From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about, as well as an exercise in sharing some of my own updated thinking. You can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about, as well as an exercise in sharing some of my own updated thinking. You can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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In a slight break with convention, The Digest is packed with earnings this week so I’m circulating a preview to the wider NFTBC mailing list - for the benefit of those who may be interested.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• BMW: following my prior best guess of a return to the 8-10% strategic automotive margin corridor by 2029, BMW are now officially communicating a target “by the beginning” of the 2030s - suggesting I was off by about a year. In either case, if they execute (and, breaking with consensus, I think they probably will), in several years EPS could be potentially multiples higher than the 2026 number.

• CBRS: expectations for the next couple of years are already very high, but I’ve been wondering lately if they’re high enough. The trail of breadcrumbs is growing longer. While the evidence is not yet conclusive, it is becoming harder to dismiss.

• OBCK: points for management credibility - 1) the business is now re-accelerating following the Q1 low ✅ and 2) they’ve signed a deal to divest the last ‘non-core’ business ✅ (in both cases as they said they would)

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I hadn’t been planning another REGN post any time soon, but then something quite interesting happened this week. You can consider this post an addendum to June’s post on partnerships. It won’t be very long so I’m making it generally available.

This week Nature published a study describing a massive genomic study led by the Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC). The study unearthed rare truncating variants of the FNIP1 gene that are strongly associated with unusually broad improvements in metabolic health. In basic terms, carriers of these variants have lower BMI, more favourable fat distribution, less liver fat, higher lean body-mass percentage, lower atherogenic blood lipids, healthier blood sugars and a 60% lower odds of cardiometabolic disease.

To quote the headline news article (and RGC’s own Luca Lotta):

“For millennia, humans lived in a calorie-deprived environment, where every calorie counted,” says Lotta. “Pathways like this one helped the body spare calories for a rainy day - a sort of metabolic brake telling the body, ‘Don’t burn too much fat, you might run out.’” But we now live in a calorie-rich environment. Our genomes haven’t changed much, but our environment has, he says. “So, there’s a mismatch.”

In effect, disabling one copy of FNIP1 appears to fix this mismatch by acting on cellular metabolism. The prospect of translating the discovery into a medicine is therefore exciting. From the patent record it’s clear that REGN has already been contemplating drugging FNIP1 for at least several years. As to how close they might be to advancing a clinical candidate remains to be seen. When Len Schleifer was asked recently which of REGN’s MASH programs he was most excited about, his answer: “the ones I haven’t told you about. Stay tuned.” It makes you wonder…

RGC

There are still likely to be important translational questions outstanding on FNIP1 (I won’t try to address those here), but the therapeutic signal is unusually intriguing. In any case, weighing up FNIP1 is not the purpose of this post. It’s more about strategy and terminal value, such as we talked about in June. Here’s something else I wrote in June (in The Digest):

Aris Baras, head of the RGC, appeared on a podcast. It’s a great overview of what RGC is up to and some of their ambitions. Notably he talks about how REGN is currently putting around 10 RGC-discovered targets into pipeline programs each year. And he also mentions that they’re seeing non-linear benefits to scale. Think about it this way - they’re looking for rare genetic ‘superpower’ variants. You can only find these through sequencing populations at scale. But that’s not enough - you need to find enough people carrying the same variant (or, more commonly, different damaging variants in the same gene) to be highly confident that the gene-level associations are real. And that takes massive scale. They’re currently around 3m people sequenced and he seems to be suggesting that the pace of discovery is picking up at this scale, say, versus 1 or 2m. They believe they already have a clear path to 10m, but their new official ambition is 50m+ and as far as they know, no one else is trying to go that big. I think it’s plausible that REGN has invested a couple of billion dollars in RGC over the last 10 years, perhaps with a current run-rate of $300m+. Yet they have little to show for it yet in terms of new targets making it to revenue. Who else behaves this way in pharma? It’s exciting to see where RGC goes in the years ahead and what the eventual economic contribution could start to look like - I think it’s going to be big.

Size Matters

Arguably the most exciting publicly disclosed targets to come out of RGC so far are as follows:

Of the publicly disclosed novel targets so far, these are right at the high-end in terms of dataset size (i.e. people sequenced). FNIP1 was discovered in a substantially larger analysis than GPR75 or CIDEB and is among the clearest illustrations yet of the returns from mega-scale sequencing. Homing in on Aris Baras’ non-linear benefits of scale point, it’s pretty interesting that the FNIP1 signal emerged from an analysis of over 1m people, and is arguably the most compelling novel target so far. They found ‘ultra-rare protein-truncating variants in FNIP1’ that were only present in 1 in 7,000 people - this is what Baras was talking about by the need to go big.

Bearing in mind that these disclosures only take place at a significant delay to the underlying work (directionally patent filings give us an extra clue here), we can only imagine what RGC is currently cooking with a dataset that exceeds 3m and is on its way to 10m+ and perhaps eventually 50m. I think it’s pretty exciting.

I’ve seen numerous murmurings in the last 12 months to the effect that REGN is past its best and should now step aside on R&D in favour of smaller, more nimble, more innovative biotechs (that’s the general argument). But show me the small biotech (or even large pharma for that matter) that is willing and able to assemble all the required infrastructure and partnerships and put into effect and analyse a database of 10m+ people’s exomes/genomes (and increasingly, proteomes) linked to de-identified patient health records. It’s a massive undertaking and costly in both dollar terms and years. Over the last 12 years RGC has built a vertically integrated population-scale sequencing factory. Frankly, it is hard to imagine anyone recreating the same integrated system quickly or easily. So far as I can ascertain (and in line with Baras’ comments), no competitor has publicly committed to building a comparably integrated, 10 million-person sequencing resource for its own R&D purposes - the nearest disclosed pharma program I can find is materially smaller. In this context, RGC scientists have led or materially contributed to many (actually, I believe, most) of the largest exome-wide association analyses published yet.

