Is Alterity Therapeutics Ltd (ATHE) a good stock to buy?
What we have tested leans negative. To like it anyway you need a reason our checks do not capture.
What each rating means, in numbers
Business quality — Middling. Passes 4 of the 7 health checks we can measure — things like making a profit, turning it into cash, and not piling on debt. Across 131,000 company-quarters the weakest scorers went on to fail at 5.4% against 1.4% for the strongest, in every era and all twelve sectors.
How wild is the price? — Wild. The share price swings about 54% in a typical year, which puts it in the above average. Out of every 100 companies that swung like this, about 3.7 went bankrupt within the year. Across the three periods we tested that ran from 0.9% to 5.7%.
What "tested" means here, and why there is no score out of 100
Tested means the read was measured against what actually happened afterwards, on a history that keeps the companies that were later delisted, using only figures that had been filed on the day they are used. Survival was ranked on companies that really did fail. What an owner keeps was tested across the universe from 2011 to 2025.
The full record of everything we have tested is on the research pages.
Which benchmark. Over the period we tested, the median listed company returned +5.8% a year while the S&P 500 returned about +13.9% — the index is weighted by size and was carried by a handful of enormous winners. So "beats the index" and "beats the other companies you could have bought" are different questions. Where a read says it picks better companies, it means the second one. None of these gets you an index fund's return, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.
The quality read is the strongest thing we have tested: 131,000 company-quarters across 5,300 companies, where the weakest scorers went on to fail at 5.4% against 1.4% for the strongest, holding in every era and all twelve sectors. It still says less likely to break, not likely to beat the market — every band in that study lost to the index at the median, because the median listed company does.
Each read is shown on its own rather than merged into a single score, so you can see which part is strong and which is weak instead of taking an average on trust.
▾ What goes into the smart-money reading
Contributions (weight × component score) sum to the total. This near-term score now includes fundamental health (leverage, FCF trend). See the Financial Health section for the full balance-sheet read.
Chance the S&P 500 falls 10% or more in the next three months.
Counted from every day since 2006. Says nothing about ATHE — see the board for how it is measured.
📍 Where to start on this page, and what to look at first
How to read ATHE (pre-profit growth)
This company is reinvesting instead of generating profit, so a standard DCF cannot price it. The useful question is whether the growth the market is paying for is achievable — and whether the company can fund itself until then.
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Reverse-DCF — the growth the price demands ↓
It shows exactly how fast the business must grow to justify today's price. Compare that to what comparable companies have actually achieved.
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Cash runway ↓
Can it reach profitability before it has to raise money and dilute shareholders?
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Interactive calculator ↓
Set your own growth + margin assumptions and see what the business would be worth if you are right.
Standard DCF doesn't fit ATHE well — but that's expected for this kind of business. The Rule of 40 (Pre-Profit Growth) Lens below uses the metrics actually used by analysts who value pharmaceuticals. Reverse DCF + Football Field also work as cross-checks.
How does ATHE stack up against its closest peers?
We take the 8 same- or closely-related-industry companies closest in size to ATHE and check what investors are paying for each dollar of their revenue (or profits). If ATHE is much more expensive on the same yardstick, that's a red flag — unless you have a specific reason it deserves a premium. For a leveraged business, FCF yield (in the table) is usually more reliable than EV/Sales, because revenue multiples ignore differences in margins and debt.
▾ What's "EV / Sales" in plain English?
EV (Enterprise Value) = market cap + total debt − cash. It's "what you'd pay to buy the entire company outright" — you pay the market cap to shareholders and take over their debt, but you keep their cash. EV is fairer than market cap alone because it includes the debt the new owner inherits.
EV / Sales = EV ÷ annual revenue. So "2.5×" means investors pay $2.50 of enterprise value per $1 of yearly sales. Higher = market is paying more per dollar of sales (usually because they expect future growth or fat margins).
p25 / median / p75 are the 25th, 50th (middle), and 75th percentile of the peers' multiples. Half the peers fall between p25 and p75. The median (p50) is the typical peer — that's the benchmark we compare to.
Bold middle number = median peer. Half the peers trade above it, half below. Computed over 8 same-industry peers; implausible multiples excluded.
⚠️ Important caveat: peer multiples only work if the peers are genuinely comparable. Always check the peer list below — if the auto-picker grabbed micro-caps or unrelated businesses, the comparison is noise. A medical-device giant priced against tiny biotech startups won't produce a useful signal.
