How To Pick Top Pharma Stocks like a Pro
Updated
Analyzing the pharmaceutical industry, whose products play a key role in improving the quality of life of people around the world, is quite challenging sometimes also it requires deep knowledge and a careful approach, as I believe that investors should consider many factors, starting with evaluating the efficacy of the analyzed company's medications, including in relation to its competitors and the "gold standards," and ending with an analysis of its financial indicators
In this article you will learn how to pick Top Pharma stocks like a pro trader and which factors you should consider, so buckle up
1/ Recognizing the risks
At the very beginning, an investor you must recognize that the pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive, where a company's investment attractiveness depends not only on the rate of expansion of its portfolio of product candidates, revenue growth, margins, the amount of total debt and cash on the balance sheet but is also heavily influenced by the expiration of patents on medications and vaccines.
Moreover, in recent months, the healthcare sector has increasingly felt the impact of the upcoming 2024 US presidential elections, as some politicians are aiming to further tighten regulation of drug prices despite the existing Inflation Reduction Act.
2/ Leveraging data to your advantage
The second step use data wisely, you should check all kinda data including stock screener, transcripts of earnings calls, financial results for the last quarters, analyst expectations, options data... The goal is to filter companies in poor financial condition, as well as those that trade at a significant premium to the sector and/or competitors
I would also like to point out that in the current market environment, with Fed interest rates remaining at multi year highs, I do not recommend investing in companies with market caps below $500 million, as they typically have limited cash reserves and weaker institutional backing
Also, I'd recommend investors read 10-Ks and 10-Qs, especially the section related to debt and sources of financing of the company's operations, to reduce the likelihood of an "unexpected" drop in the share price. A striking example is Invitae Corporation aka NVTAQ which declared bankruptcy in mid February 2024!
Was there a prerequisite for this? The answer is yes since the company continued to generate negative cash flow and also had convertible senior notes maturing in 2028.
Convertible notes can involve significant financial risks if the company cannot effectively use the cash to grow the business and break even. In this case, management will not be able to pay off the bonds with cash reserves and will have to resort to significant dilution of investors. In my opinion, Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc.
PACB may face this problem because it has convertible senior notes maturing in 2028 and 2030.
Factors that concern me include the company's declining revenue and total cash and short-term investments in recent quarters, while its operating expenses remain extremely high at around $80 million per quarter.
Let's return to the second step in my approach to selecting the most promising assets in the healthcare sector.
When selecting companies with market caps between $4 billion and $40 billion, I use more parameters since most of them already have FDA approved drugs and/or vaccines.
As a result, it is also necessary to consider the rate of growth of operating income, net debt/EBITDA ratio, and how management copes with increased marketing and production costs.
Finally, let's move on to the last basket, which contains pharmaceutical companies with market capitalizations exceeding $40 billion. I think, this group is best suited for more conservative investors looking for assets offering attractive dividend yields and growing net income, supported by a rich portfolio of FDA approved and experimental drugs.
So, from Big Pharma, I like Pfizer Inc
PFE, AbbVie Inc 
ABBV , Merck & Co 
MRK and AstraZeneca PLC 
AZN . I also want to include Novartis AG 
NVS and Roche Holding AG 
RHHBY in this group
sometimes investors need to make exceptions, namely if one larger company buys out a smaller player and/or when a major partnership agreement is concluded, as was the case between Merck and Daiichi Sankyo Company, Limited
DSKYF in 2023.
Also, in the event of a major acquisition or merger, the company's debt may temporarily increase sharply. If its management has previously implemented effective R&D and financial policies, the "net debt/EBITDA ratio"
A remarkable example of a company falling into the "value trap" is Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited
TAK, which overpaid for Shire. This deal did not significantly strengthen or rejuvenate the Japanese company's portfolio of drugs.
As a result, it had to sell off billions of dollars in assets to pay off its debt partially. However, despite all the efforts of Takeda's management, its net debt/EBITDA ratio, although it fell below 5x, remains high, namely about 4.7x at the end of March 2024.