Getting a Head Start

Now, if RGC’s discoveries were to remain effectively secret, the IP advantage would be inarguable. But in practice, RGC has certain data disclosure commitments - to partners and to its own researchers (REGN has always encouraged its scientists to publish, in the spirit of the original Genentech model). Moreover disclosing major discoveries in the name of science is, no doubt, the right thing to do in REGN’s own terms (‘doing well by doing good’). But that’s not to say that all important insights leak out - I’m sure they don’t. Nevertheless, major discoveries do not remain internal secrets - they enter the public domain through eventual publication in scientific journals or might be inferred from disclosures made in patent filings. So I think the bigger questions here are something like:

• How big of a head start can REGN get before actionable insights enter the public domain?

• How quickly can they act on that head start?

Both Len and George have talked recently about the increasing difficulty of getting a head start before someone follows. But it also looks like they’re adapting and acting a little differently to how they used to.

With HSD17B13 in MASH, REGN filed initial target IP and then around a year later told the world about the discovery at the same time they announced the Alnylam partnership to find and develop an RNAi drug - in practice they didn’t have much of a head start. And indeed, Arrowhead caught up very quickly. By GPR75 and especially CIDEB, REGN seems to have learned to feed RGC discoveries into a standing therapeutic-development machine privately, file both target-level and molecule-level IP, and only then publish the target. FNIP1 potentially takes this one step further, with almost three years between the earliest patent filing and the full scientific publication. Importantly, the patent itself became public in March 2025, so the target was not secret for that entire period. Nevertheless, REGN had approximately 18 months in which the target and therapeutic hypothesis were not public, followed by another 17 months during which competitors (if they went looking) could see the patent but not the complete evidence eventually published in Nature. I could be reading too much into it, but one plausible interpretation is that they’re allowing themselves valuable additional time for translational work, discovery and pre-clinical development before potential competitors get a first peek at the science behind the target. And if you think about it, the larger the dataset underlying the discovery, the less likely someone else is to have arrived at the same independently. FNIP1 took a million people vs 47,000 for HSD17B13. I suspect, at 3m+ people, REGN could have increasingly more headroom to act in the absence of competition.

And the same goes for target validation. Patents become public around 18 months after filing. And in these patents REGN leaves a trail of breadcrumbs around the target in question. At the very least patents can point competitors in the right direction and they can try to validate the target independently. But when variants become increasingly rare, independent validation becomes impractical in the absence of access to a massive dataset. The informational asymmetry grows as the variants get rarer. Taking it to the next extreme, suppose that RGC discovers a spectacular protective gene that’s 10X rarer than with FNIP1. The approximate carrier numbers become (illustratively):

Carrier numbers themselves increase linearly with cohort size, but the practical discovery benefit can be non-linear: an additional increment of scale can move a gene from statistically invisible to convincingly associated. At sufficient scale, RGC may have a significant window where it is the only group able to observe an ultra-rare association with persuasive statistical confidence (effectively a temporary monopoly on human-genetic insight). Until the complete evidence is published, competitors may be unable to reproduce the human genetic case - even if they can begin investigating the target through patents, public datasets and their own experiments.

Certainly once the translational work is sufficiently advanced we can assume that REGN can act expeditiously with their own VelociSuite antibodies, should the target in question be amenable to that approach. I think this is also the case with RNAi now via the Alnylam partnership - e.g. unlike HSD17B13 REGN appears to have a substantial head start on CIDEB, with their Alnylam-partnered molecule now in phase 2 (and no competitors in phase 1 yet, so far as I can see). In a similar vein, you can see REGN pushing the partnership strategy into further novel modalities to ensure they always have ready access to the appropriate technology (I find the new Parabilis partnership particularly intriguing in this regard).

Final Thoughts

Per Baras’ recent comments, RGC/REGN have put 50 RGC-discovered targets into actual pipeline programs (that’s +20 in the last two years, by the way). But in the clinical pipeline we can see only a small handful of these - the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot that they just haven’t told us yet. Separately, my review of the public patent record identified at least 13 additional novel, genetics-derived targets around which REGN has filed patents, but for which it has not published detailed scientific evidence. That is a floor rather than a complete count - applications filed since February 2025 (give or take) will generally not yet be public. Patent filings do not, of course, prove that every target remains part of an active pipeline program however.

RGC practically never comes up in the general investment discourse on REGN - even for those who know about it it’s much too jam tomorrow to be considered relevant in a market environment that operates from quarter to quarter. But it is highly relevant in my view: a unique hard-to-replicate asset that 1) regularly turns out compelling novel drug targets and 2) whose capability and informational advantage only compound further over time through scale. In practical terms for investors, if RGC/REGN can in the coming years demonstrate 1) a consistent pipeline of compelling novel RGC-derived programs converting to the clinic and 2) a consistent ability to exploit their head start, then I think RGC will be difficult not to notice. I suspect that RGC’s increasing scale as well as the facilitating platform partnership approach make this more likely than not. So my contention is that if/when RGC does eventually enter the discourse as an obvious durable advantage, investors may have to revisit conventional thinking around terminal value.

But let’s not forget the sceptics: scale alone does not make medicines. Rare-variant associations may ultimately prove undruggable or intractable, target-level patents might be designed around, most pharma development programs fail and RGC has not yet contributed much revenue. Those caveats might explain why investors discount RGC - but not, in my view, why they should largely ignore it.