▾ View peer list (8)
| Ticker | Company | Industry | Mcap | EV/Sales | EV/GP | EV/EBIT | FCF Yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDSB | PDS Biotechnology Corp | Pharmaceuticals | $60M | — | — | — | — |
| XLO | Xilio Therapeutics, Inc. | Pharmaceuticals | $49M | 1.1x | — | — | 13.6% |
| XBIT | XBiotech Inc. | Pharmaceuticals | $74M | — | — | — | — |
| TLPH | TALPHERA, INC. | Pharmaceuticals | $42M | 1,512.5x | — | — | — |
| VRCA | Verrica Pharmaceuticals Inc. | Pharmaceuticals | $79M | 2.2x | — | — | 13.4% |
| VERU | VERU INC. | Pharmaceuticals | $38M | — | — | — | — |
| TELO | Telomir Pharmaceuticals, Inc. | Pharmaceuticals | $89M | — | — | — | — |
| TVRD | Tvardi Therapeutics, Inc. | Pharmaceuticals | $32M | — | — | — | — |
Quality & solvency checks
Cheap stocks can be cheap for a reason. These screens warn when a low valuation comes paired with structural fragility.
What these health ratings mean, in numbers
Business quality — Middling. Passes 4 of the 7 health checks we can measure — making a profit, turning it into cash, not piling on debt, not issuing shares. Across 131,000 company-quarters the weakest scorers went on to fail at 5.4% within a year against 1.4% for the strongest, and that held in every era and all twelve sectors. It says "less likely to break", not "likely to beat the market".
Why it matters: Cheap-looking stocks (low P/E or P/B) often have low Z-scores because the market knows the company is dying. Z-score warns you before you fall into a value trap.
Reference: > 3.0 = safe zone · 1.81–3.0 = grey zone · < 1.81 = distress zone
Full explanation →
The Z-score needs working capital, retained earnings, EBIT, sales and total assets from the latest balance sheet, and at least one of those isn't reported in machine-readable form here — common for foreign private issuers. We leave it blank rather than compute a distress verdict from an estimated input. It doesn't affect the reported figures in the financial tables below.
▾ The checks — what passed, what didn't (and what we couldn't measure)
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✗ Positive net incomeNet income -$7.9M in FY2025.Why this matters: Does the company actually earn a profit? Sustained losses eventually force it to raise money — diluting you — or take on debt.
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✗ Positive operating cash flowOperating cash flow -$7.4M (was -$8.3M the prior year).Why this matters: Profit can be an accounting figure; cash from running the business is harder to fake. Negative operating cash flow means the core business consumes cash and must be funded externally.
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✓ Cash flow backs up reported profitOperating cash flow -$7.4M vs net income -$7.9M.
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✓ Return on assets improvingReturn on assets -26.2% vs -97.9% a year ago.
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✓ Debt load (vs assets)The filing reports no interest-bearing debt in either year (total assets $30.1M).
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✓ Short-term liquidity (current ratio)Current ratio 12.98x vs 3.54x a year ago.
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✗ Share count (dilution)Share count rose 75.3% (3,648.9M → 6,396.9M year-over-year).Why this matters: Issuing lots of new shares splits the pie into more pieces, shrinking your slice. Stable or falling share count protects existing owners.
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· Pricing power (gross margin) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
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· Sales per asset (asset turnover) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
Missing data is never counted as a pass or a fail — it's shown as n/a and excluded from the denominator. Each check compares the company against its own prior year.
Plain English: the company holds about $22M in cash and is burning roughly $7M/year in operations. At that pace, the cash lasts 2.9 yrs before it must raise capital (diluting shareholders), take on debt, or cut spending.
Assumes constant burn and ignores financing/asset sales. For pre-profit biotech and growth companies, this matters more than a DCF — a great drug pipeline is worthless if they run out of money before approval.
A standard discounted cash flowDCF — Discounted Cash Flow — sums up all future cash a business will produce, adjusted for the fact that future dollars are worth less than dollars today.
Why it matters: It is the most fundamentally honest valuation method when applicable — but only works for companies with predictable, positive cash flow.
Reference: Best for: mature, profitable businesses. Fails for: pre-profit growth, banks, REITs.
Full explanation → (DCF) valuation is not meaningful for Alterity Therapeutics Ltd (ATHE) because it has negative free cash flowFree Cash Flow (FCF) — Operating cash flow minus capital spending: cash left after a company covers operating costs, taxes and interest and reinvests in the business — but BEFORE repaying debt principal or paying dividends. The cash actually available to investors.
Why it matters: A company can show big profits on paper while burning through cash. FCF is what actually fills the bank account.
Reference: Healthy mature businesses convert 8–15% of revenue into FCF · Growth companies often negative
Full explanation → after stock comp of -$12.9 million and negative operating cash flow of -$7.4 million, indicating it is not yet generating profits. Valuing ATHE would require projecting future drug development success and market penetration, which are highly speculative. Investors are likely betting on the potential success of its drug pipeline. The biggest risk to our own assumptions is that the company's operating cash flow remains negative, as it has been for the latest fiscal year.