3/ Identifying promising therapeutic areas
In general, the more prevalent a disease is, the larger the total addressable market for a drug and, as a result, the higher the chances that it will become a commercially successful product.
Global spending on cancer medications will reach $377 billion by 2027, followed by immunology, and diabetes will come in third with an estimated spending of about $169 billion
What challenges arise when choosing pharmaceutical companies?
you should also keep in mind that the larger the market, the higher the competition between medicines, as companies strive to grab as big a piece of the pie as possible.
As a result, for drug sales to take off, they need to have significant competitive advantages over the "gold standard." These competitive advantages may include greater efficacy in treating a particular disease, less frequent administration, a more favorable safety profile, and a more convenient route of administration.
So, in recent years, competition in the global spinal muscular atrophy treatment market has intensified. Spinal muscular atrophy [SMA] is a genetic condition. Currently, three drugs have been approved to combat the disorder, including Biogen Inc.'s (BIIB) Spinraza, Roche/PTC Therapeutics, Inc.'s (PTCT) Evrysdi, and Novartis AG's (NVS) gene therapy Zolgensma.
All three products have similar efficacy, but Evrysdi has a more favorable safety profile and is the more convenient route of administration, namely the oral route, which is reflected in its sales growth rate from year to year.
The second pitfall is the company's pipeline of experimental drugs.
I believe that financial market participants opening an investor presentation that presents a company's pipeline, especially if its market cap is below $5 billion, should also pay close attention to what stage of clinical trial activity its experimental drugs are in.
if a pharmaceutical company has most of its product candidates in the early stages of development, this represents a significant risk because, in this case, institutional and retail investors are often overly optimistic about the prospects for the drugs' mechanisms of action and/or clinical data obtained in a small group of patients. Simultaneously, as is often the case, the higher the optimism, the less favorable the risk/reward profile.
In most cases, the larger and more diverse the patient population, the weaker the efficacy of a drug relative to what was seen in Phase 1/2 clinical trials. This ultimately leads to a downward valuation of its likelihood of approval and casts doubt on its ability to take significant market share from approved medications.
This may subsequently reduce the company's investment attractiveness, making it more difficult to attract financing for its operating activities.
As a result, I recommend excluding any company that, instead of focusing its financial resources on the most promising product candidates, conducts multiple early-stage clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of its experimental drugs.
In my experience, the most successful pharmaceutical companies focus their efforts on bringing up to three product candidates to market and then reinvesting the revenue from their commercialization into developing the rest of the pipeline.
The table below highlights the following parameters that I use to screen out the least promising companies.
A third factor that investors, especially those new to the investment world, should consider is that large pharmaceutical companies are leaders in certain therapeutic areas, with a rich portfolio of patents covering various mechanisms of action and delivery methods of drugs, making it more difficult and more prolonged for smaller players to find product candidates that could potentially have the competitive advantages.
So, Novo Nordisk A/S
NVO and Eli Lilly and Company 
LLY have long been leaders in the global diabetes and weight loss drugs markets, and only very recently, they may be joined by Amgen Inc. 
AMGN, Roche Holding, and several other companies
4/ Assessing a company's drug portfolio in comparison to competitors
Evaluating the effectiveness, safety profile, and mechanism of action of a medication, as well as comparing clinical data with its competitors, takes a lot of time and effort. I provided examples of drugs and the most promising mechanisms of action in the obesity treatment market. Their manufacturers are Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Roche Holding, Viking Therapeutics, Inc, Amgen, Pfizer, Altimmune, Inc, OPKO Health, Inc, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Zealand Pharma A/S
5/ When market exclusivity for a company's key medications ends
Every financial market participant who is considering investing in pharmaceutical companies should consider the expiration time of key patents of medicines.
Marketing exclusivity represents protection against the entry of a generic version and/or biosimilar of a branded drug into the market, thereby allowing the company to recoup the resources spent on its development and, in the event of its commercial success, also reinvest the money received to accelerate the development of the remaining product candidates.
Where can you find information about patent expiration dates?
