The Small Pond
Small- & Micro-Cap Stock Commentary
Twist Bioscience looks more like a bubble than an investment case, even though it could benefit as AI multiplies drug candidates and pushes value up the biotech chain. It led the 2021 biotech bubble and still loses money, so buyers pay for the story, not the business. The same AI thesis is simpler and cheaper to own in vertical market software, through serial acquirers such as Constellation Software and Topicus, which gain more acquisition targets as software gets cheaper to build. x.com
Illumina's disappointing earnings are a negative read for AI drug-discovery stocks. ScorpionFund points to management's tentative 2027 timing for BioInsight becoming more visible in results, despite upbeat AI-product commentary, and names Twist Bioscience among the affected stocks. x.com
Twist Bioscience is squeeze material, with a small float and 19% short interest. It is a former IBD sector leader and a rare biotech with revenue. x.com
AI drug-discovery picks and shovels such as Ginkgo Bioworks, 10x Genomics, Twist Bioscience and Grail are priced on a fantasy, and secondary offerings are coming. The bet that AI will solve cancers and rare diseases within months ignores how drug discovery, regulation and trial enrollment actually work. Unlike the semiconductor comparison, these businesses have not inflected, mostly burn cash, trade at 20-30x sales and need equity to fund themselves. Buyers here become their liquidity. x.com … Show more
The AI-biology narrative in biotech tools has no connection to fundamental growth. Illumina's two-year compounded growth rate is only 2.2%; the narrative is a made-up pump and dump. x.com
Twist Bioscience's upside is still quite nicely linked to AI-enabled design and discovery despite its run. Citrini acknowledges that run; Twist is hardly asymmetric or underappreciated here. x.com
Pacific Biosciences is not worth owning because the genomics space is reliving its 2021 bubble, and bubbles without fundamentals are just meme stocks. It is a broken company that will go bankrupt. x.com x.com x.com
Twist Bioscience could benefit as cheaper AI hypothesis generation and validation make physical experiments the bottleneck. It is currently the purest Anthropic-related biotech beneficiary in this view because Twist handles those experiments. More efficient hypothesis work may eventually ease even that bottleneck, but it is too early to give up on the opportunity. x.com
Twist Bioscience has real explosive upside in the AI science basket because it makes biology programmable. Its Anthropic partnership, with Claude in the loop, is already rerating the stock, and it just opened a wet lab in San Francisco. AI is moving from code into the physical sciences, and despite the jump on Google news, it is still early. x.com