Wall Street showed some life last week, finishing the week in the plus column for the first time in a while. Despite gains, insiders played it cautious as buyers mostly stayed on the sidelines. The insider purchase that lit up our radar trades for less than $2 with a cluster of buyers.
A pair of C-Suite Officers and a trio of Directors acquired 346,000 Cabaletta Bio, Inc. (CABA) shares between $0.98 and $1.25 for a total of $343,788.50. (1)
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steven Nitchberger purchased 150,000 shares for an investment of $151,160. Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Anup Marda acquired 50,000 shares at $0.99, writing a check for $49,260. Director Catherine Bollard was the smallest buyer with 1,000 shares at $0.99 for a tad under a grand. Directors Gwedolyn Binder and Mark Simon were more aggressive, adding 20,000 and 125,000 shares for $19,894 and $49,620, respectively.
Cabaletta Bio is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of engineered T cell therapies for patients with B cell-mediated autoimmune diseases.
The Cabaletta Approach to selective B cell Ablation (CABA) platform, in combination with Cabaletta’s proprietary technology, utilizes Chimeric AutoAntibody Receptor (CAAR) T cells that are designed to selectively bind and eliminate only specific autoantibody-producing B cells while sparing normal antibody-producing B cells, which are essential for human health.
Cabaletta’s lead product candidate is based on the Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell technology developed at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) that resulted in the first commercially-available CAR T cell products for the treatment of B cell cancers.
Cabaletta was founded by Penn physician/scientists Michael Milone, M.D., Ph.D., and Aimee Payne, M.D., Ph.D., who serve as co-chairs of Cabaletta’s Scientific Advisory Board, and Steven Nichtberger, M.D., CEO of Cabaletta. Cabaletta has an exclusive global licensing agreement and multiple sponsored research agreements with the University of Pennsylvania to develop the CAAR T technology to treat B cell-mediated autoimmune diseases.
CABA went public in October 2021 at $11, shot up to an intra-day high of $14.95 within eight days of trading and has been on a slide down since. The baby biotech’s price recently caught fire after bottoming out at $0.59.
Volume was crazy high on October 19th and 20th, trading 10.5 million shares and 12.967 million, respectively with its price ripping from $1.06 to as high as $2.04. CABA settled back $0.16 to $1.80 on Friday, October 21, 2021 with volume of 7.241 million shares.
With the company in the development stage, it’s not expected to make money or generate much in the way of revenue for the foreseeable future. That means, CABA’s price will be driven by news announcements and technical analysis.
Looking at Cabaletta’s stock chart, we see the biotech ran into resistance at $2 but still sits a little north of its 200-day moving average of $1.65. If buyers can push CABA to the better side of $2.10, then it could continue higher to $2.50 to maybe $3, in our technical opinion. On the downside, CABA should catch support around $1 and again at the 52-week low of $0.59.
OVERALL: Cabaletta Bio, Inc. (CABA) is highly speculative and only appropriate for investors that could lose 100% of their investment. That being said, Wall Street has a one-year price target of $9.67. (2) Hyper-aggressive investors looking for a boom or bust biotech might treat CABA like an option without an expiration date, provided they have a time horizon of at least 18 months.
1 – https://www.secform4.com/insider-trading/1759138.htm
2 – https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CABA?p=CABA