As of today
Anatomy of a share
What you're buying per share. Bars are at the same scale so you can see the relative size of revenue, costs, cash flow, and debt — not just read them in a table.
What's free cash flow / what do these mean?
Revenue per share — how much the business earns from customers, divided by the number of shares outstanding. Top of the income statement.
Earnings per share — profit left after operating costs, interest, and taxes, per share. Two versions appear on this page and are not interchangeable: GAAP diluted EPS uses the company's weighted-average diluted share count during the reporting period (this is the "earnings" in "price-to-earnings"); net income per current share divides annual net income by today's share count. They differ whenever the share count has changed.
Owner-earnings free cash flow per share — the cash the business produces for shareholders. Savng's owner-earnings FCF subtracts capital expenditures and stock-based compensation from operating cash flow (SBC is a real dilution cost even though it's non-cash). This is deliberately more conservative than "standard" FCF, which subtracts only capital expenditures — so our figure is lower than the headline FCF you'll see elsewhere. FCF funds dividends, buybacks, debt repayment, and acquisitions; a company can report positive earnings yet negative FCF.
Debt per share — total interest-bearing borrowings divided by shares. High debt-per-share next to thin FCF-per-share is a fragility signal.
What you actually need to decide
Every stock price is a disagreement. Here's the single thing that must go right for the bulls, the single thing that breaks the thesis, and the concrete signposts to watch so you can update your view as real results arrive.
- Announcement of positive clinical trial results for lead drug candidates
- Securing new funding or partnership agreements
- Progress towards regulatory submissions and approvals
The trend, in plain numbers (FY2024 → FY2025, latest reported)
Straight from the financial statements — no model, no opinion. For a small or unprofitable company, the direction of these numbers usually tells you more than any single valuation.
- Still unprofitable at -$7.9M — loss narrowing.
- Free cash flow is negative at -$12.9M — the cash burn widened vs last year.
Management & Leadership
Alterity Therapeutics Ltd is led by Chief Executive Officer David Allen Stamler and Chief Financial Officer Niven Abby Sarah Macnish. Other key officers include Directors Peter Ashley Marks and Julian Michael Babarczy. The company focuses on developing treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Financial Officer
What They Make
Alterity Therapeutics develops therapeutic solutions for neurodegenerative diseases, with its primary payers being healthcare systems, insurance providers, and potentially pharmaceutical partners upon successful drug commercialization. The company focuses on addressing unmet medical needs in this area.
End Markets
Revenue Drivers
Why Is It Priced Like This?
Why Customers Pay
What we use instead: earnings (P/E, EV/EBIT), book value (P/B) — computed from the figures this company does report, shown in the sections below. Those numbers are unaffected by the missing cash-flow data.
The market is pricing Alterity Therapeutics based on the potential future value of its drug pipeline, particularly its clinical-stage assets, rather than current cash flows, which are negative. The market may be assigning value to the potential for successful clinical trial outcomes and subsequent regulatory approvals, which is not in the model. The company's current ratio of 12.98 suggests adequate short-term liquidity, which supports its ongoing R&D efforts.
Business Model & Valuation
How They Make Money
The company funds itself primarily through equity raises, as evidenced by its negative operating cash flow of -$7.4 million and negative free cash flowFree Cash Flow (FCF) — Operating cash flow minus capital spending: cash left after a company covers operating costs, taxes and interest and reinvests in the business — but BEFORE repaying debt principal or paying dividends. The cash actually available to investors.
Why it matters: A company can show big profits on paper while burning through cash. FCF is what actually fills the bank account.
Reference: Healthy mature businesses convert 8–15% of revenue into FCF · Growth companies often negative
Full explanation → after stock comp of -$12.9 million, with no dividends or buybacks mentioned.
Growth / Revenue DCF
Negative free cash flow: revenue/margin growth model used - standard FCF DCF is unreliable for companies still scaling.
Show advanced inputs
| Revenue Growth | 15.0% |
What this model does NOT do: this is a consolidated owner-earnings cash-flow model. Standalone segment assumptions: none. It does not project its revenue segments independently; their combined effect is embedded in the historical revenue and cash-flow trend the model extrapolates. The calculator above can only approximate a segment's impact through the single consolidated growth rate — it cannot model any one line separately. For a true segment-level view, build a separate model from the company's segment disclosures.
Maturity & Competitive Position
Moat Signals
Net income was negative at -$7.9 million in the latest fiscal year, and operating cash flow was negative at -$7.4 million, indicating a cash-burning growth stage.
