Wow, I actually got my first "Cool Post of the Day" out my last response to you. You're not so bad after all Bink. You bring out the best in me!
I'm not sure what to think about Lilly. If they weren't in Indianapolis, I would regard them as a prime takeover candidate. However, as I'm sure you know, Indiana has a poison pill clause that makes it almost impossible for another company to take over an Indiana based corporation. I was at Lilly about 7 years ago and that's when I learned about this. Something about having to get 90% shareholder approval as opposed to 51%. I don't remember the exact terms. They're a good company but without the ability to expand I thinks it's going to be harder and harder for them to compete against the giants. They don't have the financial muscle to pull off deals like the Pfizer/Warner Lambert merger, which is what they need. If they come up with one or two block busters that have the same potential as Prozac did, then they would at least be a good play for a few years out.
As for your concern that newer techniques will pull the rug out from under large biotech, nothing could be further from the truth. In most cases, it's the large drug companies that are fueling the development of these new technologies. If not in house, then through investments in the smaller companies. I doubt you can find one small biotech that is on the cutting edge of todays drug discovery technologies that isn't heavily funded by a larger drug company. Pfizer, for example, has partnerships with several small biotechs, yet they also utilize some of the more cutting edge technologies like DNA microarray and proteomics in house. That's fairly typical of many of the big drug companies today.
I don't think traders are controlling the market as much as they wish they could. I'm sure they long for the huge swings that made them so much money a few years ago but people aren't so gung ho anymore. I doubt many people are quiting their day jobs to day trade the market like they were in before the NASDAQ crashed. It was that kind of shot gun approach to investing that created all the volatility in the first place. A handful of Wall St. traders can't do it by themselves. That's why they're trying so hard to convince everyone that "it's over."
But in the words of Yogi Beara- "It ain't over til it's over". |
