Athenahealth, Inc. (ATHN) Message Board
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This is how you are supposed to report stock based compensation. This paragraph comes from Ultra Petroleum's 10Q. It is an expense. It is a non cash expense but an expense. You don't remove the expense and report non GAAP earnings. There is no such thing. It is a ridiculous charade designed to hoodwink the naive and the careless. It is shocking to me that the outfits like Cheat Sheet and even Zacks state EPS = and then they use the imaginary number.
Half these stock touting organizations are not even curated. They are just programs that scrape reporting company PR's.
"Share-Based Payment Arrangements. The Company applies FASB ASC Topic 718, Compensation – Stock Compensation (“FASB ASC 718”), which requires the measurement and recognition of compensation expense for all share-based payment awards made to employees and directors, including employee stock options,
based on estimated fair values. Share-based compensation expense recognized for the three months ended March 31, 2013 and 2012 was $3.0 million and $2.5 million, respectively. See Note 4 for additional information."Sentiment: Strong Sell
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They spent just under $300 million. What did they get? These figures are from their own just amended 8-K with the SEC.
Revenues:
2010 $104 million
2011 $113 million
2013 $111 million
hardly nipple hardening...
Actual real GAAP net profits or losses (not before bad stuff)
2010 $3.8 million profit
2011 $3.6 million LOSS
2012 $3.4 million LOSS
still waiting for a bracing cool wind...
Balance Sheet
Current assets $112 million
IPO at end of 2010 $64 million which was the net.
$20 million was expenses for the IPO. Shareholders paid over $80 million of which only $64 million went to the company. Love that Wall Street. They should be PI lawyers.
The reason for the acquisition is they need a story. Stories is what nickel rockets depend on when they cannot depend on profits. Every story stock comes with a bad ending because people pay too much for stories and not enough for earnings.
the idea that the large funds that have invested in Athena have a clue as to what they have invested in is absurd. If I have to listen to one more pundit wax eloquent about "the cloud" I will vomit. They will not understand what a cloud is until they are caught without a jacket or an umbrella.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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It demonstrates what I have been saying. An adverse economy of scale. Their revenue goes up but their costs go up higher. This is precisely the wrong way. It proves they have a lot of hype around marketing and no super sauce at all. If they had a positively scalable invention there they would be having higher percentages of profit gains, not smaller. Unfortunately when you have adverse scalability as you grow it gets worse and worse, just as if you had positive scalability as you grew it would get larger and larger.
What they have attempted to do is cloud the issue by going into different lines of business, through the acquisitions. Also the dumb big money loves to see revenue. They believe that where there is revenue there is potential profits. that is what they tell their clients. Who lose money year in and year out but keep coming back for more.
Here are the figures:
Q12013 GAAP (true) Net Income before taxes loss of $12 million
Q42012 GAAP (true) Net Income before taxes profit of $12 million
Q12012 GAAP (true) Net Income before taxes profit of $5 million
If you look at just the revenues and the operating costs and do not take into account income tax benefits it is better but not good. The fact is that last quarter their SG&A increased by nearly 50% over the previous quarter. How does that happen? It can happen two ways. They can either go out and double their staff or they can cheat and buy the new business with kickbacks so that they get to count it as revenue on the way in and an expense on the way out. In either case a positive situation would be that their service is so good that they have to spend less money selling because their referral processes kick in. There are several very profitable companies that exist almost entirely on referrals. How much money do you think Epic spends on sales? A shocking small percentage is my guess, although there are no published figures because she is not a public company.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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that a perfectly legitmate way of figuring out which way this stock price will go is to decided if there is any compelling reason to buy the stock at these prices and who would do the buying. And then to take the same look at the sell side.
if you look at the trade sizes they are not thousands of share lots. They are hundreds, even single hundreds. That makes sense. Out of 35 million shares, 30 million are owned by large institutions. They are not going to buy anymore for the purpose of increasing their holdings. That would be insane. Who among them thinks they need 20% more shares? None. There would be only one reason for large institutions to buy and that would be to essentially protect the value of the 80% of the outstanding they have which they could do to start a short squeeze which would shoot the price of the stock up from insane to insane squared. Then what?
For the little trader who trades a hundred shares why the hell would he choose ATHN to buy when he could buy ten shares of Apple or, if he likes insane multiples, Amazon. Or any of a hundred other names? There is no reason at all for a little trader to go long here. Zero.
