BioCentury
ARTICLE | Finance

Ebb & Flow

June 14, 2004 7:00 AM UTC

Packed with paper profits from the run up in cancer stocks over the past year, investors chose to sell into the news coming out of the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in New Orleans last week. If investors had bought a group of 124 stocks in BioCentury's cancer universe on March 7, 2003 - the biotech group's bottom - they would have seen a paper profit of 131% going into ASCO week. Backing out the high-flying cancer names of the past year - OSI (OSIP), ImClone (IMCL) and Onyx (ONXX) - still put the group up 112% going into last week. By comparison, the BioCentury 100 was up 73% over that same period, while the NASDAQ Composite was up 52% (see "Money to Be Had").

Apart from ImClone (IMCL), the most keenly watched ASCO stocks fell on the week (see "ASCO Hangover," A17). It didn't help that there were no eye-popping, later-stage data events. ...