Inflating the hedge

How does one know whether the market is approaching peak insanity?  Maybe it is the publication of an article like this.  The author argues that Nanox is a 

buy now and hold for the long haul 

stock because it is 

a way to hedge against runaway inflation.

That is completely nonsensical, of course, as Nanox has been telling investors that it plans to charge a FIXED fee per scan with its magical device, while its costs of manufacturing and other operating expenses will be subject to whatever inflation or deflation there is.  In other words, if Nanox were not a complete fraud, it would be the worst hedge against inflation.

Image by Marina Velmozhko at Pixabay

The author gets the rest of the Nanox story completely wrong, too. 

With an efficient way to produce x-rays, 

But Nanox has never proposed an efficient way to produce x-rays.  Its proposed x-ray tubes, it they weren't completely fake, will be just as inefficient as regular x-ray tubes, as the inefficiency happens at the anode, not the cathode.

The author claims that 

Nanox.ARC produces x-rays with silicon chips that use modest amounts of electricity. 

That is quite interesting, because no functional Nanox.ARC device exists, at least none was demonstrated at the August Business Update and the recent AI webcast (Nanox has changed the design of the ARC supposedly demonstrated about a year ago at RSNA 2020).  Moreover, even if it existed, it would use the same "amounts of electricity" as a regular tomosynthesis device for the same (actually, worse) image quality, as the proposed Nanox x-ray source would use the same amount of electricity as the current regular dental x-ray tubes.  And, of course, x-rays cannot be produced with silicon chips, at least not commercially (Nanox claims to use molybdenum in its proposed chip, which happens to be fake).

Finally, the author confuses Nanox.CART with Nanox.ARC and FDA approval with FDA clearance.  Nanox has never shown a picture or photo of Nanox.CART, the only Nanox device that has been cleared by the FDA (and even that clearance appears a result of fraud by Nanox, based on what can be glimpsed from the published 510k Summary).  Also, FDA approval is completely different from FDA clearance under United States law, and claiming FDA approval when a device has been cleared is illegal.  Nanox has never submitted Nanox.ARC for FDA approval (or at least it never told the public about it) - it claimed in a June press release that it had submitted it for clearance only.

The single source Nanox.ARC has already been approved by the FDA, but the company's first attempt to earn approval for a multi-source device didn't work out.

I also have an issue with the archaic term used for CT,

Computer-aided tomography,

but that's probably a topic for another post (simplistically, the key difference between the old tomography, now called tomosynthesis, and CT is that the former can't do axial slices).  Needless to say, the proposed Nanox.ARC is not a CT device but a tomosynthesis device, according to Nanox.  What is the difference?  CT has something like 10%-20%, and growing, share of the medical imaging market using x-rays, and is considered the gold standard in many if not most x-ray diagnostics scenarios, while tomosynthesis (other than specialized breast tomosynthesis, which the proposed Nanox.ARC cannot do) is never "usually appropriate," according to ACR, and has less than 1%, and declining, market share.  It gets worse - the "tomosynthesis" images that Nanox has shown so far have no diagnostics usefulness whatsoever.

To be fair, the author hedges at the end of the article:

A fuzzy timeline for resubmitting an application to the FDA for a multi-source device combined with a lack of revenue makes this an ultra-high-risk stock at the moment. Cornering the market for x-ray equipment could be so lucrative, though, that it's probably worth the risk.