Chart courtesy webbroker.td.com
Yes, we know the adage “Health is Wealth”. Yes, the common cold sends us rushing for antihistamines (maybe, or just a box of Kleenexes) let alone the Zika virus. What do we do on a roller-coaster day of healthcare shares on $DOW? It had to be a Friday: a weekly options day.
If we had $MRK, we would be rich. Wealthy, and maybe healthy too. If we had purchased $BMY and were in a buy-and-hold strategy, we might be neither, if we were anxiety-prone or of cardio-vascular heritage.
We could have saved ourselves a trifle with Bristol-Myers Squibb if we had kept on top of our market research, fundamentals and technicals. Or perhaps we had stop-losses in place, that might have been our saving grace. If not, we would sure go down that elevator from the penthouse to rock-bottom, and down-under in the underground parking lot where all parking spaces would be occupied.
How would we have been in the lucky situation of having Merck among our asset holdings (out of all the variety of healthy healthcare stocks out there?) ranging from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Abbott, Roche, Bayer … this investment research would be enough to send us reaching out for our favorite pain-killer medication, whether it be Aspirin, Tylenol or Advil. That brings investors to the other side of the coin, the research and development that is done on an ongoing basis by pharmaceutical companies. These are they who bring us generic meds, brand names, vaccines and cures for cancer, respiratory ailments and that pesky eczema which does not seem to go away. This would bring us to the conclusion that our investment in the healthcare sector is our intermediary support of a sector that brings us a direct benefit. This might then support the hypothesis that investment in healthcare is a necessity, and not a speculative venture.
Going back to Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb. On studying the above chart, if we had bought either stock a month ago, we might have concluded … till yesterday (Thursday August 4th, 2016) that $BMY was a marginally better investment in terms of share value, as the two were running practically neck-to-neck. Whoa! Look what happened today. One lost 16%. And the other gained 10.5%. This might drive us to drink (if that is our form of solace) … or reach for the pill that will help drive away our insomnia. Or else, we might take it all in a day’s work, and urge $BMY researchers to go at it again, and get the cure to end all cures.
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