All the necessary information is either in 20-Fs/10-Ks or on the FDA website, namely in the "Orange Book" section. let's take Eli Lilly as an example. Open the latest 10-K. Then, the CTRL + F combination opens the ability to find specific words in the document. I usually enter "Expiry Date" or "compound patent" to find the patent section.nvestors can also find information about patents on the FDA website.
As an example, I enter "Mounjaro" in the top line, and a list of patents opens that protect Eli Lilly's blockbuster from the introduction of its generic versions onto the market.hen, clicking on "Appl. No." will open information about the submission date of the patent and when it will expire.
6/ Evaluating the impact of insider share transactions
The next step in selecting the most interesting assets in the healthcare sector is to analyze Form-4s. The CEO, CFO, and other key members of the company's management buy or sell shares from time to time.I am only interested in analyzing purchases since, most often, sales by management are option exercises carried out to pay taxes.
When management starts making large outright purchases of a company's shares, it can signal that it believes in its long-term growth potential.if more than two top managers buy a large block of shares within two weeks of each other, it significantly increases the likelihood of the company's stock price rising in the next two months from the moment of their transactions
But as with everything, there are exceptions, such as in the case of OPKO Health, which is developing a long-acting oxyntomodulin analog for the treatment of obesity together with LeaderMed Group.Over the past 12 months, OPKO's management, especially CEO Phillip Frost, has purchased over 12 million shares.
However, despite this, its stock price has fallen by 27% over the same period. I believe that the key reasons for the divergence between these two facts are investors' lack of confidence in Phillip Frost's ability to make the company profitable again, as well as its low cash reserves. Therefore, companies like OPKO Health have already been eliminated at the second step of selection using Seeking Alpha's screener.
7/ CEO Performance in Business Development
The CEO plays a crucial role in the success of a pharmaceutical company since the pharmaceutical industry is highly dynamic, and the competition between Big Pharma is especially high, I advise readers to pay attention to the track record of the CEO, especially how he copes with force majeure situations, as well as how effective the R&D policy is carried out under his leadership.
8/ Identifying Entry and Exit Points for Long-Term Investments
The eighth step is in addition to the information that was obtained in the previous steps, as well as the analysis of financial risks and various financial metrics of the company, including its net debt, maturity dates of bonds, historical revenue growth rates, EBIT, gross margin, I build a DCF model with the ultimate goal of determining the price target.
it is necessary to conduct a technical analysis of them, as well as the main ETFs that include them. In my opinion, the key ETFs are the SPDR® S&P Biotech ETF
XBI, Fidelity Blue Chip Growth ETF 
FBCG, iShares Biotechnology ETF 
IBB, and VanEck Pharmaceutical ETF PPH. The purpose of technical analysis is to determine the stop-loss level and entry points at which the risk/reward profile is most favorable. taking profit is not that easy cuz you must master your emotions and greed which damn hard
9/ Creating a Watchlist Based on Risk/Reward Ratio
The purpose of which is to create a watchlist of the companies I have selected based on the previous steps. I make several lists of companies based on their market caps and also rank them according to risk/reward profile, that is, in the first place is the stock that I think has minimal risks and at the same time can bring the greatest potential profit.
I also advise creating small notes on each company, which can include information about risks, support/resistance zones, dates of publication of clinical data, and any thoughts you have that will make your decision more conscious when opening a position
“What’s your secret sauce for choosing pharma stocks?”
In this article you will learn how to pick Top Pharma stocks like a pro trader and which factors you should consider, so buckle up
1/ Recognizing the risks
At the very beginning, an investor you must recognize that the pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive, where a company's investment attractiveness depends not only on the rate of expansion of its portfolio of product candidates, revenue growth, margins, the amount of total debt and cash on the balance sheet but is also heavily influenced by the expiration of patents on medications and vaccines.
Moreover, in recent months, the healthcare sector has increasingly felt the impact of the upcoming 2024 US presidential elections, as some politicians are aiming to further tighten regulation of drug prices despite the existing Inflation Reduction Act.