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It’s certainly a sign of today’s markets that Bruker can meet externally communicated expectations and maintain guidance for the year, yet still plunge more than 20% in one session (welcome to The Beauty Contest). I think there are two relevant explanations: 1) investors had assumed prior guidance to be too conservative and 2) BRKR’s recent run-up was closely tied to inclusion in various fashionable thematic trades (semiconductors and AI-in-biology). It’s probably a bit of both. If you’d put my feet to the fire, I’d have tentatively leaned towards a revenue beat for Q2 on the basis of recent results for LST peers but I wasn’t sure given BRKR’s idiosyncrasies (see here). But much more importantly I had been turning increasingly cautious on the stock, seeing it as highly prone to correction - full subscribers will have known this already (e.g. see here and here) and that I had been dialling down my own holding quite considerably. Herein we’ll take a look at the state of affairs and I’ll share a few reflections on BRKR’s future prospects - which, for the most part, I remain excited about.

Occasionally, an unrelenting share price decline in the face of no particular news is itself a source of signal to be taken seriously rather than noise to be ignored. I warned NFTBC readers about the possibility of Procept investors positioning for a negative guidance revision perhaps on the basis of privately obtained claims data here (and more recently here) - staring down the barrel of this inherent uncertainty is what prevented me from dialling up my own thus-far modest holding. And it looks like some version of this turned out to be the case with Procept in Q2. But the forward-looking picture is more complex than a simple cut to procedure expectations - there are a number of moving parts (some of which are quite encouraging) and the plan here is to weigh them up as best I can.

[NFTBC does not give advice - please do your own research. I currently own shares in BRKR and PRCT]

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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When I started writing about REGN last year, I talked about how Eylea had become “a distraction, a fixation even”. This is inevitably going to be the case in biotech when revenue is concentrated in any single molecule, but in the end, the fears proved to be unfounded - REGN has grown through the handoff from Eylea 2mg to Eylea HD. Eylea finally appears to be evolving from a hindrance into something potentially helpful once again.

One of the most entertaining quirks about Regeneron is the steadfast refusal to give revenue guidance of any kind.

I don’t like to make predictions about things that I don’t have any more information than you do. You can look at all the same information I have, and you can make your best guesses

- CEO Len Schleifer, speaking on the inSpired Podcast recently

He is, of course, being selectively candid here even if directionally fair. Ultimately there’s a tradeoff: REGN could perhaps provide considerably better forecasts than the analysts can. But it would come at the cost of having to play someone else’s game and entail a certain loss of control and freedom. To start operating that way might not suit the company philosophically either (also Goodhart’s Law etc). But the consequence of leaving analysts guessing is pretty wild volatility in revision trends. Here are consensus revenue trends over the last three years:

And let’s not forget that we’ve just about arrived at the two-year anniversary of REGN hitting its all-time high:

Yet despite a stock that remains down near 40% and a veritable rollercoaster ride in the forecasts (question: which one caused the other?), it looks as though REGN is on track to surpass future-year revenue forecasts made back at the highs - or the forecast for 2026 at the very least. When I wrote the deep dive last year, I suggested this advice:

if you err on the side of management’s ambitions rather than whatever sell-side analysts plug into their models, you’ll end up nearer to the real world. It sounds simplistic, but over the longer-term, the consensus numbers are always too low

It probably won’t have come as a surprise to NFTBC readers that revenue and EPS estimates for 2026 suddenly had to shoot upwards this week - I had been writing since last year that they seemed much too low (e.g. see here, here, here and here).

With that let’s take a look at some of the standout things from REGN’s latest quarter. You can find all the Q2 materials here.

[NFTBC does not give advice - please do your own research. I currently own REGN shares]

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

Read more

Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

Read more

Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

Read more

Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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This post is for those of you who read the Cerebras deep dive and are curious to continue following the story in the months and years ahead. A couple of evenings ago CBRS held its first earnings conference call. There are already plenty of ‘hot takes’ out there following the results - this is, emphatically, not intended to be another one of those.

Everything about CBRS currently is very very noisy: the financials, the punditry, the share price… Just to update you since the deep dive, the IPO was priced at $185 but the shares opened on 14 May at $350 and hit an intra-day high of around $400. As I write, the shares are now below the IPO price having plunged 20% yesterday in the earnings aftermath:

As I suggested at the time of my deep dive, the post-IPO reaction is all turning into a bit of a circus. So the point of this post is to take stock of where we are following the IPO and what relevant signals there might be for the future - on a multi-year view.

One important recent development is the commencement of sell-side coverage just a few weeks ago. And what’s really notable about the Q1 earnings is that it kind of looks as though CBRS management were, in their first earnings event, trying to engineer a big beat and raise on both revenue and margin relative to expectations previously shared with analysts - and this is in fact what they did. That the shares reacted so negatively appears to have been a surprise to them (e.g. see here and here). But it might be less surprising to observers of the Beauty Contest. Along with the beat and raise, they signalled a willingness to take some short term margin pain for longer-term gain - the type of act generally not looked upon favourably in present market conditions. Neither does it help that one of CBRS’s greater perceived fragilities is around the margin question - room for doubt. Throw in some second-, third- and fourth- orders of guessing along with a thin float, and a single-day correction of 20% seems fairly run-of-the-mill.

One interesting question worth grappling with is the CBRS valuation at this stage. If the consensus 2028 revenue numbers are in the right ballpark (and the CFO has suggested they are), then the stock is perhaps in the region of 5-6.5x EV/S on a 2028 timeframe (depending on what share count and net cash position you use) - putting it at a significant discount to many other semiconductor stocks (and practically all of those with links to AI). And it’s also growing much faster. But it’s not necessarily to say it’s low risk - the burden very much appears to be on management at the moment to prove that they can execute smoothly and simultaneously on a massive manufacturing and cloud capacity ramp. That said, once you can get past all the hand-waving about high multiples on trailing revenue and such things, CBRS may even be in the process of emerging as a cheap stock following the not-entirely-unexpected post-IPO blowup. For my part, I still own my pre-IPO shares. I will, of course, let full subscribers know if I change my holding in any way.

