Party of one

A good yardstick for measuring a company's intrinsic value is its performance in a poor market. Surging markets tend to embellish company prospects and cloud investors' vision of company fundamentals. Often more telling is whether investors stick with investments while the market is falling.

One Top-Tier biotech that has weathered the storm in this downturn is Amgen. When the markets soured in mid-June, AMGN was in the upper 50s. AMGN closed Friday at $55.375. While the Top Tier big cap companies, minus AMGN, have shed14 percent of their collective market capitalization since June 14, AMGN has slipped only 6 percent (Biogenis the only other big cap stock that is up). Meanwhile, the smaller cap companies, as measured by The Carson Life Sciences Indexes, are off 24 percent...