Google's Stock Quotes Go Real Time (Plus: More on SIGA)

I see no discussion of this anywhere, but Google seems to have implemented real time stock quotes. All the better for watching the price of SIGA Technologies move ever upward!

I first tipped you to SIGA on 6/9/08 when the stock price was $2.92, gloated about it on 1/28/09 at $4.29, and it is at this moment (real time!) $6.28. And will be up to $15 by year's end. I'm not usually one for touting sure things, but read on.

The government will buy a huge quantity of smallpox meds in September, and is currently gathering proposals from drug companies. Aside from SIGA, only one other company has a drug that could conceivably fit the bill, and their monkeys died during testing. SIGA's smallpox drug, ST-246, was safe enough to heal a child with a smallpox-like illness a couple years ago. It was nearly instantly effective and had no side effects.

So the contract will go to SIGA, whose 35 million outstanding shares will surely shoot skyward when the check comes in for between 1.7 million and 12 million courses of a fairly expensive drug (and one with a finite shelf life, so stockpiles will need periodic replacement). And that's just the beginning. Other government agencies (defense, homeland security) will want to buy, and Europe, Israel, and India should also be interested. Plus, SIGA has, in its pipeline, drugs for dengue fever (feared a possible future pandemic), drug-resistent staph and strep and a broad spectrum anti-viral (ST-669) that just might crack the virus puzzle once and for all. None of that stuff factors into its stock price at this point, which has yet to catch up even with the in-the-bag smallpox contract...though in the past week or two, volume and price are both starting to pick up.

SIGA keeps a low-profile, burying all this goodness amid dry scientific writing for reasons I explained in that first posting. So very few people have caught on.