Now onto the meat and potatoes…

[NFTBC does not give investment advice. Please do your own research.]

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About a week ago a sell-side analyst downgraded PRCT on concerns around competition from PAE:

The stock has gone down in a straight line ever since:

So the plan here is to briefly revisit the PRCT thesis and talk a little about how PAE might impact it, if at all.

First of all, I’m working on the assumption here that the Leerink downgrade is in fact, the catalyst for whatever is going on with PRCT currently. It does coincide perfectly with the start of the slide and the threat of PAE is something that analysts often like to raise on PRCT’s conference calls - so it’s been something of a latent fear residing in the background. Otherwise, I would just assume that some investors are taking the opportunity to position for a negative guidance revision. It’s fair to say there’s a degree of scepticism about PRCT’s guidance for the rest of the year, which entails an acceleration in H2. At NFTBC I don’t work with alt data or such things, so I have no special insight into that. My strategy is more to give Larry the time and space to carry out his strategy, all the while trying to make a sensible ongoing assessment of whether it’s going to work - in all likelihood this is going to be more of a multi-year process rather than making strong conclusions from one quarter to the next. Having said all this, PRCT management were supposed to appear for a fireside chat at a Truist medtech conference this week and I was looking forward to hearing what they had to say. But this event seems to have been cancelled. Some may interpret this as incrementally suspicious but equally these things do get cancelled from time to time for innocent reasons. At the time of writing, there has been no 8-K or suggestion of a material development.

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[NFTBC does not give advice - please do your own research. I currently own shares in PRCT].

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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It was exactly a year ago when I wrote to you about the outright despair that had taken over REGN sentiment at the time. Unwittingly, I caught the exact bottom with that post, with the shares going on to appreciate by around 70% over the following 6 months.

…Yet here we are a year later and we’re back in much the same position from a sentiment and valuation perspective:

Once you factor in REGN’s massive $16bn net cash pile, the effective P/E is 8-point-something on consensus numbers for the next 12 months. 8x earnings is so low, that you’ll be hard pressed to find anything much lower in this sector - not even in the stodgiest dregs of old big pharma. And don’t forget, REGN invests in R&D at twice the rate - on a like-for-like basis the P/E drops to just 6x. Moreover, on consensus numbers (which I think are too low by the way), REGN is set to grow its earnings by 70% out to the end of the decade. This is why, at various times over the last 12 months, co-founder Len Schleifer and others have claimed that you can arrive at the company’s entire market value just from the cash flows of Dupixent.

Here’s a similar and very simple way of thinking about it:

Note I’ve picked consensus net income here for simplicity (and because it’s the lower number than free cash flow). And you can pick your own discount rate, but the point is that earnings between now and the early/mid 2030s account for 100% of REGN’s current unlevered market cap or enterprise value.1 Or in other words, the implication is that REGN has zero terminal value beyond the mid 2030s.

Now, of course, I don’t think that anyone really believes this - that would be silly. I think one of two things is going on. Maybe investors have cleverly sussed out that REGN will very shortly go into steady decline and will be much smaller in the 2030s than sell-side analysts collectively think. For example, REGN would be approximately fairly valued today at a terminal multiple of 10x if you assume it makes 40-50% less money than consensus over the coming 10-year period. Even if someone only had a moderate understanding of REGN’s core products, collaborations, IP and competitive landscape - this wouldn’t be much less silly than the notion of zero terminal value in my view. So here’s the more likely explanation: investors are collectively just playing their own games, and the market cap is merely the outcome of those games at this snapshot in time. I’ve written about these games before, and in fact the very name and premise of this blog comes from the Keynesian Beauty Contest. There’s no shortage of reasons to positively downvote REGN’s in the Beauty Contest right now:

• Two phase 3 misses in the last year (and extrapolation therefore / Gambler’s Fallacy)

• Ongoing Eylea approval delays in the US (Eylea fears being the traditional bête noire with this company)

• A handful of CRLs in recent years (and the assumption the problem is structural)

• Dupixent loss of exclusivity creeping into the distant horizon

• Monkish abstinence from big M&A

• Investing more than twice the industry average in internal R&D2

The last two in particular render REGN something of a total weirdo in the minds of many players - and surely no one’s going to vote for the weirdo in a Keynesian Beauty Contest. If only REGN would behave more conventionally - throw on a little Instaglam if you like - then perhaps the players would take more notice. Or so it might seem. But we all know about unconventional beauty - and it’s arguably the more profound and enduring kind. If there’s a purpose to this blog, it’s in seeking out and exploring some of these cases. Naturally, I make no promise that I’ll always be right about them. That said, I suspect I am right about REGN - only time will time. Time being the operative word here. As I’ve said a few times at NFTBC before, I don’t even think the bears are wrong at all - we’re just playing different games. Games with very different time horizons for the most part. Which brings me to…

…the more serious part of this post. So why do I believe that REGN deserves a terminal value much higher than zero? For one thing, I was struck by something co-founder George Yancopoulos said earlier this year:

A lot of people have a mistaken belief that it's easy to make antibodies and all antibodies are created the same. More fully human antibodies have been approved from our platform than any other platform, 10% to 20% of all approved antibodies come from our platform. And we repeatedly are producing the best agents with the least number of problems such as antidrug antibodies and so forth. And so when you have 2 antibodies against the same target, they’re not necessarily the same. And across many programs. Remember, other people have tried to make DUPIXENT-like antibodies that all failed, including Amgen. So it’s not that easy to always make the best antibodies. Our platform and our people have perfected that ability. And that’s why our antibodies seem to work in places where other antibodies against the same targets don’t work.

