Gilead Sciences

As I suspected when I issued the buy alert for Gilead Sciences three weeks ago, its stock came under selling pressure during the last week of December dropping its share price below our entry point. Portfolio managers engaging in “window dressing” jettisoned it from their portfolios so it wouldn’t show up as a holding in their annual reports, which are issued as of the last day of each calendar year.

But I also suspect many of those same managers will be buying it back in January, since GILD appears grossly oversold and likely to rebound on even a whiff of good news (or simply the absence of bad news, given how far it has fallen). The company recently reached a verdict in its long running patent infringement dispute with Merck, so putting that uncertainty behind it should cast the company in a more positive light in 2017.

But most of the news from Gilead in 2016 was bad, pushing its share price down 29% for the year. That has also pulled its forward P/E ratio down to less than 7 times future earnings, which is quite low even for a struggling pharmaceutical company. For that reason GILD earns a perfect score of 100% from the Earnings Yield formula of our Rapid Profits Matrix, and a “buy zone” score of 8 (on a scale of 0-10, higher is better) from our IDEAL Stock Rating System.

 

Stock Talk

Add New Comments

You must be logged in to post to Stock Talk OR create an account