May 29, 2005 -- Given the perversity of financial markets, the very simple act of declaring a trend often seems to end it. So, because we don’t want to put any upward bound on the recent move in biotech, we won’t call this a trend. But we will simply observe that the last two months have been very good for biotech. Since hitting a low in early April, biotech has put together eight straight weeks of advance, interrupted only by two weeks that were virtually flat (the losses were about a point each time). During these 8 weeks, the Centient Biotech 200 has added on slightly more than 10%. Last week, the Centient Biotech 200 rose 54 points to 3381.05, a rise of 1.6%. It is almost exactly in the middle of the 2004-5 trading range, as the index stands 10% below the top established in April of 2004. We look at Genentech, which seems to move from strength to strength, now the largest biotech company and number 5 in the list of all pharma, its rivals Eyetech and QLT, plus the big percentage winners on the week, Indevus with an overative bladder treatment, Lipid Sciences, which takes lipids out of the blood, and Isis with a potential treatment for asthma. More details...
