Volume Spike Investor

Favrille, Inc. (NASDAQ: FVRL) is seeing a significant and exponential jump in its trading volume today, and for good reason…. well, a bad reason.  The company trades only an average of close to 70,000 shares per day and it has seen almost 4 million shares from early trading and pre-market activity in less than 20 minutes.

Phase III results failed to show statistically significant improvement in its primary endpoint.  This was the registration trial of Specifid following Rituxan in patients with follicular B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  On a time to progression, it failed to show a statistically significant improvement in the treatment arm versus placebo.  Analysis of all subgroups also did not show any significant differences in primary or secondary endpoints when adjusted for prognostic factors.

This one was only a $71.8 million market cap before the implosion.  Now shares are down 86% at $0.24.  We don’t liek covering penny stocks so this is probably the last you’ll see us cover this one.

The $25 million in tangible book value may let it find some support after this huge drop, but this being its lead candidate puts the company back into mostly pre-clinical stage for other products.  It might not be fair to say biotech zombie here, but tell that to shareholders down this much after an already huge 50% drop from a year ago.

This one may have traded more than 100-times average volume before it’s all said and done today.

Jon Ogg
May 27, 2008