2/ Leveraging data to your advantage
The second step use data wisely, you should check all kinda data including stock screener, transcripts of earnings calls, financial results for the last quarters, analyst expectations, options data... The goal is to filter companies in poor financial condition, as well as those that trade at a significant premium to the sector and/or competitors
I would also like to point out that in the current market environment, with Fed interest rates remaining at multi year highs, I do not recommend investing in companies with market caps below $500 million, as they typically have limited cash reserves and weaker institutional backing
Also, I'd recommend investors read 10-Ks and 10-Qs, especially the section related to debt and sources of financing of the company's operations, to reduce the likelihood of an "unexpected" drop in the share price. A striking example is Invitae Corporation aka NVTAQ which declared bankruptcy in mid February 2024!
Was there a prerequisite for this? The answer is yes since the company continued to generate negative cash flow and also had convertible senior notes maturing in 2028.
Convertible notes can involve significant financial risks if the company cannot effectively use the cash to grow the business and break even. In this case, management will not be able to pay off the bonds with cash reserves and will have to resort to significant dilution of investors. In my opinion, Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc.
PACB may face this problem because it has convertible senior notes maturing in 2028 and 2030.Factors that concern me include the company's declining revenue and total cash and short-term investments in recent quarters, while its operating expenses remain extremely high at around $80 million per quarter.
Let's return to the second step in my approach to selecting the most promising assets in the healthcare sector.
When selecting companies with market caps between $4 billion and $40 billion, I use more parameters since most of them already have FDA approved drugs and/or vaccines.
As a result, it is also necessary to consider the rate of growth of operating income, net debt/EBITDA ratio, and how management copes with increased marketing and production costs.
Finally, let's move on to the last basket, which contains pharmaceutical companies with market capitalizations exceeding $40 billion. I think, this group is best suited for more conservative investors looking for assets offering attractive dividend yields and growing net income, supported by a rich portfolio of FDA approved and experimental drugs.
So, from Big Pharma, I like Pfizer Inc
PFE, AbbVie Inc ABBV , Merck & Co MRK and AstraZeneca PLC AZN . I also want to include Novartis AG NVS and Roche Holding AG RHHBY in this groupsometimes investors need to make exceptions, namely if one larger company buys out a smaller player and/or when a major partnership agreement is concluded, as was the case between Merck and Daiichi Sankyo Company, Limited
DSKYF in 2023.Also, in the event of a major acquisition or merger, the company's debt may temporarily increase sharply. If its management has previously implemented effective R&D and financial policies, the "net debt/EBITDA ratio"
A remarkable example of a company falling into the "value trap" is Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited
TAK, which overpaid for Shire. This deal did not significantly strengthen or rejuvenate the Japanese company's portfolio of drugs.As a result, it had to sell off billions of dollars in assets to pay off its debt partially. However, despite all the efforts of Takeda's management, its net debt/EBITDA ratio, although it fell below 5x, remains high, namely about 4.7x at the end of March 2024.
3/ Identifying promising therapeutic areas
In general, the more prevalent a disease is, the larger the total addressable market for a drug and, as a result, the higher the chances that it will become a commercially successful product.
Global spending on cancer medications will reach $377 billion by 2027, followed by immunology, and diabetes will come in third with an estimated spending of about $169 billion
What challenges arise when choosing pharmaceutical companies?
you should also keep in mind that the larger the market, the higher the competition between medicines, as companies strive to grab as big a piece of the pie as possible.
As a result, for drug sales to take off, they need to have significant competitive advantages over the "gold standard." These competitive advantages may include greater efficacy in treating a particular disease, less frequent administration, a more favorable safety profile, and a more convenient route of administration.
So, in recent years, competition in the global spinal muscular atrophy treatment market has intensified. Spinal muscular atrophy [SMA] is a genetic condition. Currently, three drugs have been approved to combat the disorder, including Biogen Inc.'s (BIIB) Spinraza, Roche/PTC Therapeutics, Inc.'s (PTCT) Evrysdi, and Novartis AG's (NVS) gene therapy Zolgensma.
