Healthcare could be a real challenger for technology this year, and this business could actually grow faster than most technologies, given the coronavirus constraints many of these companies have been caught up in. It has the potential to be revived. The pandemic has overshadowed many things. For example, Abbott Laboratories poured money into the BinaxNOW test and Regeneron developed a fast-acting drug, which had a big impact on growth. Pfizer pursued a vaccine and rapid response, while drugstores shifted resources to COVID-19 immunization shots. Due to COVID-19, we are witnessing the true profitability of many great companies. For the latest bullpen additions, we focused on Abbott Laboratories, Novartis, Amgen, and Walgreens Boots Alliance. I’ll get into those later, but first let me talk about what I learned at his JP Morgan Healthcare conference that I attended in San Francisco last week and what that means for your portfolio. please. We haven’t spent a lot of resources in this area because it wasn’t right to do so. Not only was the coronavirus eating up time and resources to develop sources of immunity and treatments, but there were no patients, especially older people, coming to the hospital for more elective surgical treatment. That led to the collapse of United Health and the now-unfortunate name of the club, Humana. So we focused on Eli Lilly, the top performer with his best-in-class GLP-1 drug and Donanemab, an Alzheimer’s drug. CEO Dave Ricks reiterated at the conference that Lilly expects donanemab to receive Food and Drug Administration approval in the first quarter of 2024. This strategy was correct. Novo Nordisk currently leads the field with his GLP-1 for both diabetes and Ozempic, weight loss, but his Zepbound, recently approved by Lilly, has an excellent weight loss profile and the company is rapidly We are expanding production to. Mounjaro for diabetes has been on the market since 2022 after receiving FDA approval. All four drugs are once-weekly injections. These are difficult drugs to manufacture and must be done in clean rooms similar to semiconductor manufacturing facilities. They use self-injecting needles from Becton, also known as Dickinson Co., or BD, another great company that makes everything in the hospital, including catheters and blood collection devices. Lilly has two pharmaceutical factories in North Carolina and one in Europe. Regeneron is preferred because it has developed a vaccine that reduces weight loss, but because it attacks fat rather than muscle or fat. His GLP-1 from Novo Nordisk and Lilly helps you lose weight, so for example, if he loses 20 pounds, 8 of those pounds could go to muscle, and if he doesn’t stay in shape, the consequences will be catastrophic. brings. For example, one of the reasons we love Abbott so much is their protein supplements for seniors. Although it’s not often talked about, these drugs can make older adults very frail and unable to get enough protein. What we like about Amgen is that the company offers tablet form (60% of respondents do not prefer injections) and long-term injections once a month instead of once a week. Because the regimen focuses on both. Roche is doing all this with its $2.7 billion acquisition of Calmot last month. Lily is also working on all of this, so I’m not sweating the competition. We know that there are many facets to medicine. For example, there are so many companies working in oncology and everyone is looking for Keytruda. Keytruda is considered by far the strongest in Merck’s cancer franchise, with Bristol-Myers Squibb behind Opdivo. Although we like Segen’s cancer research, which Pfizer has spent more than $40 billion to play a major role in, we fear the power of Keytruda, so we don’t want to buy a cancer drug. I haven’t focused much on it. ABT 1Y Mountain Abbott Laboratories 1st Year We also don’t want to be too hostage to companies that might be harmed by GLP-1, even if it turns out that some companies aren’t really harmed. We were concerned about Abbott’s drug exposure due to its Libre diabetes product. After speaking with CEO Robert Ford, we determined that Abbott was the beneficiary of the drugs. We also liked Abbott because we couldn’t see anything the company was doing in diagnostics, diabetes, or infant milk. The company is back in the No. 1 spot from Justice Department purgatory. The company has four unassailable double-digit growth franchises. WBA 1Y Mountain Walgreens 1 Year What first struck us and led us to move the bullpen to Walgreens was the extraordinary transformation of the company that I see coming from Tim Wentworth. He is an extraordinary trained Pharmacy Benefits Manager and he is a CEO. His talents are desperately needed if Walgreens is to turn around and move in a healthier direction. Former CEO Roz Brewer came from Starbucks and was worried about Walgreens’ role in health care. Wentworth said Walgreens could reconfigure its stores to provide better health care and reduce the loss of flotsam and jetsam stolen from stores and easily purchased on Amazon. know. I consider Walgreens a “destination” and there is probably nothing quite like it. The company is having a hard time finding pharmacists, but is able to get one through Rite Aid, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. If Rite Aid has to liquidate, it could be a big win for Walgreens. Wentworth is willing to sell stake in Chencora, formerly Amerisource, and eliminate clinics to obtain capital to reconfigure stores, remain agile and achieve lowest drug prices I think it might be. Wentworth is well-liked among pharmaceutical companies, and that helps. He’s up against a formidable group of CEOs. Wentworth is up to the task as bravely as Brewer was. Wentworth will act quickly. Is this Foot Locker? It’s possible, but given the dividend cut two weeks ago and the suspension that preceded it, now is the time for Walgreens. AMGN 1Y Mountain Amgen 1 Year We came to Amgen because Amgen has about 18 drugs that have the potential to be billion dollar formulations. This is great considering so many drug companies are too focused on his one drug, like Merck with Keytruda. Amgen CEO Bob Bradway is not a promotions CEO. He’s straight as an arrow. But he’s excited about what he’s seen in terms of artificial intelligence, and he’s really excited about Amgen’s new anti-cholesterol drug Repatha, which can defeat all cholesterol by lowering