely weird for the FDA/CDER (and White House) to give all of these "pro-psychedelics" signals to the public, and then turn around and immediately decline (or hamstring) the highest profile, most time-sensitive drug application. To be clear, this is not 100% chance of approval, because there are ALWAYS risks/weird things that can happen, but directionally, this moves in the right direction (and the recent stock price move partially reflects that). But my opinion, as I've said before, is we've got a long way to go before the market price truly reflects the opportunity for $CMPS.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

$CMPS Lots to be excited about for the company and the space. Specifically there's been a lot of "thematic" interest in the psychedelics/psilocybin space in the last few weeks, and I expect that to continue. The most notable event recently is an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine: "FDA's New Framework for Psychedelic Drugs" (paywall) https://t.co/rdkgp5GsOG This was co-authored by Michael Davis (just named permanent director of CDER) and the FDA's top psychiatry and neuroscience reviewers. They're the group that ultimately approves/rejects COMP360 (and other psychedelic drugs). Aside from approve/reject, they will be helping negotiate/decide the "label" and essentially how permissive or strict the availability of these drugs/therapies are. The devil is in the details and hearing the FDA publicly state that they are aligned, i.e. "let's make sure these drugs get to market safely AND effectively" versus "this is weird/different, lets be extra cautious/slow with the roll out" is very important to both shareholders, and patients who could potentially be helped by these therapies. Another interesting article is here: WSJ: "Elon Musk's Inner Circle is Pouring Cash Into Making Psychedelics Mainstream" https://t.co/pfuE6JqBGD It is widely expected that COMP360 from $CMPS is going to be the first classic psychedelic (Psilocybin) drug to be approved and commercially available. Despite this being "priced in" by people who follow markets (or the industry) closely, I believe there's a good chance there's a positive public reaction to the headline when/if it comes out in the coming months. More importantly, I think we're at the very early innings of a treatment category that will be highly beneficial to a group of patients who historically have not had great treatment options. My full write on $CMPS is below, I have a $45 price target: https://t.co/rVZOU3yIz6 Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds does hold a long position in CMPS. Views expressed are current opinions for informational educational only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in bio for more important information.
@kevin__mak

Kevin Mak on X

I think this is a good analysis and I'm long $QURE, but I want to flag something about this style of argument because it shows up across a lot of stocks. The common version is "the fundamentals are much better than they were x years ago, but the market cap is the same, so it must be underpriced." That doesn't follow. A disconnect like that means one of the two prices was wrong. It could be too cheap now, or it could have been too expensive before. All you actually know is that the market was probably wrong once. (To credit: @ClearPath100 doesn't explicitly say it's underpriced here.) That said, I still think these situations are worth finding. I generally assume the market is more often right than wrong, so a stock that moves with its fundamentals isn't very interesting. The disconnects are where the market might be wrong, and that's what we want. You just have to do the work to figure out which price was the wrong one. For QURE, I think the shorter comparison is more useful than the 5 year one. The stock was $70+ before the FDA denial that took it to $8. It's $48 today at a lower market cap than it was at $70. In between, the path to approval got better, not worse. The BLA is filed, the confirmatory study design is agreed, the timeline to commercialization is shorter, there's a year more of follow up data, and more cash on the balance sheet. Every risk that exists today also existed at $70. The biggest risk that did exist at $70, the FDA refusing the dataset, has already played out and been resolved. So which price was wrong? My guess is a lot of sharp people owned this at $70+, dumped it on the news, and never came back. I think they were right to sell back then. But if you were right to own it at $75 with more risks and a longer timeline, you should want to own it even more at $48 with fewer risks and a shorter one. Not buying it back isn't consistent with their own original view. I think the reason is simple. Losing 75% on a stock stings, and it's a lot easier to stay away than to admit the same thesis is back on the table at a better price. That's part of why we own it here. Disclosure: Creek Drive and its affiliated funds holds a long position in QURE. Views expressed are current opinions for informational educational only, subject to change and are not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Investing involves the risk of loss and past performance is not indicative of future performance. See the disclosures link in my bio for more important information.