All three products have similar efficacy, but Evrysdi has a more favorable safety profile and is the more convenient route of administration, namely the oral route, which is reflected in its sales growth rate from year to year.
The second pitfall is the company's pipeline of experimental drugs.
I believe that financial market participants opening an investor presentation that presents a company's pipeline, especially if its market cap is below $5 billion, should also pay close attention to what stage of clinical trial activity its experimental drugs are in.
if a pharmaceutical company has most of its product candidates in the early stages of development, this represents a significant risk because, in this case, institutional and retail investors are often overly optimistic about the prospects for the drugs' mechanisms of action and/or clinical data obtained in a small group of patients. Simultaneously, as is often the case, the higher the optimism, the less favorable the risk/reward profile.
In most cases, the larger and more diverse the patient population, the weaker the efficacy of a drug relative to what was seen in Phase 1/2 clinical trials. This ultimately leads to a downward valuation of its likelihood of approval and casts doubt on its ability to take significant market share from approved medications.
This may subsequently reduce the company's investment attractiveness, making it more difficult to attract financing for its operating activities.
As a result, I recommend excluding any company that, instead of focusing its financial resources on the most promising product candidates, conducts multiple early-stage clinical trials to evaluate the efficacy of its experimental drugs.
In my experience, the most successful pharmaceutical companies focus their efforts on bringing up to three product candidates to market and then reinvesting the revenue from their commercialization into developing the rest of the pipeline.
The table below highlights the following parameters that I use to screen out the least promising companies.
A third factor that investors, especially those new to the investment world, should consider is that large pharmaceutical companies are leaders in certain therapeutic areas, with a rich portfolio of patents covering various mechanisms of action and delivery methods of drugs, making it more difficult and more prolonged for smaller players to find product candidates that could potentially have the competitive advantages.
So, Novo Nordisk A/S
NVO and Eli Lilly and Company LLY have long been leaders in the global diabetes and weight loss drugs markets, and only very recently, they may be joined by Amgen Inc. AMGN, Roche Holding, and several other companies4/ Assessing a company's drug portfolio in comparison to competitors
Evaluating the effectiveness, safety profile, and mechanism of action of a medication, as well as comparing clinical data with its competitors, takes a lot of time and effort. I provided examples of drugs and the most promising mechanisms of action in the obesity treatment market. Their manufacturers are Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Roche Holding, Viking Therapeutics, Inc, Amgen, Pfizer, Altimmune, Inc, OPKO Health, Inc, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Zealand Pharma A/S
5/ When market exclusivity for a company's key medications ends
Every financial market participant who is considering investing in pharmaceutical companies should consider the expiration time of key patents of medicines.
Marketing exclusivity represents protection against the entry of a generic version and/or biosimilar of a branded drug into the market, thereby allowing the company to recoup the resources spent on its development and, in the event of its commercial success, also reinvest the money received to accelerate the development of the remaining product candidates.
Where can you find information about patent expiration dates?
All the necessary information is either in 20-Fs/10-Ks or on the FDA website, namely in the "Orange Book" section. let's take Eli Lilly as an example. Open the latest 10-K. Then, the CTRL + F combination opens the ability to find specific words in the document. I usually enter "Expiry Date" or "compound patent" to find the patent section.nvestors can also find information about patents on the FDA website.
As an example, I enter "Mounjaro" in the top line, and a list of patents opens that protect Eli Lilly's blockbuster from the introduction of its generic versions onto the market.hen, clicking on "Appl. No." will open information about the submission date of the patent and when it will expire.
6/ Evaluating the impact of insider share transactions
The next step in selecting the most interesting assets in the healthcare sector is to analyze Form-4s. The CEO, CFO, and other key members of the company's management buy or sell shares from time to time.I am only interested in analyzing purchases since, most often, sales by management are option exercises carried out to pay taxes.
When management starts making large outright purchases of a company's shares, it can signal that it believes in its long-term growth potential.if more than two top managers buy a large block of shares within two weeks of each other, it significantly increases the likelihood of the company's stock price rising in the next two months from the moment of their transactions
But as with everything, there are exceptions, such as in the case of OPKO Health, which is developing a long-acting oxyntomodulin analog for the treatment of obesity together with LeaderMed Group.Over the past 12 months, OPKO's management, especially CEO Phillip Frost, has purchased over 12 million shares.
