This has, quite-frankly, long troubled me. I am excited to see someone — anyone — making a larger issue of it. It has impacted, and will, in the future, certainly continue to impact the stock prices of the participants in the next-gen Hep C wars. And more than occasionally, it will do so in non-transparent ways — conferring significant trading (and thus financial) benefits upon Wall Street’s high-powered-elite: the hedge funds and largest portfolio managers.
Writing for The Street, Adam hits the nail on the head, here:
. . . .But if you want an advance look at potentially market-moving hepatitis C drug data, you’ll have to be an EASL member or a registered attendee of the EASL meeting — a group which includes hedge fund and mutual fund portfolio managers and sell-side analysts, all of whom can pay for early access.
EASL plans to selectively distribute hepatitis C drug research abstracts to these folks on Thursday. The same documents will not be made available to the public. That means a select group of investors will have access to potentially stock-moving clinical data while a majority of investors will be kept in the dark. . . .
Exactly right. The EASL conference selective disclosure/embargo system needs to be reworked — there is scant legitimate reason to suggest that EASL members need advance access.
