Ivanka Trump said she’d give up management of her businesses.
http://bit.ly/2lm1szY
Trump Presidency
Investor. Any references to securities are not recommendations or solicitations to buy or sell anything. I may have positions in securities mentioned.
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Trump Presidency conflicts of interest?
Ivanka Trump said she’d give up management of her businesses.
http://bit.ly/2lm1szY
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
First Carbon-Capture Coal Plant in U.S. is Now Fully Operational
Yale Environment 360: First Carbon-Capture Coal Plant in U.S. is Now Fully Operational http://bit.ly/2jgKoY9
Monday, February 6, 2017
Persistence is a game changer
"#Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up."
— Elon Musk
Never give up on a dream just because o9f the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.
Persistence can change failure into extraordinary achievement. — Matt Biondi
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Wayne Gretzky
"He conquers who endures." — Perseus
Friday, January 20, 2017
George Soros calls Trump a 'would-be dictator'
George Soros calls Trump a 'would-be dictator' who 'is going to fail'
CNBC.com
George Soros thinks President-elect Donald Trump will fail — and that will be just fine with the billionaire investor and supporter of progressive causes.
"I personally am convinced that he is going to fail," Soros told Bloomberg during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Failure will come "not because of people like me who would like him to fail, but because his ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory and the contradictions are already embodied by his advisors."
Soros spoke less than 24 hours before Trump, himself a billionaire businessman and political agitator, takes the oath of office as the 45th president. Trump's Cabinet picks have been undergoing a sometimes-grueling round of confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, though it's not clear if any will be rejected.
]
During the 2016 campaign, Soros donated close to $20 million to various causes, including more than $10.5 million to Trump's opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
He has been unrelenting in his criticism of Trump, and unloaded on him again during the Davos interview.
"I personally am convinced that he is going to fail," Soros told Bloomberg during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Failure will come "not because of people like me who would like him to fail, but because his ideas that guide him are inherently self-contradictory and the contradictions are already embodied by his advisors."
Soros spoke less than 24 hours before Trump, himself a billionaire businessman and political agitator, takes the oath of office as the 45th president. Trump's Cabinet picks have been undergoing a sometimes-grueling round of confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill, though it's not clear if any will be rejected.
]
During the 2016 campaign, Soros donated close to $20 million to various causes, including more than $10.5 million to Trump's opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
He has been unrelenting in his criticism of Trump, and unloaded on him again during the Davos interview.
"It is impossible to predict exactly how Trump is going to act, because he hasn't actually thought it through."
"I have described him as an impostor and a
con man and a would-be dictator," Soros said. "But he's only a would-be
dictator because I'm confident that the Constitution and the
institutions of the United States are strong enough. ... He would be a
dictator if he could get away with it, but he won't be able to."
Trump's unexpected win in November hurt Soros beyond politics and ideology — he is believed to have lost more than $1 billion in trades he made that would have benefited if the market went down. Instead, a monthlong rally after the election cost Soros big.
However, he said Thursday he still believes the market is headed lower.
"Uncertainty is the enemy of long-term investment," Soros said. "I don't think the markets are going to do very well. Right now they are still celebrating. But when reality comes in," his bets against the market "will prevail."
Soros said Trump will act as a divisive figure because "anyone who disagrees with him is not really part of the people."
"It is impossible to predict exactly how Trump is going to act, because he hasn't actually thought it through," Soros said. "He didn't expect to win. He was surprised. He was engaged in building his brand and improving it by his success in attracting crowds. It was really only when he got elected that he started to seriously think whatever he is going to do."
Correction: Trump's Cabinet picks have not been confirmed yet. An earlier version mischaracterized their status.
Trump's unexpected win in November hurt Soros beyond politics and ideology — he is believed to have lost more than $1 billion in trades he made that would have benefited if the market went down. Instead, a monthlong rally after the election cost Soros big.
However, he said Thursday he still believes the market is headed lower.
"Uncertainty is the enemy of long-term investment," Soros said. "I don't think the markets are going to do very well. Right now they are still celebrating. But when reality comes in," his bets against the market "will prevail."
Soros said Trump will act as a divisive figure because "anyone who disagrees with him is not really part of the people."
"It is impossible to predict exactly how Trump is going to act, because he hasn't actually thought it through," Soros said. "He didn't expect to win. He was surprised. He was engaged in building his brand and improving it by his success in attracting crowds. It was really only when he got elected that he started to seriously think whatever he is going to do."
Correction: Trump's Cabinet picks have not been confirmed yet. An earlier version mischaracterized their status.
Jeff CoxFinance Editor
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Build a new habit
Healthy Lifestyle:
The best way to build a habit is consistency, so think "same place, same time" and try to stick with it.Be flexible, sometimes you may have to change it up. Return to your schedule when convenient.
