Valuentum Exclusive Analysis for the Discerning Investor

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Feb 3, 2023

Dividend Increases/Decreases for the Week of February 3
Let's take a look at firms raising/lowering their dividends this week.

Jan 9, 2023

Exact Sciences: Fast-Growing Molecular Diagnostic Company But Huge Risks
Image Source: Exact Sciences. Though Exact Sciences is experiencing strong top-line momentum in its business at the moment given its recent upward guidance revision for 2022, its net losses remain huge while its net debt position remains large. We also can’t forget that Exact Sciences recently lowered its full-year 2022 guidance in August, so visibility behind its operations is also somewhat limited, in our view. That said, Exact Sciences’ stool-based Cologuard test has a massive long-term market opportunity, but competition from procedure-based detection technologies and other potential new entrants looking to develop their own stool-based colorectal cancer tests means its long-run outlook is just too murky for us to get excited about shares. Regardless, Exact Sciences' equity has soared more than 20% to start 2023, and we’ve taken notice of the speculative pop.

Dec 14, 2022

Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine (PCV) Could Be a Game-Changer When Combined with Merck’s KEYTRUDA
Image: Moderna’s therapeutics pipeline continues to advance, and the company recently received positive news regarding its personalized cancer vaccine (PCV), ID # mRNA-4157, when combined with Merck’s KEYTRUDA. Image Source: Moderna. Moderna and Merck have revealed what could be a big breakthrough with respect to investigational cancer treatment, but we remind investors that the news is a Phase 2b study, and there is still a meaningful probability that the Phase 3 trial for the immunotherapy may be unsuccessful. Still, the Phase 2b results for the PCV-KEYTRUDA combination showed an impressive 44% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death in patients with late-stage melanoma, and the adverse effects from the combined PCV-KEYTRUDA therapy occurred in just 14.4% of patients, which was not terribly different than those receiving KEYTRUDA alone. There are a plethora of players dabbling in mRNA vaccine technology these days, and we remain excited about its future potential to improve patient outcomes, as much as we are about CRISPR gene-editing technology.

Jun 8, 2021

News Round Up and Some Answers
Image Shown: Wendy's is the latest stock to be swept away by the meme-stock craze, providing further evidence that 1) markets are inefficient and 2) prices and returns are based on future expectations that may be realized or not. We continue to witness extremely volatile trading in "meme" stocks, including AMC Entertainment and GameStop but the crowd has now moved into restaurants of late, centering on Wendy’s, which soared to an all-time high as a result of positive mentions on the Reddit platform. We think price-agnostic trading--trading that does not pay attention to the underlying value of the security--will create tremendous problems for the financial markets, if not curbed. In the meantime, we continue to watch with a cautious eye. You should, too.

Aug 27, 2020

Hats Off to Powell and Mnuchin!
"My hat goes off to Powell and Mnuchin. As you know, I used to be a big believer in (very) hands-off government policies when it comes to the free-market system, but we can no longer afford that today. There are too many investors that aren't paying attention to their investments and/or pursuing misguided correlation analysis. Many have noted, including Danielle DiMartino Booth, that "the Fed could be setting the US economy up for a harder fall down the road by flooding markets with cash and spurring investors to prop up firms that are not fit to survive." Almost completely lost today, however, is that the Fed and Treasury also propped up almost every investment firm tied to indexing and modern portfolio theory." -- Valuentum's President Brian Nelson, CFA

May 28, 2019

From Nano Cap to Big Cap in Biotech
Image shown: Athersys' MultiStem therapy can improve the lives of millions of stroke victims.We cover some very interesting technologies in this piece, from a nano-cap company that could best be described as a call option, a stroke therapy firm that may improve the lives of millions, to a big cap genomic sequencing leader that has exposure to the development of a liquid biopsy test for cancer.

Jul 10, 2018

Biogen Hits a Potential Home Run
We closely follow the progress of the clinical pipeline of companies in the pharma/biotech sector. Unlike other less product-driven industries, the pharma/biotech sector can experience wide swings in operating performance as a result of the lapsing of patent protection on key drugs, underscoring the importance of innovation to replace aging products. Biogen may have hit a home run in the critical field of Alzheimer's, an area of tremendous untapped need.

Jun 27, 2018

Roche Continues to Underwhelm
We like cutting-edge, novel therapies as they have a transformative impact on a small to mid-cap biotech as years of revenue growth could be in the cards. While new therapies are the life-blood of the research field, the impact of a new novel therapy on the growth prospects of a large cap is often muted, however. Such is the fate of Roche as it struggles to replace its mainstay oncology division with new patent-protected entities.

Mar 29, 2018

Dividend Highlights in Big Pharma
The first quarter of 2018 will go down in the record books as one of the most volatile in recent memory--a sharp jump out of the gate was met with significant selling at the end of March as numerous political and economic worries entered the picture. We believe a timely review of some of the dividend stalwarts is in order.

Mar 6, 2018

Updating Our Thoughts on Celgene
Image Source: Celgene. Although the combination of disruptive new discoveries coupled with burgeoning demand thanks to the aging demographics of the world’s population sets the biotech space for a potential virtuous long-term cycle, we’re not too happy with with the recent developments at Celgene. Let’s dig in.