Popular Posts: 4 Pharmaceutical Stocks to Buy Now8 Oil and Gas Stocks to Buy Now5 Pharmaceutical Stocks to Buy Now Recent Posts: 6 Biotechnology Stocks to Buy Now 4 Commercial Services Stocks to Buy Now 33 Commercial Banking Stocks to Buy Now View All Posts The grades of six biotechnology stocks are better this week, according to the Portfolio Grader database. Every one of these stocks has an “A” (“strong buy”) or “B” overall (“buy”) rating.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. () is making progress this week as its rating of C (“hold”) from last week increases to a B (“buy”) rating this week. Inovio Pharmaceuticals engages in the discovery and development of synthetic vaccines and immune therapies focusing on cancers and infectious diseases. In Portfolio Grader’s specific subcategory of Sales Growth, INO also gets an A. .
This week, KYTHERA Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. () pushes up from a C to a B rating. KYTHERA Biopharmaceuticals focuses on the discovery, development, and commercialization of prescription products for the aesthetic medicine market. .
This week, Alkermes Plc () is showing good progress as the company’s rating jumps from a B (“buy”) last week to an A (“strong buy”). Alkermes is a fully integrated biotechnology company committed to developing medicines that will improve patients’ lives. Shares of ALKS have increased 15.7% over the past month, better than the 1.3% decrease the Nasdaq has seen over the same period of time. .
Gilead Sciences, Inc. () gets a higher grade this week, advancing from a B last week to an A. Gilead is a research-based biopharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, and commercializes therapeutics to advance the care of patients suffering from life-threatening diseases. Wall Street has pushed the stock higher by 5.9% over the past month. .
PDL BioPharma, Inc. () shows solid improvement this week. The company’s rating rises from a C to a B. PDL BioPharma engages in intellectual property asset management and patent portfolio and related assets investment activities. Investors have pushed the stock price up 6.6% over the past month. .
Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. () is seeing ratings go up from a B last week to an A this week. Isis Pharmaceuticals discovers and develops novel human therapeutic compounds. Wall Street seems to agree with the upgrade and has propelled the stock up 17.2% over the past month. .
Louis Navellier’s proprietary Portfolio Grader stock ranking system assesses roughly 5,000 companies every week based on a number of fundamental and quantitative measures. Stocks are given a letter grade based on their results — with A being “strong buy,” and F being “strong sell.” Explore the tool here.
AP/Jim Mone Is Bitcoin a slam-dunk as the currency of the future? The Sacramento Kings seem to think so. The NBA team recently became the first pro sports franchise to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. Basketball fans will be able not only to purchase tickets and merchandise online with the digital cryptocurrency, but also to use it to buy souvenirs at the arena come game time. The team is the latest in a growing number of commercial entities finding a slot in their virtual cash registers for Bitcoin. Little by little, momentum is building for a widespread acceptance of the upstart currency. Overstocking The Kings' drive towards the Bitcoin basket comes a week after the big online retailer Overstock.com (OSTK) announced it would start accepting payments in the currency. The move was an instant hit -- the first day the company had the nifty Bitcoin button as an option in its shopping cart, its customers used it to make more than 800 transactions for total sales of around $130,000. Overstock.com was by no means the first online marketplace to accept the currency. Numerous web retailers have been doing so for some time. It's a natural fit, %VIRTUAL-article-sponsoredlinks in a way, since Bitcoin exists solely in the digital realm. Customers booking flights on discount travel operator CheapAir.com, for example, can use Bitcoin to buy their tickets, as can love seekers on dating site OkCupid, owned by IAC/InteractiveCorp (IACI). These digital players are going to have plenty of company. Earlier this month, online games purveyor Zynga (ZNGA) started to dip its toes in the water, announcing that it was testing Bitcoin payments for some of its titles in conjunction with specialist transaction facilitator BitPay. But if Overstock.com didn't get there first, it's still the largest and most prominent e-retailer to take the Bitcoin plunge thus far. This is a big win for the currency and its advocates, and Overstock.com will surely be followed by more well-known companies both online and off. In Bitcoin We Trust? Acceptance of the currency does seem to be gaining momentum, but it's still considered too speculative an investment for many. This is partially because of its immaturity as an asset (Bitcoin came to life only in 2009), and partially because it's still tarnished by its association with illicit activity. The U.S. government's take-down of the online illegal substances marketplace Silk Road last year led to the recent seizure of nearly 30,000 Bitcoins, which at current market prices have a value somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million. Institutional resistance is also a factor. Compounding the bad PR of the Silk Road mess, and coming around the same time, China's central bank banned the nation's financial institutions from accepting Bitcoin in their transactions. That move was not only discouraging, it also put the brakes on a wild global speculative run in Bitcoin that had been powered to a significant degree by Chinese buyers. That rally saw the U.S. dollar exchange rate of the currency zoom from $100 apiece at the end of last July to over $1,200 barely four months later. The exchange rate has since come down, but it's still fat; it's in the mid-$800s as of this writing. But most important of all, Bitcoin so far isn't being taken seriously enough by major financial players and noted economists. Some of the currency's strongest selling points are glaring weaknesses from their perspective -- its decentralized nature, and the fact that it is a finite currency (only 21 million will ever be "minted"). These elements theoretically free it from potentially negative political influences and shield it from short-term economic shifts but, crucially, also rob it of flexibility. After all, one of the key reasons central banks exist is to manage a nation's money supply. When done correctly, this allows countries to more or less match the amount of money in circulation with the goods and services available in an economy, keeping inflation in check and deflation at bay. There's basically no possibility of that sort of management with Bitcoin. A Commercial Tide Those concerns and drawbacks aside, it's obvious that the Bitcoin wave will continue to rise. The more small and medium fish like Overstock.com and the Kings enter the water, the higher the chance that the behemoths will jump in to join them. It'll really take off when and if giants such as Amazon.com (AMZN) and Walmart Stores (WMT) add the currency's button to their checkout pages. At the moment, many central banks and financial pundits are hostile to Bitcoin. But its popularity is coming from the ground up with consumers -- and they want to use it to buy things like blue jeans and basketball tickets. Bitcoin will almost certainly win wider acceptance in the commercial world. The real question is how much momentum it's got, and how far it can ride as a viable, useful currency.