Other than to cover, which is to close a short, which gets back to the short squeeze and buying by institutions.
I dont know much about the shenanigans of the stock market, other than it exists. But I see no scenario in which the company, with its current fundamental trajectory and what I know to be the difficult market, should see a rise in share price.
Thus, absent a concerted effort by instituitions to create a buying panic among shorts I see the stock going down because, as I said above, what the hell do the insittuitions do after they own all the shares? They have the same problem they have now, only with more shares, at a higher price, and no anonymous public market.
Interested in your thoughts.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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you are right. There may be only two vendors doing well. One is private (Epic) and one is Cerner. I know of no other. GE is putting IDX to sleep and using CPS (old Millbrook). The low end system I see making healthy inroads is eClinicalWorks. They just replaced NextGen in a major hospital system that is five miles from their corporate office.
EMR's do not make money. They cost money. In the beginning and down the road. Good billing solutions make money.
Back in the late 90's the doctors that sold their practices to aggregators wound up getting them back again after the aggregators went out of business.
The problem the docs have is not clinical. It is billing.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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thanks. if you change your id let me know.
This went to $56 last time. Did not totally understand what the market saw the last time given that it then went back up. But now that it is going down again i have to believe there is more conviction in the sellers and that means it may go past where it went before because the sellers now understand that there is a structural, not temporal issue. And the marketplace is much worse now. The subsidies compressed years of naturally paced give and take market dynamics and evolving insights among the doctor clients into 18 frenzied months. Frenzy was the goal.
There are now clients all over the place that are postponing the EMR implementation portion of their integrated PMS/EMR purchases because the subsidies are not worth the opportunity costs of the dysfunction they are facing with new PMS routines (billing) and because it is now common knowledge that an EMR reduces doctor productivity by up to 25%.
Financially, an EMR reduces the work of $15 per hour charge capture clerks at the expense of $600 per hour physicians, all so that the government can ultimately detach the medical record from the doctor. I am not saying that is a bad idea or a good idea. But that is the purpose of the EMR. It is financial, not clinical. The goal is to disenfranchise the doctor.
The doctors are like the apocryphal Manhattan Indians who sold Manhattan for beads. In this case it is $14,000 per doc first year, less second, less third, for a total of $44,000 and a promise not to reduce their Medicare payments by 1.5%, a promise that will be honored in the breach. It is not even a promise that can be made. Normally if Medicare paid too little the docs would not participate and then what? But they have been stampeded into a situation in which the chart is out of their filing racks.
Oops!Sentiment: Strong Sell
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Interestingly TA was showing this pricing move as well as a fundamental analysis. TA was showing a price of $80 without the change of dumb investor enthusiasm. The local channel minimum was due for this move.
Now that you have chilling fundamental news and finally the pimps are using real GAAP numbers and there are even more chilling sector news, the bottom of this negative run should shoot below the last one of $56. We could see easily the $40's.
The institutions are between a rock and a hard place if they even know what is happening. Maybe some will try to make a private sale below market but outside the view of the market. If such things are done.
The current fundamentals indicate a share price under $10. Every dollar above that needs some faith that mgt would embrace reality and chop off all the excessive and expensive fantasy-based flourishes and just be a quasi billing service. But they would need to sell Epocrates and that stupid office building and stop pretending they are disrupters of technology from the bowels of the University of Chicago Econ Dept and get down to business. They are not disrupters outside of their morning showers. We all sound like Sinatra in the shower.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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It's even worse than you portray it. You are using the insane non GAAP earnings they use that do not count as expenses the stock they pay for compensation and anything they can characterize as non recurring expenses.
This company made TWO CENTS this quarter.
The revenue does go up. The profits do not keep pace. Next quarter there will be new non recurring expenses. And the quarter after that. And they will again not count stock compensation that shareholders pay for.
Now that they bought Epocrates which was in trouble and now that they are landlords and now that they are an incubator company they have complicated the story enough to hide and lie about all sorts of things.
RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF DOING THIS THEY UNLOADED ONE THIRD OF THEIR HOLDINGS. THEY ARE NOW DOWN TO ALMOST NOTHING. LESS THAN ONE DAYS VOLUME.
THEY ESSENTIALLY SOLD EVERYTHING THEY STARTED OUT WITH AND EVERY SHARE THEY GRANTED THEMSELVES AS THEY PROMOTED THE PRICE.
