 Eli Lilly's two major GLP-1 drugs have dominated headlines, but a slate of new treatments in development—and some already available—suggest... ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ |
| | Written by Nathan Reiff 
GLP-1 treatments such as semaglutide (under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy) by Novo Nordisk A/S (NYSE: NVO) were likely the hottest medical sector story in 2024. With its offering of tirzepatide (branded as Mounjaro and Zepbound), Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY) was another key pharma player in this new type of treatment for diabetes and obesity. Revenue gains followed the popularity of these treatments. Eli Lilly saw Mounjaro sales climb by about 114% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2024, beating Novo Nordisk in large part thanks to the availability of supply. Nonetheless, shares of Eli Lilly have been erratic in recent months. Though the stock is up 25.1% in the year leading to January 24, 2025, in the back half of that time period—the six months from late July 2024 through January—LLY has dropped by more than 4%. This is all despite a record-high share price of close to $973 achieved in 2024 on the momentum of tirzepatide sales. Investors may naturally be wondering what is going on with Eli Lilly and what they might expect from the pharma giant in the year to come. Besides its existing GLP-1 offerings, Eli Lilly may appeal to investors for its pill version of tirzepatide—likely on the horizon in 2026—as well as for its oncology products. Indeed, the company's pipeline is impressive overall. What to Expect From Blockbuster GLP-1 Treatments Much of Eli Lilly's momentum in recent quarters has been due to Mounjaro and Zepbound. However, in January 2025, the company updated its 2024 revenue guidance and offered guidance for the new year, which many investors found disappointing. Sales are still booming—chairman and CEO David A. Ricks said that the U.S. incretin market (encompassing GLP-1 drugs) grew by 45% year-over-year through the final quarter of 2024. However, the company does not anticipate that sales of its two GLP-1 treatments will grow as quickly as initially anticipated. Investors might keep in mind that Eli Lilly still projects substantial top-line growth for 2024 and especially for 2025. The company expects $45 billion in revenue for 2024 and somewhere in the range of $58 billion to $61 billion for 2025. Helping to drive this growth is Eli Lilly's concerted effort to bolster GLP-1 production. The company expects to produce at least 60% more salable doses of incretins in the first half of 2025 than in the same period in 2024. There's even more reason to be excited about the potential for Zepbound in particular in 2025 and beyond—late in 2024, the FDA approved that drug for the treatment of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) in adults with obesity. Zepbound is the first FDA-approved medicine to treat OSA, opening up a new portion of the market and giving Zepbound a potential edge over other GLP-1s currently available. New Products to Watch For Orforglipron is Eli Lilly's pill version of tirzepatide, and the company expects data on the experimental drug by the middle of this year and potential approval as early as the first few months of 2026. Considering that GLP-1 drugs currently require a regular injection, it's likely many patients will opt for a straightforward pill option instead if given the choice. Besides that, Eli Lilly has another GLP-1 candidate in the works that seems to be the most powerful yet. Retatrutide has been shown to produce the greatest weight loss of any GLP-1. With the popularity of GLP-1 drugs, it's easy to forget that Eli Lilly has a deep roster of many other strong candidates as well. In particular, analysts favor the company's oncology slate, including Verzenio, an oral medication used to treat certain types of breast cancer. Sales from this drug alone reached almost $4 billion for the third quarter of 2024, an improvement of 38% year-over-year. On top of that, Eli Lilly has a number of exciting oncology drugs in the works, including STX-478 from Scorpion Therapeutics, for which the company recently paid $2.5 billion. All of this is to say that, despite the massive success of GLP-1s, Eli Lilly has plenty of other reasons to inspire optimism among investors.  Read This Story Online | There are very few people in this world who are considered "the best" in their field.
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| Written by Gabriel Osorio-Mazilli 
After a horrendous start to the last week of January 2025, technology stocks across the United States stock market saw a massive sell-off. The reason behind this behavior is the bold claim made by Chinese technology company DeepSeek, which allegedly was built quicker and more powerful than its American competitor ChatGPT. This is why there was some turmoil in the markets. Capital expenditure budgets were much higher than what DeepSeek claims, meaning that demand for chips and semiconductors might be overstated today. This is why shares of NVIDIA Co. (NASDAQ: NVDA) led the way lower in the market, declining by over 17% in a single day. However, other stocks related to artificial intelligence also went down by association. Investors can take shares of Oracle Co. (NYSE: ORCL), for example, which sold off by up to 14% during the same day as NVIDIA’s crash. However, there should be no association between this lower semiconductor demand and Oracle’s cloud and infrastructure business; if anything, it should boost it. Why? If DeepSeek proves anything, there will be a more energy-efficient and faster way to do things, and that’s where software dominates hardware. Price Action Left Clues Behind Before the sell-off, shares of Oracle rallied, following an announcement of an investment of up to $500 billion in developing artificial intelligence technology and infrastructure. Compared to other stocks, Oracle led the way. Now, taking that behavior for what it means, investors can feel more comfortable in a potential thesis where Oracle recovers quickly since it deals with the infrastructure and cloud computing businesses that can make artificial intelligence more cost-effective in the first place. Unlike NVIDIA’s business, where the faster chips get, the less need for chips there could be until a new revolutionary model is developed. Oracle’s upside seems to be an undeniable bargain now that the stock sits at only 82% of its 52-week high. For these reasons and its discount, some Wall Street analysts might want to keep their recent upgrades. The Market’s Take on Oracle Stock As of late January 2025, analysts from Cantor Fitzgerald decided to initiate coverage on Oracle stock, kicking things off with an Overweight rating and a valuation of up to $214 a share. This view, which is unlikely to change soon, would call for a net upside of as much as 35.3% from where Oracle stock trades today. Despite its discount on a price action