All major indices and sectors sold off today making it 7 bad days out of 8 and a 6.37% correction in the S&P 500 over 30 days. The NASDAQ is now down 7.94% since May 11. Remember “sell in May and go away” ? Things were not much better in biotech-land with the IBB down 5% over one month. Remember the “sell on the ASCO news”? The corrcetion everyone warned about is here and ebullience is gone. Both the S&P and NASDAQ are down for the year but the biotech sector at one time up 15%+ is still up about 9% YTD.
Speculative mid-cap biotechs got hit harder down 2% and the Rayno Life Science portfolio was also down 2% and the only winners were : Micromet (MITI), Neogen (NEOG) and Quidel (QDEL).
Gilead (GILD) was down 2.25% and another 2% after hours with new that it received a subpoena from the justice department regarding manufacturing and distribution practices (could be GMP issues).Until this news get clarifaction one should be cautious on the stock as revenues can be affected.
Ariad (ARIA $9.56) up 0.63% after hitting $10 shows unusual stability in a terrible market on a volume of 6M shares. The Company will hold an investor day on June 17 in NYC so the ARIA fans must be hanging on for something.
We urged raising cash to 10% a month ago and if we don’t get some buying Monday raise more cash.