I tend to agree with you Trevor. Ligand has potential and I think it is too early for naysayers to declare their line of development financially useless. In general, I believe in science and not traders pushing their skewed bent on a stock and their research. Good job Ligand, keep up the hard work.

That being said, as the market heads for more 2015 turmoil, look for opportunities to by suppressed stocks and don't be surprised stock prices can head much lower on little to no news about their specific progress or lack thereof.

HFT and dark pools will lead to massive losses in income and then just plain losses to the TBTF banks that dominate this area simply because they can gamble like mad demons because they assume the public is the ones who pay when they lose and they make a ton of profit in the meantime.

This is an unusually high market that has stayed this way for an unusually long time, however, never before has the Federal Reserve been this loose monetary wise creating the long run and the bubbles, nor has it been so clearly biased towards asset classes including housing, stocks, bank personal gambling including oil which has created the unusual valuations. This is simply put not capitalism, this is government/central bank manipulation and should be rejected regardless of the outcome.

We'll see how outlying it is after this year lol.

Needless to say, 2015 is starting out as a bad year for every stock market. At least Japan is very used to bad news since their economy has been living it for over 2 decades.

It is strange but the Federal Reserve has been pretty much gently forcing banks to put money into the stock market making this a bubble. Why knows when it will pop. Probably with the next market downturn. Housing is another bubble caused by socialist policy through Fannie and Freddie although no one cares because its the taxpayer who will take the loss. Thus it will go on until someone realizes that it will make us all broke.

The biggest bubbles asides from these is probably the derivatives market that still hasn't corrected. Followed by steel and other things banks and the central banks supported stockpiling given there is nowhere else to invest the funny money they plug out.

Bothe mutual funds and ETFs require you to pay capital gains on appreciation annually regardless if you sell or don't sell them. This makes you pay tax on gains you otherwise wouldn't. Say you buy 10 stocks at 1 each and they rise 10% you pay nothing, you buy a fund or ETF and it rises 10% you pay tax on it. Then next year you lose 10%. In the first scenario you paid no taxes. In the second you paid taxes even though you made less than nothing and you need to make more gains to write off your loss. This is why smart and big investors laugh at both these investments and why so many want to sell them. If investors are dumb enough to buy these then they are dumb enough to pay massive amounts of money to those that run them too. The way securities firms look at it is that these investors are obviously dumb and are too ignorant to care about their losses.

The population problem is a function of having a 2 decade long economic decline in which the government has been part and parcel of and still decides to bury itself and their people into a bigger and bigger QE hole. There can be a recovery only after a massive QE collapse and a recognition one should accept reality instead of making it worse with socialism and mutated central bank money games. The same goes for the US which is still in denial and refusing to reform from the last downturn, consequently they are getting the ill effects of the QE bug as well starting with a distorted banking sector led by bigger TBTF banks and dependence on a government controlled false market through Fannie and Freddie.

Socialism and planned economics was the worst thing to immigrate to America in the last 10 years. They may call it anything else but that is what it is.

Sadly TBTF banks have been spurred on by the Federal Reserve to gamble themselves in the market, thus making the effects of an eventual pop prove to be a crushing blow to these already mismanaged behemoths. Ergo the Federal Reserve's ambition to pump up housing and stocks to hide the ills of their patrons. Needless to say, the Federal Reserve doesn't seem to care one cent about capitalism, bubbles, the general public, or honesty. It's best if those in the market realize it before they get left holding the bag like Greenspan's bubble left them holding into overpriced housing.

LOL how about US ghost housing, or US walking dead banks, or US puppet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bubble China has is an issue, but is smaller than the bubbles we have here in a stagnant economy with a government wallowing in unsustainable debt supported by a Federal Reserve that rigs its own Treasury auctions.

For one thing China is still growing, so it's excesses can eventually be normalized. The US, on the other hand seems dead set on enjoying the socialist degeneration Japan has embarked on without the massive public reserve that helped prop Japan up for all these years. Good luck with that.