Geography & Markets
Geographic Risks
Market Signals
These are timing signals, not value signals — they describe the stock's recent price behavior, not what the business is worth. Use them for the "the thesis looks good, but is now the moment?" question. Each tile below explains what it's saying.
Why it matters: Short-term contrarian indicator. Extreme readings often precede mean reversion, though not always.
Reference: 30–70 normal · >70 overbought · <30 oversold
Full explanation → (14)33.2NeutralMomentum is balanced — neither overbought nor oversold.
Why it matters: When the fast line crosses above the slow line, short-term momentum is turning up; below, turning down. A timing cue, not a value signal.
Reference: Line above signal = bullish momentum · below = bearish
Full explanation →BearishLine below signalThe fast trend is below the slow trend — short-term momentum is currently downward.
Technicals describe price, not the business. A great company can have a "bearish" tape (a buying chance) and a weak one a "bullish" tape (a trap). Pair these with the valuation and health sections above.
QUALITY
Data Quality & Risk Flags (5 notes — click to expand/collapse)
Guardrail Notes (5)
- FCF negative: revenue/margin growth model projects future cash flows from revenue trajectory.
- INVARIANT: weighted IV is non-positive. Model may not be appropriate.
- Model implies no positive equity value under these assumptions. Valuation is speculative/low-confidence.
- Illiquidity discount 15% applied (small/micro-cap — harder to exit, demand a margin).
- Extreme valuation gap (P/IV withheld — see the note above): result may be dominated by model assumptions, share count issues, or sector-specific dynamics. Treat as low confidence.
FINANCIALS
Financial Statements (5-year tables — click to expand)
From Alterity Therapeutics Ltd's SEC filings (EDGAR).
Income (5yr)
| Year | Revenue | Net Income | EPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | — | -7.9M | $-0.12 |
| 2024 | — | -12.5M | $-0.34 |
| 2023 | — | -9.3M | $-0.38 |
| 2022 | — | -9.3M | $-0.38 |
| 2021 | — | -11.4M | $-0.67 |
Cash Flow (5yr)
CapEx is approximated. This filer reports capital expenditure under a company-specific tag our parser cannot read, so the CapEx column uses total investing outflow instead. That includes acquisitions and investment purchases, so the free cash flow shown is a conservative (lower-bound) figure in years with large deals.
| Year | Operating CF | Investing outflow (capex proxy) | − SBC | Free Cash Flow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | -7.4M | 4.9M | 635,224 | -12.9M |
| 2024 | -8.3M | 3,751 | 578,091 | -8.8M |
| 2023 | -13.5M | 4,922 | 650,692 | -14.1M |
| 2022 | -9.0M | 64,697 | 1.1M | -10.1M |
| 2021 | -12.9M | 7,820 | 1.5M | -14.4M |
How we define FCF: operating cash flow − capital expenditure − stock-based compensation (owner-earnings basis — SBC is a real cost to shareholders even though it's non-cash). Latest year: -7.4M − 4.9M − 635,224 (stock-based comp) = -12.9M. This is the same owner-earnings FCF definition the valuation model uses, though the DCF's starting value is a projected from revenue × terminal margin, not this single year.
Balance Sheet
| Total Assets | 30.1M |
| Total Liabilities | 2.4M |
| Equity | -147.5M |
Recent video coverage
Top recent YouTube videos by date. We don't endorse the channels — these are surfaced for context.
![Alterity Therapeutics stock analysis - would ChatGPT buy or sell today? [June 2025] thumbnail](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/y-OBAMfIARs/mqdefault.jpg)
![Alterity Therapeutics stock analysis - would ChatGPT buy or sell today? [June 2025] thumbnail](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SxP-rozxfuU/mqdefault.jpg)
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The questions people ask about ATHE
Is Alterity Therapeutics Ltd (ATHE) a good stock to buy?
We do not publish a single fair value for Alterity Therapeutics Ltd, because one number would not be reliable for this business (the page explains why). Judge it on what today's price assumes, its financial-health checks and what insiders are doing, all shown here from SEC filings. This is educational research from SEC filings, not investment advice.
Is Alterity Therapeutics Ltd (ATHE) overvalued?
A single fair-value number is not reliable for Alterity Therapeutics Ltd, so we do not call it overvalued or undervalued. The page shows what growth today's price assumes and how the company's finances look instead. This is educational research from SEC filings, not investment advice.
Where do these numbers come from?
From Alterity Therapeutics Ltd's own SEC filings (10-K and 10-Q), Form 4 insider filings and daily market prices. Every figure on the page links to how it was calculated, and the model's weak spots are listed next to its results.