I had never thought about it in those terms before, but it’s true. Depending how exactly you count it, somewhere in the mid- to high-teens percent of all fully human antibodies currently approved came out of REGN’s VelociSuite platform. The odds that this platform continues to turn out great therapeutic antibodies therefore seem very favourable - VelociSuite’s not worth nothing anyway. I have written about it before, so I won’t repeat myself here. But I thought it might be more interesting to write about another important and overlooked contributor to REGN’s terminal value: platform partnerships. And this is where we come back to time horizons.

The central platform partnership in REGN’s commercial operation is, of course, the one originating in the Sanofi antibody collaboration - established back in 2007. VelociSuite was the platform and Sanofi were paying to access it, on pretty favourable terms to REGN I might add. There were various additions and amendments made in the ensuing years. Here we are almost 20 years later and antibody therapeutics born of this alliance are currently annualising at around $23bn and together grew more than 34% in the latest quarter. A great pharmaceutical collaboration can take years and years to really pay off. But who in this industry has a 20 year time horizon? Who even has a 5 year horizon? Certainly not your typical investor anyway. As Len recently noted, he’s worked with 8 different Sanofi CEOs during the collaboration. It’s almost impossible to imagine that the collaboration would have been as successful if the same turnover and constant rearranging of the deck chairs had applied on both sides. Despite Sanofi’s numerous unforced errors3 this is arguably the most successful pharma partnership of all time. But what if instead of Sanofi, both parties were more REGN-like in time horizon and innovative by nature, and the resulting value creation was more multiplicative rather than one sided? And what if instead of one such partnership REGN had 10 or so of these with new ones landing every year? These are the sorts of questions that I believe should feed into the conversation about REGN’s terminal value. Why? Because it’s literally their strategy, or a major part of it anyway.

As a reminder, via its sequencing operation RGC, REGN plans to sequence the genomes (and increasingly, proteomes) of tens of millions of people in the years ahead, with the specific intention of using this unique resource to generate insights and invent innovative therapies. But only a portion of this tidal wave of genetically validated drug targets will be optimally addressable with plain vanilla VelociSuite-derived antibodies. REGN is well aware of this hence their desire to expand into new modalities. While some of this can be done in-house (e.g. bispecifics, ADCs), much of it is better achieved through platform partnerships where both parties can bring something valuable to the table: world-leading target discovery and antibody technologies on REGN’s part and world-leading capabilities in new modalities and related technologies on the part of partners.

By the mid-2030s I would expect REGN’s revenue from partnered products to be one of the fastest growing parts of the business, albeit still a minority share relative to pure VelociSuite products. The evidence for this is the fact that ~60% of REGN’s phase I pipeline is constituted of partnered molecules, most of which from the Alnylam partnership. Including also the partnered assets already in phase 2, one could well envisage waves of new approvals during the early- to mid-2030s period - right at the time when REGN is implicitly supposed to be worth nothing at all. And we can only imagine what the pre-commercial partnered pipeline might look like at that stage. But outside of REGN and its partners, no one is thinking that far ahead. We’re talking here about the event horizon, beyond which the analysts’ models cannot possibly see. And they’ll give you all sorts of very good reasons why: this industry is far too unpredictable to model that far into the future - fair enough, I don’t disagree. But I ask: do you even need to model it? At today’s prices you’re getting the 2033 instantiation of REGN essentially for free. The pharmaceutical industry being inherently fat-tailed, this makes the option-like nature of REGN kind of interesting to me. REGN is built from the ground-up to exploit these fat tails and stay in the game long enough to reap the rewards:

1. Platforms, platforms, platforms: lots of low-cost bets through repeatable constantly-improving platforms, rather than one-off assets and singular bets acquired through competitive bidding

2. Skewing the odds of success: it’s not only about shots on goal. The centrepiece of George’s philosophy is removing bottlenecks in the R&D process. This is what VelociSuite/platforms and RGC are for: making the shots on goal faster, cheaper, much more precise - more option-like

3. Pipelines in products: one product, multiple indications, massive payoffs

4. Unconventional behaviours: time horizons measured in decades rather than quarters, optimising for fat tails rather than smooth earnings, avoiding the average, being unafraid to look weird/wrong etc

5. Massive pile of cash: safety + optionality.

I think there are two ways to play REGN. If you’re skilled at reading the tea leaves - then go for it and play the short term game. This stock moves around a lot (actually for this reason) and that creates opportunity. Alternatively, if you’re as fascinated as I am by the things going on at this company you can use such occasional opportunities to build yourself a stake and settle in for the journey whenever that may go. One way or another, it’ll be fun.

Now lets talk some more about partnerships.

[NFTBC does not give advice - please do your own research. I currently own shares in REGN]

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The idea of doing some version of this post has been percolating for a while. I have written about the Decibel platform before and the increasing importance of the Alnylam partnership has come up a few times too. But REGN’s recently announced collaboration with Parabilis Medicines was the eventual catalyst - it looks like a really interesting partnership.

Overview

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, updates, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

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Friends of NFTBC

Welcome to The NFTBC Digest - a regular email that normally goes out to full subscribers only. Since I started it last year, The Digest has essentially developed into a repository for all the material that I have decided not to make into standalone posts - generally news, earnings, links and occasional updates around my own portfolio activities. Every once in a while I’ll do a wider-circulation email, principally to ensure that newer joiners are aware that The Digest exists. This week’s will be slightly longer than usual as there were plenty of things worth writing about with regard to NFTBC stocks.

The week certainly had its ups and downs. I’ll dispense with my usual alphabetical ordering and get straight to the bad news.