Sick people are big business:
Sick people are big business:
Five things for pharma marketers to know
1. Biogen will pay Forward Pharma about $1.25 billion for the patents to several multiple-sclerosis drugs, including Tecfidera. Tecfidera brought in about $1 billion in sales for Biogen in the third quarter of 2016. (Reuters)
2. The Supreme Court will hear an appeal by Novartis over a decision that prevented the drugmaker from selling Zarxio, the first biosimilar version of Amgen's Neupogen, for six months after approval. Novartis is arguing that the delay, prompted by Amgen's patent claims, improperly gave Amgen six additional months of exclusivity. (Reuters)
3. Merck KGaA inked a deal with Palantir Technologies to analyze its data in a bid to make its drug-delivery process more efficient. Palantir gets a cut of Merck's resulting profits. (Bloomberg)
4. A news investigation found that drugmakers that develop drugs for orphan diseases have received millions of dollars in government incentives for therapies that eventually were approved for mass market indications. (Kaiser Health News)
5. The implementation of Pennsylvania's prescription drug monitoring program led to a drop in the number of prescriptions written for painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin. (WaPo)
Blockbuster Drugs
'Blockbuster Drug' An extremely popular drug that generates annual sales of at least $1 billion for the company that creates it. Examples of blockbuster drugs include Vioxx, Lipitor and Zoloft.
There
can be a heavy cost to being prescribed 'popular' drugs like Vioxx...
my doctor prescribed it to me but a quick Google search alerted me to
problems with the drug. It was given to people for about 9 months after
the toxicity was well known.
Initially hailed as a superior non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), Vioxx spent only a few years on the market before it was the focus of thousands of consumer lawsuits. Within five years of being approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of arthritis and menstrual pain, the painkiller was linked to thousands of heart attacks, strokes and deaths. At the same time, the drug’s manufacturer, Merck, vehemently denied any problems.
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
The billion-dollar pharma startup that Silicon Valley has totally missed
May 5, 2016 ... Ali Tehrani ought to be exhausted, considering what his company, Zymeworks
Inc., has accomplished in the past few months. Instead, he is enveloped in a
bubble of calm rationality, as if he’s thought it all through in
advance. “You have to make calculated decisions, but you have to be on
the aggressive side,” he muses about life in the biotechnology industry.
“You have to take chances.”
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/search/?q=ali+tehrani
***********************************************************************
The billion-dollar #pharma #startup that #SiliconValley has totally missed http://tcrn.ch/2jjSP7M via @techcrunch
The billion-dollar pharma startup that Silicon Valley has totally missed
When it comes to millennials and healthcare companies,
recent history gives plenty of reason for pause. Elizabeth Holmes, the
founder and CEO of Theranos, has watched her star fall precipitously
over the last year, amid a continuing drumbeat of allegations that her
blood testing company never worked as advertised.
Meanwhile, Martin Shkreli, a young hedge fund manager turned pharmaceutical executive, was for a while the country’s most reviled businessperson,
after his relatively small company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, bought a
drug that treats toxoplasmosis and promptly raised its price from less
than $20 per tablet to $750.
Roivant, will one day be a giant holding company for dozens of independent biopharmaceutical companies — both by developing drugs as well as focusing squarely on reducing the time and cost of the drug development process.
It all sounds rather lofty. Then again, it’s hard to argue why Ramaswamy shouldn’t be one to reshape how drugs are brought to market.
A Cincinnati native who studied biology at Harvard then earned a law degree from Yale, it was when Ramaswamy began working as an analyst in 2007 at the hedge fund QVT Financial in New York that he first observed the problem that defines his work today.
He noticed that many big and small pharmaceutical firms abandon promising drugs for various reasons having nothing to do with their efficacy.
Sometimes, it’s a strategic decision to focus elsewhere; sometimes, it owes to a lack of resources.
Seeing an opportunity to complete the development of some of these abandoned late-stage drug candidates and get them to market quickly, Ramaswamy struck out on his own in 2014.
Having earned the trust of QVT was key.
The firm, along with Dexcel Pharma, an Israeli firm that reviewed Ramaswamy’s work at QVT, provided Ramaswamy’s new holding company with just less than $100 million in capital — a feat, given that he was just 28 years old at the time.
Yet what Ramaswamy has done with Roivant in the years since is pretty remarkable, too.
While Silicon Valley has obsessed over Theranos, Ramaswamy has acquired a dozen drugs, including an Alzheimer’s pill that’s now named intepirdine.
He also formed a company around that drug, Axovant Sciences, and took it public in 2015 — despite that the drug’s Phase 3 results won’t be out until this year.
It was the biggest biotech IPO ever in the U.S., raising $360 million. It has largely held up, too. Axovant’s shares, which opened at $15, currently trade around $13.25.
