The Bear Cave #93

New Activist Reports, Recent Resignations, and Tweets of the Week

Nov 28, 2021

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New Activist Reports

The Parallax View published a 9,933-word report on Oramed Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ORMP — $770 million), an oral drug delivery systems company focused on treating diabetes. Parallax highlighted excessive insider compensation including $3.2 million to the company’s CEO, Nadav Kidron, and his mother, who serves as Chief Scientific Officer. In addition, Parallax noted that the company spends only ~1% of its market cap on research and development and highlighted litigation around stock grants and a Chinese partner. Parallax also alleged the company’s research “only achieves statistical significance by trimming 20% of data.”

Oramed stock fell 26% this past week but remains up roughly 360% this year. Follow Parallax on Twitter @ParallaxBio and join their newsletter here.

Blue Orca Capital published a Twitter thread dismantling the response of Standard Lithium (NYSE: SLI — $1.47 billion), a pre-revenue lithium extraction company, to its previous critical report. Blue Orca primarily confirms that government data accurately shows that the company’s lithium recovery rate is approximately 12% compared to the company’s claim of 90%.

Citron Research reiterated its positive thesis on The RealReal (NASDAQ: REAL — $1.47 billion), an online and brick-and-mortar luxury resale company for clothes and jewelry. Citron claimed that “credit card data for the month is on fire” and speculated that the company could be acquired by eBay.

Recent Resignations

Notable executive departures disclosed in the past week include:

Chief Accounting Officer of SciPlay Corp (NASDAQ: SCPL — $2.10 billion) notified the company “that he would like to transition to a part-time role” after about two and a half years on the job. The company’s CFO also resigned four months ago with one week’s notice.
Chief Commercial Officer of Y-mAbs Therapeutics (NASDAQ: YMAB — $748 million) resigned after three and a half years. In June, the company’s Chief Scientific Officer also resigned.
CEO of Cellcom Israel (OTC: CELJF — $707 million) resigned after a little less than two years.
CEO of Rafael Holdings (NYSE: RFL — $122 million) resigned after nine months following the company’s failures in multiple clinical trials. The company’s Chief Legal Officer and Chief Business Officer also resigned.
COO of Talkspace (NASDAQ: TALK — $346 million) resigned after four months. Last week the company’s two co-founders also resigned.
Chief Accounting Officer of Teva Pharmaceutical (NYSE: TEVA — $9.76 billion) resigned after ten months.
Two weeks ago, the Chief Accounting Officer of BM Technologies (NYSE: BMTX — $165 million) resigned after just 43 days on the job. On Monday, the company uploaded her resignation letter that explained her decision was “to pursue another career opportunity in the precision medicine industry.” BM Technologies was taken public by a SPAC sponsored by Jay Sidhu earlier this year. His 35-year-old daughter is the company's CEO, and Mr. Sidhu’s bank is a large counterparty of BM Technologies.

Data for this section is provided by InsiderScore.com

What to Read

“Have Fun Staying Cold” (Doomberg)

“As a fuel, natural gas has many compelling attributes. It burns cleanly and efficiently. It produces electricity and useful heat with less CO2 emissions and far fewer toxic byproducts than coal or oil. It is also abundant and ubiquitous. It does have a couple of unfortunate drawbacks, including the fact that it is a fossil fuel (boo!) and that it is a gas at standard temperature and pressure (ugh!). It’s the latter attribute that makes the natural gas market so interesting, although the former plays a significant role in defining the current conundrum.”

“Bill Hwang Made a Huge, Secret Bank Bet Before Archegos Collapse” (Bloomberg)