However, despite this, its stock price has fallen by 27% over the same period. I believe that the key reasons for the divergence between these two facts are investors' lack of confidence in Phillip Frost's ability to make the company profitable again, as well as its low cash reserves. Therefore, companies like OPKO Health have already been eliminated at the second step of selection using Seeking Alpha's screener.
7/ CEO Performance in Business Development
The CEO plays a crucial role in the success of a pharmaceutical company since the pharmaceutical industry is highly dynamic, and the competition between Big Pharma is especially high, I advise readers to pay attention to the track record of the CEO, especially how he copes with force majeure situations, as well as how effective the R&D policy is carried out under his leadership.
8/ Identifying Entry and Exit Points for Long-Term Investments
The eighth step is in addition to the information that was obtained in the previous steps, as well as the analysis of financial risks and various financial metrics of the company, including its net debt, maturity dates of bonds, historical revenue growth rates, EBIT, gross margin, I build a DCF model with the ultimate goal of determining the price target.
it is necessary to conduct a technical analysis of them, as well as the main ETFs that include them. In my opinion, the key ETFs are the SPDR® S&P Biotech ETF
XBI, Fidelity Blue Chip Growth ETF FBCG, iShares Biotechnology ETF IBB, and VanEck Pharmaceutical ETF PPH. The purpose of technical analysis is to determine the stop-loss level and entry points at which the risk/reward profile is most favorable. taking profit is not that easy cuz you must master your emotions and greed which damn hard9/ Creating a Watchlist Based on Risk/Reward Ratio
The purpose of which is to create a watchlist of the companies I have selected based on the previous steps. I make several lists of companies based on their market caps and also rank them according to risk/reward profile, that is, in the first place is the stock that I think has minimal risks and at the same time can bring the greatest potential profit.
I also advise creating small notes on each company, which can include information about risks, support/resistance zones, dates of publication of clinical data, and any thoughts you have that will make your decision more conscious when opening a position
“What’s your secret sauce for choosing pharma stocks?”
Trade active
now lets talk about my sweet Novo!
Novo Nordisk is a Danish pharmaceutical company that is the global leader in the anti-obesity medicines market and also holds a dominant 36% share of the insulin market in the US
It continues to aggressively develop next gen experimental drugs, aiming to enhance its position in the fast-growing obesity treatment market.Let's move on to a more detailed discussion of Novo Nordisk's progress in developing its pipeline of product candidates. CagriSema, which contains cagrilintide and also semaglutide, has demonstrated significantly greater efficacy in reducing weight and HbA1c levels in patients in clinical trials than semaglutide 2.4 mg, making it the next logical in the evolution of the Danish company's obesity franchise.
Back in 2022, the company published the results of a phase 2 clinical trial, which demonstrated the extremely high efficacy of the combination of cagrilintide and semaglutide among patients with type 2 diabetes and obesity.
So, at the 32nd week of treatment, the group of patients taking CagriSema experienced a decrease in HbA1c levels by 2.19%, while the reduction in body weight exceeded 15%, which is significantly higher than in the group of patients who received either once-weekly 2.4 mg semaglutide or 2.4 mg cagrilintide alone.
Currently, Novo continues to conduct several pivotal clinical trials, the results of which are expected to be published in late 2025/early 2026. In my assessment, based on the mechanism of action of CagriSema, as well as already published data, it will become the most effective medication on the market until 2029, when more innovative products being developed by Novo Nordisk and its competitors, including Roche Holding and Eli Lilly, could potentially be introduced on the US and European markets.
I also want to highlight a more promising anti-obesity drug candidate, amycretin, a co-agonist of both GLP1 and amylin receptors that demonstrated a 13% reduction in patient weight after only 12 weeks of treatment in a phase 1 clinical trial, significantly better than Wegovy and Eli Lilly's Tirzepatide
Trade active
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