Seeing Eye to Eye on STAAR Surgical (STAA)
STAAR Surgical Company (Nasdaq: STAA) is going to be the big surprise for Thursday, yet we have at least some question over this because of the week’s trading history. STAAR announced that the FDA has granted marketing approval for its Epiphany Injector System for use with the Affinity(TM) Collamer® Three-Piece NTIOL and the Elastimide(TM) Silicone NTIOL.
Epiphany has been designed to combine both ease of use with controlled delivery. The Epiphany injector system is intended for single use and offers the flexibility of either twist or push insertion techniques – a unique feature of STAAR’s IOL delivery systems. The FULL RELEASE is here from the company.
STAAR closed at $1.49 yesterday and the 52-week range is $0.79 to $5.98. The stock is now trading up about 100% on this morning’s news at $2.98 to $3.00 and it has recently been in a $2.89 to $3.10 range in pre-market trading. The market is not even open, yet we have seen over 250,000 shares trade as of 9:26 AM EST. The average volume is only about 90,000 shares per day.
More importantly, and perhaps our largest reason for concern or at least some pause, this huge gap-up follows a 50% gap-up just on Tuesday when shares hit 1.2 million shares in volume. On that exponential volume day, the stock opened up at $1.60, hit a high and low of $1.41 to $1.89, and closed at $1.58.
With this being low-priced and seeing a second double gap-up in a week after a cataract device was approved in the E.U., we are finding it difficult to not have some caution in trusting this gap-up amount. Can it rise? Sure. Anything is possible, particularly in today’s markets and particularly in the medical arena.
JON C. OGG
June 11, 2009