THE PRESS RELEASES GROW MORE FRIVOLOUS.
IF YOU MAKE MONEY YOU NEED NO PRESS RELEASES.
THE ONLY ESCAPE FOR THEM IS TO HAVE A HUGE COMPANY THAT IS DUMB DUMB DUMB BUY THEM. LIKE EXPERION.
BUT HALF ATHN ASSETS ARE GOODWILL AND INTANGIBLES.
IT IS A JOKE.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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They have a real problem. They can't get out. Insiders own fewer than one days volume. The institutions got in a long time ago. They know nothing. They are the recipients of hot money. They have to invest. So they focus on Pygmy concepts like sectors they think are hot. This sector is cloud computing. What the hell is the cloud? They have no clue. That the cloud is just a hosted server is unknown to them and unknowable by them because they are unable to admit to others and themselves that they don't know something. They don't even know they don't know.
But if these bozos were to start selling at 300,000 shares per day it would take them THREE MONTHS to liquidate.
So they go to Plan B. Which is to try to convince the rest of the world that the company is something new. It is now an incubator and a landlord and an iPhone app and a content play.
Of course it will end badly. For them. Not for shorts. Just like Facebook which has 1 BILLION users and will be a home run when it gets to 2 BILLION???? LOL.
The people on CNBC are also clueless. If they weren't they wouldn't be hacks on TV.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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Cramer is a buffoon. He is a self limiting disease. You can't take his advice past the point where you don't have any more money. If he were honest he would keep a score card of every buy and sell. But he is not. He gives me the creeps. If he had been good at what he did he would be ten times richer. And his clients would have not left him. Subtract the stock lingo and you are left with Pinky Lee.
Sentiment: Strong Sell
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Agreed. I misspoke. I meant that I expect to see unambiguous signs about the stock by then. By then if market prices are holding up and news is good the stock price should be anticipating the future quarters.
With trade type stocks I find that for me it is much easier to make a good entry point than it is to know when to close. Either a long or short trade.
With investments like GE or EPD or C I get in well and I stay put for a very long time.
But I bought THC at $3 or $4 and sold at $7.
Hard not to kick yourself after that.
NG has a lot of political risk. But it seems to have weathered that. But that is sobering given that I invest in only half a dozen companies at a time and thus invest a significant amount (for me). It tends to make me close early.Sentiment: Strong Buy
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On a good board. Most Yahoo boards are moronic. You all have sensible and thoughtful things to say.
I am very long UPL having ridden UNG for six months as NG price rose and then a month ago traded into UPL. Rationale was that as prices moved up UNG was more sensitive than UPL and simpler mechanism. But when prices got around where I thought they would be down and up by 10% but all at a profitable level for UPL I thought that UNG would stay about the same while UPL would accrue profits over time even if NG pricing stopped moving dramatically and also they might mark up the value of the reserves which necessarily hits the P&L.
I have to admit I have not read the actual Q and I should.
Am a bit surprised at stock price action today but I agree that the play is six months. Not six days or weeks.Sentiment: Strong Buy
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That the old current P/E is 179!!!!
In fact if you multiply 2 cents by 4 you get 8 cents and thus a stock price of 80 cents is 10 times earnings and a stock price of $8 is 100 times and a stock price of 80 is 1,000 times earnings.
Every quarter there will be what they call extraordinary one time non recurring charges and they will ask you to disregard the stock they use to compensate heir employees (that you pay for).
This is a stock for idiots.
Every month the insiders sell relentlessly. They now have less than 1% of the outstanding shares.
What the hell does an idiot long with $10,000 and an Etrade account know that the CEO does not?
Nothing.
If you know nothing else you should know that.
They have now screwed the pooch by buying a charm bracelet company for hundreds of millions and bought real estate and started an incubator company and next who knows what. Maybe a chain of hair salons.
The trick is to follow the pea and do as they say (buy) not as they do ( which is sell sell sell) and pretend that the earnings were 37 cents.
The earnings were TWO CENTS. Earnings is a technical term. Not a wish.
How low can this go? It depends on how long it takes to start there. The longer it takes the more savage will be the drop because the more bitter will be the disappointment.
The last time it went to $56. I don't know if it will get there this quarter but I would bet it blows by that two quarters from now after the fake earnings that Epicrates saved up are exhausted with the diabolical inverse effect post fake quarter.
