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Gilead

Gilead arguably has the best science in the business. But success in Biotech / Pharma is reserved for those who keep their customers alive, but milk them forever by not curing them of anything.

Hits against Gilead:

1. Gilead did not make any friends by creating the Gardasil vaccine for HPV, which killed the downstream pipeline for those companies that would have treated HPV for 40-50 years.

2. Gilead does not have deep hooks inside the FDA either

Regeneron on the other hand has deep contacts inside the FDA and also practices the milking-forever business model. If they package dried-prunes as a cure for Covid, FDA will merrily approve it.

Taking losses

takinglossesTaking losses is a tough part of doing Day Trading and no one is immune to making mistakes. In fact, professionals know that the sin isn’t in taking a loss, but rather not taking a loss and letting a loser continue to eat away at the equity in a portfolio.
Losers not dealt with are like a cancer which can quickly spread throughout the body if it is left untreated.

DENIALISM: A STOCK TRADER’S DISEASE

Stock traders are the world’s worse at making poor trading decisions while denying that poor decisions were made in the first place.  It is a disease called denialism and it starts when a trader abandons his rules (or worse yet has none), and trades whatever feels or looks right whenever it feels or looks right  Once the trade is entered, denialism begins to spread like a cancer looking for its next body part to attack.  The disease grows in stages, with each successive stage sucking more life out of its victim.

50 Smartest Companies in 2017

Top 10 of 50

1) Nvidia Continues to tweak its chips, originally developed for gaming, to help develop breakthrough technologies like deep learning and autonomous driving.

$3 billion: spending on R&D to create its new data-center chip

2) SpaceX Changing the economics of space travel with its successful landing and recycling of rockets to be recycled for multiple trips

10 percent: price discount being considered for customers who agree to fly their payloads on reused rockets

3) Amazon Creating an AI-powered store of the future with Amazon Go while expanding intelligent voice assistant Alexa into phones, cars, and more.

12,000: number of programs that software developers have published for Alexa

4) 23andMe Vindicated this year when the U.S. FDA granted permission to tell customers whether their DNA puts them at higher risk for some diseases.

1 million plus: number of customers who have consented to have their genetic information used for scientific research

5) Alphabet Continues to dominate research into AI while expanding innovation in phone systems, virtual reality, and self-driving cars.

40 percent: amount of energy the company says it saves applying machine-learning algorithms from its DeepMind subsidiary to cooling its data center.

6) iFlytek Its voice assistant technology is the Siri of China, and its real-time portable translator puts AI to remarkable use, overcoming dialect, slang, and background noise to translate between Chinese and a dozen other languages with surprising accuracy.

70 percent: iFlytek’s share of China’s market in voice-based technologies

7) Kite Pharma Nearing FDA approval of its experimental immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own blood cells to combat cancer.

39 percent: proportion of study participants very sick with lymphoma who showed no sign of the disease six months after a single treatment with Kite’s therapy

8) Tencent Turning its insanely popular chat platform WeChat into a virtual operating system featuring mini programs.

50 percent: proportion of WeChat’s 770 million daily users who are on the service at least 90 minutes a day

9) Regeneron The biotech company has a strong drug pipeline and track record treating eye and other diseases, and it’s testing treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and pain.

500,000: number of U.K. volunteers whose genetic data it is helping sequence

10) Spark Therapeutics Its blindness treatment could be the first gene therapy approved in the U.S. to treat an inherited disease.

1 in 30,000: estimated number of individuals affected by the disease, Leber hereditary optic neuropathy

Full list at: MIT Technology Review

Taking losses

losses-Taking losses is a tough part of doing business on Dalal Street and no one is immune to making mistakes. In fact, professionals know that the sin isn’t in taking a loss, but rather not taking a loss and letting a loser continue to eat away at the equity in a portfolio.

Losers not dealt with are like a cancer which can quickly spread throughout the body if it is left untreated.

Cancer May Soon Be Detected By a Simple Blood Test

A new study is all set to change the course of medical history in the field of cancer detection forever, as it has identified roughly 800 biomarkers present in the blood of cancer patients which can be found out through a single blood test, making early detection of cancer a possible reality in the future.

This study is the very first to comprehensively review and identify cancer-specific blood markers for future clinical development. Almost 19,000 scientific papers were analyzed and more than 800 biomarkers were identified.
This research aimed at using a single blood sample for developing a screening test to identify multiple cancer types. Every type of cancer is known to produce markers in the blood. Therefore, developing a general screening test for many different forms of the disease may be feasible.

Study author Ian Cree, a Cancer Research UK funded scientist at the University of Warwick and University Hospital in Coventry said in a press release, “This is a new approach to early detection and the first time such a systematic review has been done. A single blood-based screening test would be a game changer for early detection of cancer which could help make it a curable disease for many more patients. We believe that we’ve identified all the relevant biomarkers; the next step is working out which ones work the best for spotting cancers.”

The research is poised to be presented at the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI) Cancer Conference.