Regeneron

On Friday evening Regeneron provided an update on their long-anticipated fianlimab-cemiplimab combination trial in metastatic melanoma. The trial did not reach statistical significance for the primary endpoint of improvement in progression-free survival (PFS). Regeneron has inevitably taken some heat for releasing the results on a Friday post-market close, but per the press release they only reviewed the results themselves on Friday. The press release itself contains not a single word of commentary, only headlines and data - which seems rather unusual. My guess is that Regeneron probably felt the need to get this news out as quickly as possible before having had sufficient time to process it in any helpful manner, but no doubt others will have different takes.

It’s clear that Regeneron was expecting a positive result in this trial, as was I. However, the timing of the readout was previously deferred a couple of times due to the unexpectedly slow accrual of events in the study - this has been well communicated and discussed and consequently there was already some degree of building scepticism prior to Friday. Additionally, some months ago they amended the trial protocol to include additional patients from the overall survival cohort in order to be able to accumulate more events.

Last year they provided two possible explanations for the slow rate of events - either the pembrolizumab control arm was performing better than expected or the study drug was delivering long and durable responses. They also mentioned they were looking for a PFS in the low- to mid-teens of months in order to be differentiated against the existing field - and that’s against the context of the 24 month PFS they reported from their pooled phase I cohorts.

Here are the headlines:

You can see the high-dose combination (the principal dose of interest) failed on statistical significance - and it seems to be a particularly narrow fail as indicated by the upper bound of the hazard ratio confidence interval only very marginally crossing the 1.0 threshold. In any case the 15.5% relative risk reduction likely falls short of the company’s expectations. Median PFS at 11.5 months arguably just makes it into the low- to mid-teens they were hoping for at a minimum (if we take that to mean 11 to 15).

Notably, they were only expecting the pembro arm median PFS to land somewhere in the range of 4 to 5 months when they designed the study, although they previously said the study was conservatively powered to assume 7 months. In the event it was 6.4 months - which suggests that not only did pembro outperform their expectations, but the fianlimab combination underperformed their expectations. I think our working assumption has to be that the fianlimab combination is not as good as Regeneron was hoping.

However. We are told that detailed results will be presented at an upcoming medical meeting and presumably the data will continue to mature (the study officially runs until 2031). One plausible theory is that at the cutoff date there was a high number of censored (i.e. event-free) patients in the fianlimab arm who may go on to have durable responses beyond the 11.5 months - especially in the context of the 360 overall survival cohort who were dropped in later (and enrolled January to late Summer 2025). In such a context, the study could still have been underpowered at the analysis point. With maturing data, it’s not impossible that PFS goes up and hazard ratio improves. How likely this is, I just don’t know. There’s also the overall survival data. While I’m certainly not betting that this trial delivers subsequent positive surprises, it’s probably premature to draw any strong conclusions about fianlimab before there’s more data in hand.

The good news is that fianlimab still has a further shot on goal in metastatic melanoma coming up in around 10 months - the head-to-head against Opdualag, another LAG-3 combination that’s already on the market. A convincing superiority readout against Opdivo would certainly be helpful in reviving hope of approval and a meaningful commercial opportunity. I think there’s a decent chance that the fianlimab combination could still stack up favourably against Opdualag. That’s partly because Regeneron likely has the better anti PD-1, partly due to their being able to administer their anti LAG-3 at a higher dose and partly due to the relative ORRs they’ve previously shown. We’ll just have to wait until Q1/Q2 next year to find out. But what might make the difference in commercial traction will be the eventual overall survival data, if it’s encouraging.

I wouldn’t write off fianlimab in metastatic melanoma just yet, although in the absence of further data we should downgrade our expectations and push the timeline out by another year. In my mental model, fianlimab was not one of the sizeable opportunities that was going to have a major contribution to intrinsic value. Rather, it was going to be incrementally helpful out to the end of the decade in the interim phase before before some of Regeneron’s bigger swings start to come to fruition. For some context, Regeneron recently said they believe the global metastatic melanoma market opportunity to be between $2bn and $3bn, of which Opdualag does ~$1.2bn.

A convincing win in the pembro head-to-head would certainly have been very helpful for sentiment around the stock and the company in general. But, alas, I suspect this failure will be received in a similar way to the itepekimab failure 12 months ago. As such, we should be braced for a severely negative market reaction next week with this readout being construed as another loss of confidence. The market seems to be much more of a mind to focus on Regeneron’s failures rather than the successes at this moment. But it’s important not to overlook the successes - for example the C5 program is the much more interesting commercial opportunity than fianlimab in my view and it’s coming soon.

An outstanding question is whether Regeneron blundered in designing the pembro head-to-head trial in the way they did or if they just got unlucky. I don’t know enough to have a view - if you have one, I’m happy to hear it. I’m not a clinical trials expert, but I know some of you are. I have left the comments section open, so feel free if you would like to add something or otherwise explain where I have erred.

Now back to alphabetical order…

BMW

In the last Digest I suggested the possibility of a standalone post following the AGM this week. In the end I decided against this. Last year’s AGM was unusually eventful (so far as BMW AGMs go) with the first public showing of the (camouflaged) iX3 and i3 Neue Klasse models as well as a rare speech given by controlling shareholder Stefan Quandt. This year was more business as usual, although did mark the last occasion with Oliver Zipse as chair of the executive board. The renewed plan here is to post a few combined notes and interesting quotes from the both the earnings conference calls (analysts/media) and AGM.

The most notable thing that came up was the idea of export credits in the US. Apparently BMW is in discussions with the US administration about implementing an offset agreement whereby BMW is allowed to import one vehicle for each one it exports. Per comments, the administration seems to be very supportive of the idea and “there’s a very good chance to implement it” - but it all hangs on the EU first implementing their side of last year’s trade deal first. This would clearly be tremendously positive for BMW’s margins given that they import as many vehicles into the US as they export (i.e. net imports are roughly zero) - and it would allow for a faster recovery to the 8-10% strategic automotive margin corridor.