That is how it works. First quarter post acquisition has all these saved up sales. The hope, never realized, is that somehow they will plug the hole by the time it appears. With sales (which never happens) or with another story acquisition which will enable Bush to tell you that the way you thought about the company before is not the right way to think about it now.
I should hang a shingle out that says, "Psychic".Sentiment: Strong Sell
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In last 6 months insiders have bought ZERO shares but have sold nearly one third of their shares down to less than ONE PERCENT of the outstanding.
Is anyone home????
If you look at Greenway (GWAY) they report GAAP numbers even if they are less than thrilling and the insiders own just under 30% of the shares.
Try to find any good company that not only reports fake numbers but has pimp tout sheets that use them rather than the GAAP numbers. There are none.
GAAP. Generally Accepted Accounting Practices.
In GAAP 2+2=4. In non GAAP it equals whatever the hell you want it to.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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There headline should be grounds for imprisonment.
They made $0.02 this quarter. If you don't count 35 cents per share in costs they made $0.37.
If you don't count another 35 cents per share in costs they would have made $0.72 per share.
If they were Apple they would have made $10 per share.
If a bull had #$%$...
Don't worry longs. Bush says you need to think of this company in a new way. You need to think about all the money his clients make! $2.6 BILLION.
Focus on that. Not Athena. Think BILLIONS.
And think about how he has created a system for the first time physicians can exchange clinical data. Of course it helps if you don't know what a Health Information Exchange is.
And now they are landlords. And now they own Epocrates which was a real coup. Yessir. They can now try to sell that for $10 per month per doctor to the ones who don't use the free version.
If this sucker goes up now I will short more.
The market is worse every single day and this stock has an insane valuation that has with time gotten worse not better.
It is like WebMD was. The idiots who bought it on the beginning were lucky. They were the first fools. Now we are at the last fool stage. The early idiots were so sure that they bought up almost all the stock and for them to sell to realize their gains would take THREE MONTHS and drive the price down to nothing.
The only thing they can do us start confusing the issue with acquisitions and mergers just like WebMD did.
They will leave behind them a trail of little guy losers while they use every merger event to lighten up.
Take a look at Athena Balance Sheet.
Accounts Receivable up by 50% in one quarter.
Half the assets are intangible.
Smoke and mirrors and they have pimps behind them who crow superlatives with every horrid result.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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Is it halted?
They can't halt a stock after the market is closed.
Now the naysayers are as idiotic as the longs.
Make sure the market is open the next time you say that.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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Load up the trucks, boyos!
Who cares about new business if you can host Hackathons.
Maybe Jerry Lewis will be there.
Greenway just joined Allscripts and NextGen today.
Athena is a better company.
But a much worse stock.
The worst stock in the entire sector.
Ironic.Sentiment: Strong Sell
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I was in UNG which follows the price of gas. Once gas went up from 1.50 to 4.40 I got out, waited a couple of days and got into UPL. Rationale is that UNG will not move if prices stay around here but UPL will because UPL makes profits on the price level while UNG merely reflects that level. UPL profits come later. So I am not in UPL and will ride out this summer and into next year. Cannot bring myself to by LNG. No profits, reverse cash, etc. Insane buying. You will see in six months after UPL ;moves up that the analysts will put out a buy. Morons. They advise you what to do with your money until you dont have anymore.
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where are the yapping longs?
Sentiment: Strong Sell
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ran out of steam. small wonder. Where the heck could it go from here? there are only two things that can happen to this share price. it will stay around here waiting for the fundamentals to catch up or it will plunge again. i dont think the fundamentals can catch up. it has proven that it can grow revenue but not positively scaling profits. look at amazon. another idiotic stock. Grows revenue but not profits. that is not a trick. the trick is to grow profits, not revenue. the only person who cares about revenue is the person figuring out the velocity of money in Washington DC. But idiots always say where there are revenues, profits cannot be far behind. This is simply not true. They can be far behind. Each client this company adds costs them a tad bit more to handle. the scalability is adverse, not positive. The margin goes down, not up. and now it is crowing about buying a company that has lots of eyeballs. so does juicy fruit gum.
i can see how not everybody would think that shorting this stock is too risky but for the life of me i cannot figure out how anyone could buy it. the market is going up, not down. The market is valued at about one tenth what this thing is valued. you have to be demented to go long this stock. IMHO.Sentiment: Strong Sell