What happened today with Schering-Plough (SGP) is exactly why I have never bought a pharmaceutical stock and don’t plan to. I’ve always had this belief that every pharma company was one FDA study away from a 20% drop or worse and I had been meaning to write a blog post about this for a while. Of course on the flip side you could say with these stocks they always have a pop in them if they get approved for a new drug but the drug approval process creates so much volatility in these stocks as the FDA takes a very long time and creates many news stories causing lots of pops and drops on rumors of approval or FDA wanting more information.

You are kidnapped and dropped off in one of these stores with all name brands removed. Can you tell which one you are in?

I believe all of these stores are too similar and would never invest in any of them for that reason and also there are just wayyyyy to many of them. If I see a CVS next to a duane reede, my only incentive to goto one over the other is which one is physically closer to me at the given moment. These companies are expanding way to quickly, in the last 3 years within a 5 mile radius of my house there has been a CVS, Walgreens and Duane Reade opening and the CVS that opened there was one already 2 miles away from the next closet CVS.

…Most over used 2 words in newspapers this year. Searching google news for “credit woes” in the last day(Feb 29th 2008) produces 914 hits. Everyday the market is down I see the same couple of words in financial headlines over and over again.

When the market is down we have a mix of the following words…. Investors, Credit Concerns/Woes, Fear, Inflation, Worries, Economic, Fall, Drop, Housing, Outlook, Profit Taking, Dollar Weakening, Write-offs, Pullback. I’m pretty sure if you do some combinatorics, you can come up with every possible news headline for a financial news site when the market is down for the day. Am I the only one who thinks these headlines are beginning to get a bit bland?