Speaking of which, in my last BMW post I modelled a return to the 8-10% corridor in 2029 along with a potential doubling of automotive profits in the 2025-2029 period (via a dip in 2026). The corridor came up on the analyst call:

the 8% to 10% is not unreachable. Don’t forget that it is 3 x 1 EBIT point we have to achieve. One is on the performance side. We love our BMW ecosystem, and we can do even better. Not to forget Alpina to come, which is also positive for the contribution side. Not to forget that the Gen 6 Neue Klasse has a much better contribution margin than the Gen 5, as we all know for a while. So that’s the performance 1 EBT point.

Second one is, of course, we are doing our homework, working on the material cost side, on the manufacturing cost side, on the warranty cost side. If you have a better quality, you have to provision less warranty costs, which is also contributable to the EBIT margin, not to forget and of course, also logistic costs, et cetera, to be optimized with our global footprint. So that’s the second EBIT point.

The third EBIT point is also homework, is our fixed cost levels, which we are also coming down, as we mentioned already, step by step in ‘26 and ‘27 and also in ‘28. Not to forget the BBA purchase price allocation depreciation, which is always accounted for 1.1, 1.2 EBIT points. This is only lasting until mid- ‘28. So you will have already a half year effect in ‘28 and a full effect in ‘29.

So with these elements to come, there is a chance to come back to 8% to 10%. Of course, we are not naive. There is always something coming around the next corner, whether there are tariffs or other crisis points, and we mitigate as they come along. And we have plans already to do so.

“Not unreachable” / “there is a chance”. I’ve been following BMW long enough to have developed an ear for ‘BMW Speak’ which is characterised by wiggle room and conservatism. My translation is something like this: “We’re gunning hard to get back to 8-10% in the next several years and have a well-developed plan to do it - but we’re not giving guidance on it”.

On differentiation versus ‘monoculture’ in the China auto market:

when you walked over the Beijing Auto Show and compared what the BMW Group was representing and what the rest of the show was representing by and large, there was a very focused presentation of most of the players in that industry. The majority was electric. The majority was the same segment of cars, very few sedans, a lot of SAVs of larger size, focus on autonomous driving, it’s all the same. It was almost a monoculture. And of course, markets worldwide, they are not monolithic. They are widespread. They are differentiated by drivetrains. They are differentiated by size. They’re differentiated by price segments.

And then you looked at the BMW Group stand. There was a large portion of MINI with all drivetrains available. Then you look at the BMW stand, you saw individualization. You saw all drivetrains. You saw V8s. You saw, of course, the Neue Klasse, fully electric. You saw smaller cars. You saw the new 7 Series. You saw our focus on hydrogen. So the full breadth of a premium player, you saw that. And that differentiates BMW. The variety, which represents the variety of market segments. And you don’t have to look on a global scale. You see that in China as well. The markets are much more wider than you would see on that fair.

And that is a worrying thing. If the whole industry thinks they can concentrate only on one segment, larger cars, SAVs, electric, then something is wrong. On the other hand, this makes us more resilient, antifragile to offer the whole breadth. Let’s just look at the first 3 months. EV sales in China were plummeting, not only decreasing, they were plummeting. And what happened, our ICE sales went up at the same minute. So especially China shows what it means to be a full segmenter, to be technology open and at the end, also to be a global industry. That was proof that our strategy is right.

Much is being made currently of the entry of the Chinese into the premium market. When I originally wrote the deep dive, I had some of these things in mind. It’s one thing to pack in a load of features and undercut competitors on price (which gets much of the media attention in the moment), but it’s another altogether to have a desirable and successful premium brand with longevity - I think this is a really under-appreciated characteristic of BMW that gets lost in today’s noise. It’s really really hard being a successful premium automotive brand, but BMW is uniquely good at it. Zipse added some useful thoughts on the topic:

on the strategic side, what is premium in the future? Premium of the future is product quality, specifically long-term product quality. It does not make sense to push cars in the market who lose their resale value after 2 or 3 years’ time. This is not premium. So it’s not feature count in a new car, it’s what is the residual value after 1, 2, 3 or even 5 years. I’m not even talking about historic cars of 15 or 20 years. That is premium.

The second thing is premium system integration. It’s not feature count. We discussed what we saw in Beijing, again, feature count over future count. That’s not the point. How does that all play together? How does it fit? And is it for someone who drives the car, not while it’s standing, but while it’s driving, does it fulfill the function they are supposed to?

And the third one is safety. And I think that becomes one of the foremost criteria for premium of the future, safety, no casualties, no risks. Absolute promises to a brand who promises to be premium means no casualties, no risk in driving the car. And I think that will define premium of the future, and I think we are well underway to fulfill that promise.

And, relatedly, on who will be the survivors in the next five years:

I still think there’s too much focus from the media, but also from the capital markets on individual players, individual technologies, singular events. In 5 years’ time, the players who will still survive, they have the competence to system integrate, to bring all technologies into a car, who build cars who have a long-term quality, who are not falling apart after 1 or 2 years, who will still be in service after 5 years. It’s a completely different game which is happening there, and who are able to differentiate between a singular hype and an overall business model.

If you watch the industry today, actually, there are too many bets going on, too many bets on a singular technology that might happen, but this cannot be endured. So much money is lost in this industry on bets. So system integrators who are able to follow regulation and at the end, have still a business model on high-quality products, that’s the key of everything. And in 5 years from now, to follow CO2 regulations specifically and remain a profitable business will be more or less the key to everything.

Some interesting facts about BMW in Germany (that came up during the AGM):

• one in three customers who have ordered the new iX3 are new to the BMW brand

• in 2025 they built more than one million cars in Germany - the most ever. 25% of all cars built in Germany are now BMWs. I have a strong impression that few investors/observers appreciate the contrast with the wider German automotive industry here

Next - conversion of preferred shares to ordinary shares. This was approved at the AGM. One thing I actually hadn’t appreciated was the possibility of a technical benefit to the share price from the conversion and a strengthening of BMW’s weighting in the various indices.