it to almost zero. ing. There is no such thing as good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Research shows that Repatha injection is unique and may be an alternative treatment for people with moderate cholesterol levels. This can be a very big drug. Amgen recently acquired Horizon Therapeutics to develop specialty drugs and is already developing a drug for people with thyroid problems that cause proptosis. The acquisition was initially contested by the Federal Trade Commission, but the deal was finalized after the Commission removed concerns and demonstrated that there was no duplication. My disdain for the FTC faded when I learned it could listen to reason, and this change of heart at Amgen Horizon opened the floodgates for many deals. NVS 1Y Mountain Novartis 1 Year Finally, the oddity of our choice was Novartis. The company has fundamentally changed over the past five years since a new CEO, Vasu Narasimhan, took over. He quickly sold the stake he inherited in the company’s generic drug spinoff and then divested Sandoz, which held low-growth drugs. And now, Novartis is completely a first-in-class, high-growth drug that generates tremendous cash flow and that money is coming back. You can expect good dividends and huge share buybacks. It is very difficult to find pure pharmaceutical play with almost all young drugs. While interviewing these CEOs, I found it almost fun to see what they were up to. There was none of the swagger or “off the record only” gatherings I was used to in the West. Just honest pride. Now, this is the difficult part of the group. Usually at this point in the cycle, when the economy is having a soft landing, this is the group you want the least. But there will always be an almost self-righteous group who argue that it’s not possible. That’s why pharmaceutical companies can and should play a bigger role in our portfolio. There are other companies on my radar screen as well. We need to keep an eye on the transformation of Bristol-Myers, which has invested in the acquisition of a number of pharmaceutical companies, including antipsychotic drug company Karuna. If Bristol-Myers can make the cancer turnaround, it’s a very interesting company. But Karna is a big gamble. No effective antipsychotic drug invented in the past 70 years has come without horrific side effects, especially weight gain. If Karuna’s KarXT drug is effective, it could be used for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, creating a huge market. You’re being rewarded for waiting with Bristol-Myers’ generous dividends. When I spent some time with BD, I was surprised at how much of a low-end device the company has. Medtronic is starting to make a comeback, and if its new hypertension treatment is used by experts, it could be out. It took more than 10 years to get it approved. Medtronic also says that despite GLP-1, bariatric surgery will remain the standard treatment for obesity. Medtronic is developing Hugo, a robotic-assisted surgical system that rivals Intuitive Surgical, which reported a strong quarter last week. Medtronic may be a company to watch. I wanted to get excited about his CVS Health, which owns a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) and a health insurance company, as well as a series of specialty companies for seniors. I don’t understand the expansion plans. And we are strong in home care. These acquisitions seem expensive to me. I also don’t understand how Target is reducing its footprint by closing some of its stores, which should have been a great partnership. Call me confused. Overall, I feel like we may be at a point where people finally stop paying for all kinds of technology products. And as we saw last week, you can’t get too excited about bank stocks even if JPMorgan reports a great quarter. The stock price then rises and then ends falling. What exactly was that? Morgan Stanley, the club’s name, will report its quarterly report on Tuesday, following the club’s holding of Wells Fargo’s numbers this Friday. Healthcare is the way to do that. It’s all too easy to fall in love with that after a tumultuous period in which much of what these companies do best has been swept under the rug due to the coronavirus. (See here for a complete list of Jim Cramer Charitable Trust stocks.) As a subscriber to Jim Cramer’s CNBC Investment Club, you will receive trade alerts before Jim makes a trade. After Jim sends a trade alert, he waits 45 minutes before buying or selling stocks in a charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim talks about a stock on his CNBC TV, he will wait 72 hours before executing the trade after issuing a trade alert. The above investment club information is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, along with our disclaimer. No fiduciary duties or obligations exist or arise from your receipt of information provided in connection with the Investment Club. No specific results or benefits are guaranteed.
Abbott will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 10, 2024
Brendan Smialowski AFP | Getty Images
Healthcare could be a real challenger for technology this year, and this business could actually grow faster than most technologies, given the coronavirus constraints many of these companies have been caught up in. It has the potential to be revived. The pandemic has overshadowed many things.growth as Abbott LaboratoriesFor example, pouring money into the BinaxNOW test; regeneron We have developed a fast-acting drug. pfizer In pursuit of a vaccine and rapid response, drugstores have shifted resources to COVID-19 immunization shots.
Due to COVID-19, we are witnessing the true profitability of many great companies. The latest bullpen addition focused on Abbott Laboratories. Novartis, amgen and walgreens boots alliance. I’ll get into those later, but first, let me tell you what I learned at last week’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference I attended in San Francisco and what it means for your portfolio. please.
We haven’t spent a lot of resources in this area because it wasn’t right to do so. Not only was the coronavirus eating up time and resources to develop sources of immunity and treatments, but there were no patients, especially older people, coming to the hospital for more elective surgical treatment.it fell united health Adopting a club name that is now regrettable humana Please stop doing that.