Just want to make sure that everyone caught this sell decision that I made first on my subscription JubakAM.com website.
I’m selling Agenus (AGEN) and Amyris (AMRS) out of both my Jubak Picks and Volatility portfolios.
I added both stocks to these portfolios on August 20. I have a 15.97% gain on Agenus and a 27.80% loss on Amyris.
I added them to my portfolios as a pick and shovel play on the race for a coronavirus vaccine. Both companies make adjuvants, materials such as squalene that can be added to vaccines to make them more effective. Many adjuvants have had to be harvested from relatively hard to access natural supplies, such as sharks’ livers. That makes ramping up supplies to deliver to a huge global vaccine effort difficult. These two small companies are on the front lines of using technologies such as fermentation to produce artificial equivalents.
But these companies have other businesses too and frankly they are just too volatile for me in this market. Amyris plunged 25.8% on Friday, September 11, for example, when LAVANT announced a lawsuit for patent infringement. Agenus was up 23.87% on September 10 on positive news on two potential drugs for cancer treatment. But the stock has been giving back the gains on no news that I can find in recent days with a 3.87% drop on September 11 and another 3.85% decline today, September 15.
Yesterday in my post on how to protect a portfolio in case the Vaccine Put supporting stock prices starts to totter on JubakAM.com (https://jubakam.com/part-3-in-my-ser…-or-three-months/), I suggested raising cash as a buffer by selling your most volatile positions, the ones that make you really nervous. For me that’s Agenus and Amyris.
Full disclosure: I own shares of both Agenus and Amyris in my personal portfolios. I’ll be selling them three days after yesterday’s sell notice.