basis, Oracle stock still commands a premium from the broader markets, as investors can see from its current price-to-book (P/B) ratio of 30.7x. Compared to the rest of the computer sector, valued at an average of 8.3x P/B, Oracle clearly trades at a significant premium to peers. Some value investors would call this expensive and filled with downsides. However, seasoned traders would confirm that the market is always willing to pay a premium for the names it expects to outperform its respective industry and the market. With this in mind, it shouldn’t surprise investors to see an overall downtrend in Oracle stock’s short interest over the past quarter. This means that, as the bullish evidence and catalysts built up for this company over the past few months, short sellers decided that the chances of a new rally outweighed the ones for a sell-off. So, they decided to close down some of their short positions, as investors can see through the 4.0% decline in short interest for Oracle over the past month alone. After these bearish traders left, some institutional buyers gladly came to take their place recently. As of late January 2025, institutional buyers from Jennison Associates decided to boost their holdings in Oracle stock by 280%, an allocation that netted their entire stake at a high of $201.8 million today. Those from Abrdn followed closely with an 8.1% boost of their own, leaving them with $166.4 million worth of Oracle stock today. What investors should take away from this DeepSeek sell-off is this: Making models and artificial intelligence more efficient doesn’t reduce its demand; it actually increases it due to the added benefits. This is when industries shift to catch up to the new norms, and Oracle seems to be front and center, ready to take on that shift today. Read This Story Online | |
| Written by Gabriel Osorio-Mazilli 
There is a big difference, a massive one, between buying shares of stock as investors attempt to profit from their rising prices and seeking exposure to this underlying move by applying leverage. The most common form of leverage retail traders implement in their portfolios is margin, or borrowing money from their brokerages, which is often not the greatest choice. A better way to have access to leverage is to trade stock options, contracts that fluctuate a lot more aggressively as the underlying stock that they cover starts to make a move. There is one main caveat to these products, and that comes through the timing element, as if investors don’t just have to get the direction of the stock but also the timing of the move correct; otherwise, they risk losing 100% of the premium paid for the contracts traded. This is why a list of names that call option traders decided to get aggressively into recently can be useful for investors, as they now understand that many traders are confident in both the direction and timing of a move in the underlying. Today’s considerations include the Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR Fund (NYSEARCA: XLP), shares of American Express (NYSE: AXP), or even Capital One Financial Co. (NYSE: COF). Why Safer and Stable Names Will Dominate According to analysts from Goldman Sachs, in their 2025 macro outlook report, there are many tail risks present for the broader S&P 500 index and its stock constituents. This essentially means that they see some downside risk due to high valuations, and that would make perfect sense in today’s trading activity. If and when volatility comes around in the form of an index decline, the safer and more stable names in the market will call for more attention and capital moving forward, which is why just over 4,000 call options were traded during late January 2025 on this defensive index. It might very well mean that traders are becoming bullish on some of the stocks that make up this index, such as PepsiCo Inc. (NASDAQ: PEP) or Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), but chances are that these traders are starting to bet on the safety that the index provides amidst potential economic uncertainty on the horizon. This is one place for investors to either find shelter in case volatility comes around or start drilling deeper for specific stocks that, through their defensive natures, could provide a favorable risk-to-reward ratio as well as stable and strong fundamentals. Expanding on Protective Views with American Express Stock Few stocks do as much justice as American Express when it comes to protecting against downside volatility. This is not only an international consumer credit name with the scale and reach to weather most economic storms, but the company's selective model gives it the sort of moat that every investor wishes to support. Knowing that this moat and protective layer is present, traders may have considered the stock's low beta of 0.5 to be half as volatile as the broader S&P 500. More than that, given that the stock trades at a new 52-week high, investors can safely assume that the broader market is already giving this name its fair share of bullish attention. That might explain why up to 19,916 call options were traded recently, a 36% increase from the stock's average level of only 14,641. This sudden surge in trading activity might signal to retail investors that confidence in this company's future is on the rise, but these traders weren't the only ones willing to express their optimism. Institutional buyers from Swedbank also decided to boost their holdings in American Express stock by 0.4% as of late January 2025. While this may not sound like much on a percentage basis, the new allocation did bring the group's position to a high of $121.8 million today, giving investors another bullish pillar to lean on. Improving Credit Profiles Boost Capital One Financial The first quarter of 2025 has brought a positive message out of banking earnings, which showed improvements in consumer discretionary profiles, which can be taken as a bullish sign for companies involved in that space, such as Capital One Financial, a stock that now trades at a new 52-week high for a reason. That reason is already being taken to the bank by options traders, who recently bought up to 25,831 call options, translating into a 159% boost from the company’s usual 9,972 options volume. As with these other stocks, traders weren’t the only ones willing to start showing their optimism for the company. Analysts from the UBS Group decided to place a buy rating on Capital One Financial stock as of January 2025. This time, however, they kept a $235 valuation for the stock. This new view calls for up to 16% upside from where it trades today, not to mention a new 52-week high to give investors the timing and momentum they need to start the year. Read This Story Online | Rural Texas Town Ramps Up Global Currency War
A small town has joined a radical $1.9 trillion attack on the global banking system... backed up by Elon Musk and the White House. Read about it here. |
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