One last thing: BMW has now unveiled its first Vision Alpina model. As a reminder, a couple of years ago BMW licensed the historic BMW-underpinned Alpina brand from the Bovensiepen family with plans to relaunch Alpina has a BMW sub-brand positioned between the highest-end BMWs and Rolls-Royce. This is presumably Bentley and Aston Martin territory with ASPs in the EUR 200,000 to 250,000 range. Alpina production models are due to hit the roads starting in 2027. It’s worth noting that CFO Walter Mertl specifically referenced their expectations of a positive margin contribution (see above). As I’ve noted before, Rolls-Royce ASPs are over EUR 500,000 and they make, I suspect, margins at least in the higher 20s percent range on 6,000 units per year - it’s potentially in the region of 15% of group automotive EBIT. Alpinas were previously very rare with around 2,000 sold per year prior to the license deal, although there’s perhaps no reason in principle why they can’t drive this to 6,000 (~Aston Martin) or even 10,000 (~Bentley) if they’re particularly shrewd in their positioning/strategy. Assuming margins in the low 20s (such as Bentley managed until recently) it becomes possible to envisage a 20-30bps automotive margin contribution by the end of the decade - hence why I assume Mertl brought it up. Here’s BMW’s video of the Vision Alpina:

Cerebras

Following my recent deep dive Cerebras has now gone public. You can watch the five founders ring the opening bell here. I will now start accounting for my shares in my listed stock portfolio and you’ll see further updates at NFTBC. Until the lock-up ends in September, effective free float is only 16% at the moment and according to comments made by the CEO, the IPO was 25x oversubscribed - in other words, some more reasonable measure of price discovery perhaps won’t come until later in the year.

Cerebras’ CFO Bob Komin was interviewed on CNBC and a couple of notable points came up:

• He said Cerebras’ valuation was probably trading in line with Nvidia on 2028 revenue. With Nvidia at ~8x calendar-2028 EV/S this might imply Cerebras is anticipating a much more aggressive revenue ramp than what I modelled in the deep dive. I said in the deep dive that the range of outcomes is particularly wide, and this also includes the possibility I was too conservative

• They are already serving one trillion parameter models, including ChatGPT 5.4 and 5.5 internally for OpenAI. These are not yet released to the public “but that’s coming very soon”. This is one of the key debates around Cerebras. A one trillion parameter model might require 46 or more CS-3s to fit it, at $1 to $1.5m each - so there are serious questions as to whether that is economical relative to the throughput. I’m assuming there are various co-designed elements to it that we can’t see from the outside including things like disaggregation. But I’m also starting to wonder if the relationship could eventually involve an element of sparse pretraining (weight sparsity) which is only possible on Cerebras hardware. It was supposed to be one of Cerebras’ USPs before the pivot inference in 2024 and everyone seems to have assumed it was a dead end - but is it..? In any case, if they start serving 5.5 at high speed soon, I think that’s going to be a really big deal - there won’t be anything else like it

Ottobock

Ottobock announced that it is acquiring Blatchford’s Norwegian patient care business. The price is EUR 110m and comes with EUR 40m in revenue. In effect, this signals Blatchford’s retreat from patient care outside of the UK. This is actually quite interesting. I discussed some of the competitive dynamics in the deep dive - I think Ottobock’s forward integration model is going to be very tough to compete with and Blatchford has apparently dropped its decade-long ambition to try the same.

Procept

Procept spoke at the Bank of America Global Healthcare Conference this week. CEO Larry Wood provided some helpful context around the prospect of a hybrid support model that they started talking about recently:

The going to a hybrid support model is really not about trying to drive leverage out of the P&L. What it’s really about is trying to drive procedure growth. And what I worry about is that we could be losing procedures here and there because a doctor sits there on a Thursday and says, I got 2 more cases tomorrow, I could do Aquablation, but I don’t want to call the rep or maybe he’s always [out of town] on Friday.

And what I don’t want to do is ever lose any cases because we can’t get somebody there. I want our team routinely visiting with our customers. I want them routinely making sure the system setup is being done properly. There’s a lot of turnover of staff in hospitals, and there’s a setup element to the robot, and we want to make sure that people are doing that right and doing it correctly.

So I always want our people in that. There’s never going to be something where we don’t see a customer for 3 months and they’re just written off cases. And I think there’s actually - at some level, there’s a risk to the business that you quit paying attention to your customer and you just open the door for other people to come in. So we’re always going to be there doing that.

I just don’t want somebody dependent on us. I don’t want somebody saying, if a rep can’t get there, if a rep is sick tomorrow, I can’t do cases and thus I’m going to have to convert them to something else. So I just see this as a lever for us to be able to continue to drive case growth more than I see it as an operational lever. Now the byproduct of it is if we can cover - if we can double the number of cases and we can keep our sales footprint the same or grow slightly, obviously, that drives tremendous leverage for us. But it’s a byproduct, it’s not the reason.

That’s it for this edition. Thanks for reading.

Get in touch if you have any comments or questions.

Welcome to The NFTBC Digest, an email received by full NFTBC subscribers only.

From week-to-week, there is all manner of news, links, marginalia and other curiosities concerning NFTBC stocks that I might not otherwise share with you. So this is what The NFTBC Digest is all about. My thinking here is that you can simply scroll to whichever company you’re interested in and see very quickly if there’s anything notable that tickles your fancy and that you haven’t already seen. There won’t be a set frequency - I don’t want to publish for the sake of publishing. Sometimes The Digest might be weekly when there’s plenty happening, but there could be fewer Digests during earnings season or if news is slower.

Read more