Life Science Stocks Surge Ahead From February Lows 

NASDAQ Up 1.67%, IBB Up 4%, FBIOX up 4.72%, XBI up 5.64%, XLV up 1.7%

The soaring biotech sector would not let a losing week go by and took off early Friday erasing most losses for the week 2/3 to 2/7. Institutions can apparently drive biotech stocks up at will. The sector is up over 12% YTD compared to the NASDAQ virtually flat. It would appear that the downdraft has subsided but without news or metrics to move the market the technicals must call the shots for now.

Our index of 40 mid and small cap biopharmaceutical stocks was solid green up over 6% (except one loser AGIO down 1.3%)  with incredible breadth and heavy volume. We have said this before but if your biotech stocks were not up 3% Friday  just dump them or move to a fund or ETF. Check out some big movers on volume:

Ariad (ARIA $8) up 11.45 % on volume of 43.5M shares !

Endocyte (ECYT $12) up 8.19%.

Exelixis (EXEL $7.20) up 9.09%.

Idera Pharmaceuticals (IDRA $5.14) up 6.2% on 3M shares after public offering notice Feb 4 at $4.

Puma (PBYI $122) up 18.22% on LOW volume of 374K shares!.

As we have written last week the more speculative small caps are hot and volatile as tracked by the equal weight ETF XBI which was up 5.65% on Friday. Equal weight can change weekly upon re-balancing for example as of Friday’s close XBI top holdings include ICPT at 6%, ARA at 2.35% and NBIX at 2.33%.

However we should note that many stocks, except Illumina (ILMN) new high at $156.90,  have not hit new highs so that is one trend to watch next week.

 

 

 

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