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Monday, December 17, 2007

Pfizer shows mettle, to launch 240 drugs

The world's largest pharmaceutical company to replicate Lipitor's success

While Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, is being criticised for its inability to come up with blockbuster drugs, its global research and development head said the company was working on one of its largest ever assemblage of drugs.

“Pfizer is developing about 240 potential drugs, including those in the pre-clinical stage, and new indications for existing drugs,” said John L Mattina, president of Pfizer Global Research and Development and senior vice-president, Pfizer Inc.

“This is one of the largest ever drug pipelines in the history of Pfizer,” he said on the sidelines of a function to inaugurate the R&D complex of Bilcare, a pharmaceutical packaging company, in Pune, yesterday.

“It may not be possible to come up with a $13 billion drug like Lipitor (world’s largest ever selling drug, for cholesterol reduction). But we have exciting new drugs like the smoking cessation drug Chantix, and Lyrica indicated for multiple disease cure,” he added.

Pfizer had given information about 100 drugs under various stages of development across 11 therapeutic categories, including 85 new molecular entities and 14 additional indications, according to the drug pipeline update as of July 2007.

Usually, big pharmaceutical companies disclose details only on the drugs that are in to the clinical trial stage. Pfizer has 38 programmes in the first phase of clinical trials, 47 in phase II and 11 drugs in the phase III advanced clinical trial stages. The company has discontinued about 13 programmes in the recent period.

A few months ago, Pfizer had to discontinue an advanced non-small cell lung cancer drug in the final stages of clinical trials and withdrew Exubera, a much-anticipated inhaled powder insulin after 11 years of development and one full year of sales which attracted poor revenues.

In December 2006, Pfizer dumped torcetrapib, a high profile promising cholesterol drug, during the clinical trial stage. Pfizer’s hopes were pinned on this drug to replace Lipitor, which will face generic competition as early as 2010, mainly from Ranbaxy. Due to the expiring patents, Pfizer has projected loses in excess of $14 billion by 2012.

Pfizer spends more than $7 billion a year ($ 7.6 billion in 2006) in R&D, and a significant portion of this investment will go to countries like India, China and Singapore in the years ahead. Pfizer’s future strategy would be to increasingly look at collaborative research and alliances to contain drug development costs, said Mattina.

“India will be one of our key focus areas in the future, and we are already talking to Indian companies. Currently, we conduct clinical trials of about 44 compounds in India, involving 143 clinical trial sites with an enrollment of more than 1,800 patients.”

He said it was the quality of services rather than the cost savings that attracted Pfizer to India. However, India needs to strengthen its intellectual property rules to gain more confidence of companies like Pfizer.

“India has the potential to create an explosion in the field of pharmaceutical services, similar to what it did in the field of IT,” he said.

Source - Business Standard

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Understanding Short Term Trading

Before I begin, this blog is not for intraday traders. My definition of short term implies duration of around 2 to 3 months.

Short Term stock picking is no rocket science, but rather a visual interpretation of technical charts. A basic moving average on a time frame chart will show the direction of the securities movement.

Moving averages is a mathematical results calculated by averaging a number of past data points. Moving averages (MA) in it's basic form is calculated by taking the arithmetic mean of a given set of values on a rolling window of timeframe. Once the value of MA has been calculated, they are plotted onto a chart and then connected to create a moving average line. Typical moving averages used for short term trading are 50 MA and 100 MA.

Types of Moving Averages

1) Simple Moving Average (SMA)

SMA is calculated by taking the arithmetic mean of a given set of values on a rolling window of timeframe. The usefulness of the SMA is limited because each point in the data series is weighted the same, regardless of where it occurs in the sequence. Critics argue that the most recent data is more significant than the older data and should have a greater influence on the final result.

2) Exponential Moving Average (EMA)

EMA overcomes the limits of SMA, where more weight is given to the recent prices in an attempt to make it more responsive to new information. When calculating the first point of the EMA, we may notice that there is no value available to use as the previous EMA. This small problem can be solved by starting the calculation with a simple moving average and continuing on with calculating the EMA.

The primary functions of a moving average is to identify trends and reversals, measure the strength of an asset's momentum and determine potential areas where an asset will find support or resistance. Moving averages are lagging indicator, which means they do not predict new trend, but confirm trends once they have been established.

A stock is deemed to be in an uptrend when the price is above a moving average and the average is sloping upward. Conversely, a trader will use a price below a downward sloping average to confirm a downtrend. Many traders will only consider holding a long position in an asset when the price is trading above a moving average.

In general, short-term momentum can be gauged by looking at moving averages that focus on time periods of 50 days or less. Looking at moving averages that are created with a period of 50 to 100 days is generally regarded as a good measure of medium-term momentum. Finally, any moving average that uses 100 days or more in the calculation can be used as a measure of long-term momentum.

Support, resistence and stoploss can be infered by referring the closet MA below or above the market price. The other factor that is used in short term momentum is the trading volume. The moving averages along with the trading volume can provide a better insight to short term movement.

Markets are moved by their largest participants - I believe this is the single most important principle in short-term trading. Accordingly, I track the presence of large traders by determining how much volume is in the market and how that compares to average. Because volume correlates very highly with volatility, the market's relative volume helps you determine the amount of movement likely at any given time frame--and it helps you handicap the odds of trending vs. remaining slow and range bound.