Despite a tumultuous five weeks, the market is entirely unchanged for 2015.
Yes, Friday’s close puts the S&P 500 flat from the beginning of the year.
Although the Friday session got off to a good start and it looked as though the index might break out of resistance around the 2060 level, this early strength turned out to be a headfake. The S&P dipped lower and ended the day at the top of this 2015 channel.
We started off the week at PropThink with a long look at unique (QURE), one of the smaller and often overlooked publicly traded gene therapy developers. uniQure developed the first and only approved gene therapy in Europe, Glybera, as a treatment for Lipoprotein Lipase Deficiency (LPLD). LPLD is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disorder caused by a diminished or absent LPL enzyme – a result of a mutated LPL gene. Perhaps most interesting to the lay investor, Glybera, a one-time treatment for LPLD, is priced at $1.4 million dollars.
But Glybera isn’t what drives Mr. Fink’s interest in the company. uniQure also develops a potential one-time cure for Hemophilia B, and has one of the more advanced drug candidates globally (Baxter may have a slight lead). In the report, Mr. Fink explains why uniQure is a dark horse in the gene therapy space, and why they might have leg up on the competition, which now includes Spark Therapeutics (ONCE) and Biogen Idec (BIIB).
Last Sunday night the New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks in the most-watched television event in American history: Super Bowl XLIX. In a tongue-in-cheek article published this week, we explained why biotech stocks are going higher in 2015 as a direct result.
We looked at the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index’s (NBI) performance going all the way back to 1994, and the correlation to the Super Bowl’s winner. In the resulting 20-year dataset, 80% of the time in which the AFC champions (this time, the Patriots) won the Super Bowl, the NBI ended the year higher than where it began in January. We can also tell that in the years in which the AFC champion won and the total game score (scores combined) was greater than 50 points, the mean 1-year NBI return was 45%. The total score this past weekend: 52. Clearly, biotech investors should be celebrating the Patriots’ big win.
That’s obviously bullsh*t, but we used this example of “data mining” to illustrate how data can be manipulated to make it say what you want it to say. Likewise, it is a common occurence in the land of small- and mid-cap biotech stocks, which are often reliant on a single drug candidate to keep investors engaged, for failed or disappointing trial results to be “spun” in a positive light.
At PropThink, our first advice to new and aspiring biotech investors is to be skeptical. Be deeply skeptical. Read the light-hearted article for an example of data mining (and how it played out in the long run), as well as an example that’s playing out now. In conjunction, we’re also offering a $100 discount to investors who sign up for our Premium research service.
For PropThink subscribers, we sent out a note on Friday updating investors on Innate Pharma (IPH.PA) (IPHYF), a small European company that we’ve followed for some time due to its novel approach to treating cancer. Read the update here.
Also this week in biopharma, Pfizer (PFE) bought generic/biosimilar maker Hospira (HSP) for $17 billion, and the U.S. FDA rescinded for the first time ever a Breakthrough Therapy Designation.
One or more of PropThink’s contributors are long IPH.PA or QURE.
