ABMD results

For those following ABMD, they announced blow-out results and advanced $11.40 in the regular session, to $88.80 from $77.40.

Revenues up 50%

GAAP earnings (which is all we have until they file their 10-K) was 20 cents up from a loss of 4 cents.

Gross margins of 85% up from 80%

Operating margins 20%, up from a loss.

Cash $156 million, no debt.

An additional 15 hospitals made initial purchases of Impella during the quarter, compared to 24 new hospital sites in the prior year period, bringing the installed customer base to 973 sites. As part of Abiomed’s continued Impella CP® launch, 54 new hospitals purchased Impella CP, bringing the total number of Impella CP U.S. sites to 694.

An additional 15 sites made initial purchases of the Impella RP during the quarter, bringing the total number of Impella RP U.S. sites to 23.

Saul

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Saul
An additional 15 hospitals made initial purchases of Impella during the quarter, compared to 24 new hospital sites in the prior year period, bringing the installed customer base to 973 sites

When whey install, or actually after they install, is there recurring to revenue associated with that? The famous razor/razor blade model we all know and love?

Brian

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Saul,
When you first mentioned that you had put a small stake in this company I pulled their financials only to find them nearly incomprehensible. I decided to take a pass at the time because I couldn’t understand why any company would intentionally publish such opaque documentation.

But, I watched the stock and eventually decided to take a very small stab. The stock has been moving up rapidly and yesterday I sold my long held position in Apple (which has been fading) and bought more ABMD, even though I find myself relying on you to decipher their reporting - which makes me somewhat uncomfortable.

But here’s the deal. When I review my portfolio, which has been almost fully overhauled since the beginning of the year when I first started paying attention to this board, I find that my best performing stocks are all companies that I learned about on this board. The only exceptions are a few MF recommendations that I already held (e.g. BOFI, AMBA two or three others). Reading about them here boosted my confidence in these companies and I’ve added to the positions.

I’ve learned a lot rather quickly and the performance of my portfolio reflects that (up about 30% so far this year).

You have often advised that no one should simply copy you. This advice is based on two reasons: 1) you’re not infallible, you make mistakes and 2) If we don’t learn the methods we’ll be in the cold should you stop publishing for some reason. I’ve been trying very hard to embrace that advice.

But one thing I’ve not learned very much about is your prospecting process. For example, how is it that you became aware of ABMD in the first place? What was it that motivated you to further investigate this company when their reporting seems to intentionally obscure rather than illuminate their financial results? Do you have a process for finding new prospects? With literally hundreds of new issues getting some positive press every week, how do you filter them? What are the first things you look at in order to eliminate the far more plentiful chaff rather than waste time on it? Do you keep notes on the companies you looked at and eliminated from further consideration? Is there a consistent set of criteria you look for in order to pull the trigger on a starter position?

I’m very grateful for the time you devote to this board. So I am little reluctant to ask you to devote more of your time to this question - but obviously, not reluctant enough to refrain from asking it.

Thanks Saul

24 Likes

Brittlerock,

If I may answer on behalf of Saul, and Saul please correct me if I am mistaken, Saul found the stock on the community spreadsheet I’ve been helping to maintain.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H_v6WOjFi81rM3TH9ZHS…

I had a subscription to another service on MoneyMap Press called “High Velocity Stocks”. The premise was to invest in stocks that have a combination of high Piotroski scores (8 or 9) and are exhibiting periods of momentum. It is an almost shear technical based approach.

I wasn’t really a fan of their recommendations, but occasionally you can find a diamond in the rough. ABMD was one of them. Others (like CVG recently, and also DIS) have failed.

Ideas can come from all places - and I think the first step is to make sure a stock passes its first pass check (which AMBD did on the spreadsheet). Once you get past that, I’d say only another 10% will become true contenders.

Those are my thoughts - but I am a student as well, and would appreciate hearing Saul’s thoughts on the matter as well.

Best,
–Kevin

16 Likes

Kevin, You are exactly right. It just kind of fell out of the sky. I’ll try to find my first post on it.

Saul

1 Like

I found it. It was post #10123. It was pure serendipity, as you’ll see by reading the post.

Saul

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When whey install, or actually after they install, is there recurring to revenue associated with that? The famous razor/razor blade model we all know and love?

Hi Brian, This has been covered at length. Briefly, it’s (almost) ALL recurring income. When they use an Impella on a patient it’s not reusable. It’s thrown away and they use another for the next patient. Duma found the reference for that. It was very clear.

Saul

2 Likes

I’m going to ask for a small favor and I hope it doesn’t make me sound lazy, but could you post the company names of some of the stocks in the titles, rather than the tickers? When I see tickers I can’t relate so well to them, it’s just a bunch of letters, and so I kind of shy away from any of the ones I don’t know. I checked today to see that ABMD is Abiomed? (I almost thought it was American Moble Dent AMBD…) Anyway it’s probably my fault for being slow to follow some of your newer companies, but I think that beyond the biggies, I don’t know these tickers so well.

Thanks for considering, congrats on the stock!

Karen

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I was going to reply only to Karen, but I figure it’s useful for others for more than just finding out what the company name is from the ticker, so…

Chrome and Firefox browsers (and probably others, too) allow for substitution in bookmarks, so here’s a very quick way to find the names of companies, or pull up charts or whatever else you want.

First, grab the basic page you use most often, such as:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRTO -or-


[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CRTO+Interactive;range=1y...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CRTO+Interactive;range=1y)

(note that TMF will chop these URLs for display purposes – right-click to copy the entire URL, don’t just highlight here and copy/paste!)

From that second URL, you can see the stock symbol being passed (the ?s=CRTO part), and some other stuff defining the type of data (+Interactive is the price graph), and time range (;range=1y tells it to display 1 year). That’s great, and you can save that as a bookmark if you always want to pull up CRTO… but you’d need a bookmark for every single ticker, and that’s totally impractical. For those of us that look at many different stocks every day, here’s the secret sauce:

Bookmark one of those URLs, but then edit the bookmark to instead be:


[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%s+Interactive;range=1y](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%s+Interactive;range=1y)
                                   ^^

Note the %s I highlighted. That %s in the URL basically tells the browser, “Pull the string that comes next and plug it in here, in place of the %s.”

Next, while you’re still editing the bookmark, add a keyword. This is the most critical part. This keyword will allow you to type the keyword plus the ticker symbol in the URL bar, and magic happens. I use ‘fin’ (no quotes) as my keyword, so when I want to look up a stock, I just type ‘fin [space] [ticker symbol]’ in the URL bar, hit Enter, and voila!

For reference, this is my actual bookmark – my default shows 50- and 200-day simple moving averages on a 6-month chart, with the 50/200 SMA lines being red and green:


[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=)**%s**#{%22showSma%22:true,%22smaColors%22:%22#cc0000,#009999%22,%22smaPeriods%22:%22200,50%22,%22smaWidths%22:%221,1%22,%22smaGhosting%22:%220,0%22,%22range%22:%226mo%22}

If you prefer to see basic summary info only, use something like:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%s

These work for any site, so feel free to change it up and use finance.google.com or even stuff like:

http://www.1ypeg.com/%s
I’d build a bookmark for that with a keyword of something like ‘yy’ (because yp is actually a pain to type quickly) and then be able to type ‘yy CRTO’ on the URL bar and hit Enter.

Magic.

This saves countless keytrokes a day for me… hope you find it useful.

13 Likes

hlygrail, slick trick and it worked great. Going to save me a lot of typing and clicking. So thanks much.