CROUSDT
Crypto.com Coin / Tether USD
crypto Composite

CRO is ~8.6% of All Time High
BTC is ~55% of ATH
ETH is ~42% of ATH
XRP is ~41% of ATH
SOL is ~34% of ATH
If you are holding long term, you still want Bitcoin instead.

CROs, clinical research organisations conduct clinical trials of new drugs for pharma and biotech companies. They don’t own the IP of the drug or bear any of the commercial risk of product success or failure.
ICON has been hugely successful through organic growth and bolt on acquisitions since founding in 1990 and has, until recent years, compounded at a similar rate to Microsoft without all the headlines.
Customer base is stickler and contracts are long high value multi year awards which typically provide 70% revenue visibility of the next 12 months.
They had a major peer acquisition of PrA for around $13bn in 2021 which essentially doubled the size of the company to circa 8bn a year in revenues and 1bn a year in free cash flow.
As you can imagine accounting for revenue recognition on such large contracts in wolves estimates over % on completion and projected final profitability.
Other CROs have had issues in the past when reporting these kinds of figures due to the complexity involved. Syneos had a similar issue a few years back. Had to delay results to address a control weakness in revenue recognition processes. SP dropped and sprang right back a few months later when dust settled.
It looks like something similar has happened with ICON. Possibly flagged by an ex employee of the acquired company who was at a mid to lower level and raised whistleblower complaint.
My guess is that ultimately, as ICON are saying no customers are impacted, that there was no overbilling (as clients monitor contracts and billing like hawks) but there could be slightly earlier recognition of when the revenue earned was being recorded or at the very least that the process wasn’t strong enough to prevent this.
With a public company of this scale and major systems and processes integration this isn’t necessarily something nefarious. Sometimes stuff like this is hard and there is range of subjectivity. Add in a disgruntled employee (see the iconplc subreddit) and a whistleblower report to a audit committee comprised of ex big 4 / big legal audit and lawyer type and the only appropriate response is to commission and investigation.
The old CEO and CFO have left since then and the new team will probably use the opportunity to do a good clean up.
I reckon in 3-6 months the dust will settle on this and the new team will also stabilise operational activity. Judging be the subreddits and comments elsewhere the old ceo was pennywise / pound foolish and cut too hard which impacted morale, growth and client relationships.
But the relationships are deep and icon are one of the few companies globally who can do what they do. So even if out of flavor compared to medpace or IQVIA (much higher rated) they will still be at the table
And will rerate over the next few years.
In valuation terms the company is trading at prices not seen since 2016 when eps was around $4.77 per share on revenues of $1.6bn. This compares with expected eps or around $12 per share now and $8bn revenues.
The valuation multiples are around 30% to 40% lower than any CRO acquisition, take private or merger that has taken place in the past.
Operationally ICON is a quality company, albeit having a rough patch. I expect this to blow over, mgt to reset the bar at slightly lower margin targets and to use the opportunity to reinvest in organic growth and reverse some of the bone deep efficiency type cuts from recent years.
This should be possible without impacting long term profitability. The industry has growth tailwinds give the levels of new drug discovery and is very conservative in terms of adopting new technology as it is highly regulated. This makes it highly resistant to ai disruption.
However it will benefit from AI as all the new potential compounds and treatments AI will identify will new traditional clinical trials conducted.
ICON doesn’t have to shoot the lights out to 3x from here. They just have to do the basics right and they’ll 3x at least from
Here.
Growth does look slow but tha is mainly due to tricky comps in recent years that included high levels of covid vaccine work.
In fact ICON were the company Pfizer entrusted with running their vaccines trials and they compared the original vaccine trials in record time to get the vaccines rolled out.
Folk there are probably tired. They were hugely stretch running vaccine studies, had the world larges merger in 2021 and have been flat out since.
Might take a year or two to stabilise but it is a great business with solid management in a growing industry where AI will be a tailwind. And it is currently cheap as chips.
Check out the news on the stock. One fund announced they were putting 20% of their entire capital into IcOn after it dropped as the payoff was so asymmetrical.
You rarely see that kind of conviction and concentration.

CRO: A Top performing Coin part 3

CRO continues to be a top performing crypto going back a year plus.

And CRO

Why hasnt the community raised a vote to send the CRO to a burn wallet? It would send a huge message.

CRO ETF

He said very clearly that they would issue a “Roadmap” in February, we’re halfway through tomorrow, so basically two weeks left. That’s what I’m going to measure him on, and when I’ve read it, that’s what I’ll base my opinion on in regard to CRO itself.
And remember, he’s only concentrating on the Exchange and the Onchain platforms, nothing to do with the App itself. So, things like spread, cards/banking/stocks will also not change in my opinion, if anyone is hoping for that. And, neither will the 70B, he himself said he didn’t like it, and that it’s caused trust issues, but he’s not going to change it, but hopefully he might give a good explanation of why, and how it can help (perhaps but….).
Don’t forget, watch this space 🤷‍♀️
Ohhhh and happy Valentines to you all for tomorrow 🤗

Instructions unclear. Traded another bitcoin for CRO. Have millions now.

He absolutely dodged the question of what the heck they’re doing with the 70bn CRO they just printed in the AMA the other day. He’s the CEO, he could burn it if he wanted to make the community whole.

Literally logged in, topped up CRO, staked some ETH/Sol/CRO on chain to get some rewards, all within 10 minutes. If this isn’t easy investing for those with risk appetite then what is!

Wrong subreddit, this is for CRO.

It’s fine and it must be bring your average down, however you could do better with just a little effort. 🤷‍♀️
# DON’T buy & sell on the App
Do your buying and selling on the Exchange.
Send your CRO to the Onchain and stake it for ~6%, restake your rewards and compound the CRO you own.
Utilize the three platforms that CDC provides, each has its pros and cons.
You’re down (but haven’t lost) $3,000 on this investment, put it all to work, it’s amazing how quickly you can turn this around to having unrealized gains.
I certainly believe it’s a good price to buy!
Just some musings from a random internet stranger 🤷‍♀️

Imagine still buying CRO xD

#CROFam, you have been invited to the CRO League 🎖️

Different exchanges and wallets still don’t handle CRO networks consistently, so the safest workflow is always confirming chain compatibility before moving anything. A lot of people run into trouble because major platforms only support specific versions, funds can end up stuck if you send through an unsupported network.