I watched Kevin's video on 23andMe. That was pretty good numbers analysis he did. I agree with lot of his points. But I'm going to go with my man zinfamous and trust his scientific judgment about the value of the data this company is sitting on. I will just look at this as speculative venture capital play. I'm not going to bet huge because this area is outside my expertise but I like the story. So I'll throw some money at it and hold. Forget I even own it.
Sold another 10 April $12.50 puts for $1.50. So now on the hook for 50 puts or 5,000 shares to purchase if VGAC closes below $12.50 on April 16. That would put me at 7,000 shares which I will be comfortable owning as speculative investment.
Yes I also agree with his numbers, but when I watch that, I think--that isn't the value of the company so it's maybe not that relevant.
HOWEVER! I need to add some things that I didn't fully think out this morning, and dawned on me while walking to the train earlier this morning and being pelted by ice shards falling from the sky all the while. --I tend to speak and post things way to quickly without thinking them all the way through....a lifelong struggle, lol. I blame this morning's quick outbursts on a euphoric high from caffeine shot and satisfying morning dump.
anyway, I need to expand on what I mentioned earlier about "quality," when it comes to genomes (and the "libraries," as we call them, that are created from the nucleic acids that are collected--e.g. DNA or RNA--and then sent off to be sequenced, then assembled into whatever purpose...whole genome, whole transcriptome, various other types of data sets for different purposes).
I don't really know the overall quality of what these companies collect right now, but if it is all coming from spit kits, it isn't going to be that great--meaning--they aren't going to make high quality genome assemblies by today's standards (they may not be able to make them, period; but it is true that what they can construct are well above the standards of say, 20 years ago when "the first human genome" was published. the quality there was pretty much garbage, and has been improved drastically.
There are several different types of sequencing technologies, each one of them proprietary, and generally used for specific purposes...what type of data you want, the quality you need. But...you don't really need "50 million individual genomes." What you need are a bunch of crappy, decent, high quality genomes that you can "stick together" to assemble one large high quality genome. Everyone has access to that sort of the thing.
What 23&Me has is tons of individual data, that is super useful for making population-wide analysis, when compared to a high quality reference genome....but that in itself isn't that sexy anymore. Genomes aren't all that sexy. Transcriptomes are sexy. Every cell in your body has the exact same DNA. The RNA, however, is different from cell to cell (kidney RNA is not liver RNA), and at different time points (say, during development) or in various conditions (Say, fighting a bastard disease at that moment), your RNA signal is going to be different. specifically, the messenger RNA (mRNA) and even really cool novel things that aren't super-well understand yet, like snRNA (small, noncoding), which is a big target in epigenetic studies these days.
Does 23&Me have access to this stuff? I don't think so, but they can? maybe? You need very high quality samples to put this stuff together but more importantly, you need more difficult-to-obtain tissue, and storage/shipping conditions to send them tissue to process. ...we all know about -80 C temperatures and dry ice for shipping now, which is the gold standard, but there are some nice stabilizing buffers that let you ship tissue samples for about a day or two at room temperature, for keeping RNA stable in these samples. This is expensive, though.
Anyway, for things to be super amazing and glorious like I think they will be, 23&Me needs to expand their testing and offer various other packages to their customers, that they would be willing to donate. (basically, blood is maybe the easiest from this perspective--good luck!--but also not great for RNA, IIRC).
Do you think their customers would be willing to donate brain or liver tissue? that would be awesome. Heart tissue would be even better....
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