Roivant has also launched Enzyvant Sciences, a company focused on rare genetic pediatric conditions that Ramaswamy calls “ignored and underserved,” including a metabolic disorder called Farber disease and DiGeorge syndrome, a genetic disease that results in poor development of several body systems.
It has also teamed up with one of Japan’s oldest companies, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, to start Myovant Sciences, a standalone company that’s focused on women’s health issues.
The drug candidate around which the company is centered is called Relugolix, which aims to treat endometriosis and uterine fibroids.
Takeda is currently conducting two Phase 3 studies in women with uterine fibroids in Japan. In the meantime, Myovant last year orchestrated what was — again — the biggest biotech IPO of the year.
The Alzheimer’s pill that Axovant is currently researching was bought from GlaxoSmithKline as it was dialing down its neuroscience research. Roivant paid a mere $5 million in upfront payments, with the promise of significant upside if the drug works. (Specifically, Axovant will pay Glaxo $160 million in milestones and a 12.5 percent royalty on sales.)
Roivant has also now raised more than $1 billion from investors since its inception. Ramaswamy declines to break out from where that money has come, but he calls a recent, undisclosed amount of funding from hedge fund Viking Global Investors “one of the largest, if not the largest, private financing of a biotech company in history.”
Roivant is meanwhile counting on the power of equity to attract top talent, which seems to be working thus far. Among the 150 employees across Roivant’s organization is Lynn Seely, who is leading Myovant as its CEO. Seely is an endocrinologist with more than 20 years of drug development experience, including as chief medical officer of biotech firm Medivation, where she worked for 10 years ending in 2015. (Medivation sold last year to Pfizer for $14 billion.)
An even newer hire is Alvin Shih, who recently joined as the CEO of Enzyvant. Shih was previously head of R&D at the publicly traded biopharma company Retrophin (where Shkreli was once CEO). He was also the COO of a rare disease research unit at Pfizer.
The idea, explains Ramaswamy, is to create individual companies around each drug or small groupings of candidates that Roivant acquires, then install the scientists who developed the drugs and provide them with big rewards if the drugs prove useful. If the drugs don’t pan out, Roivant will find another place for the scientists — potentially at another company under its umbrella.
Whether the scheme will work longer term isn’t clear, but it’s easy to appreciate why people like Seely and Shih were drawn to Ramaswamy’s vision. At traditional, top-down pharmaceutical companies, scientists aren’t typically rewarded when a drug they’ve developed becomes a blockbuster, and failed drugs often translate into job cuts.
“It sounds vanilla, but I can’t overstate the importance of re-aligning R&D personnel,” says Ramaswamy of his decentralized approach. “A lot of what you see in conventional pharma R&D is, because [scientists’] jobs are on the line if their projects fail, in many instances, clinical studies aren’t designed to get the answer but instead not get the answer. There’s a kick-the-can mentality.” By addressing that incentive misalignment, he insists, “we’ve stacked the odds in our favor.”
Naturally, questions remain, including whether there’s been a biotech bubble in recent years.
When Axovant went public, a columnist at FierceBiotech warned that it should “scare the hell” out of investors, writing, “The fact that someone can make something of this size out of virtually nothing should be of concern to everyone in the industry. Magical thinking will take you just so far (remember the intoxicating dot-com days?).”
It’s young, yes, but Roivant doesn’t have a sure-fire winner on its hands, either. Though Ramaswamy argues that the “rationale [for Axovant’s Alzheimer’s drug] is uniquely strong relative to other therapies that have entered into Phase 3 trials,” he also concedes that he “can’t promise the clinical trials will work.”
Still he and his investors are willing to bet that at the pace the company is moving, some subset of the drug candidates it’s exploring will pay off — even if it’s by discovering new ways to apply the underlying science that it’s acquiring.
If it doesn’t, expect the Holmes and Shkreli comparisons to follow.
Not that Ramaswamy sounds terribly concerned about that happening. “The more general skepticism about another millennial that likes to claim they’re disrupting another industry — that doesn’t serve me well,” he says with a laugh. But it’s “irrelevant to our business model,” he continues. In fact, he says, “I’d encourage more young people to apply their talents beyond finance and consulting and to think about reshaping how medicines are brought to market and how the business is run. This is a bigger problem that talent has ignored for a very long time.”
Besides, as he’s quick to point out, while “young ambitious people are flocking to companies like Facebook and Google and Snapchat and Uber,” the trillion or so dollars up for grabs in the pharmaceutical industry “far exceeds the scale of the industries being tackled most by Silicon Valley startups.”
The billion-dollar #pharma #startup that #SiliconValley has totally missed http://tcrn.ch/2jjSP7M via @techcrunch
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Atul Gawande suggests new ways to do medicine
Published on Apr 16, 2012
http://www.ted.com
Our medical systems are broken. Doctors are capable of extraordinary
(and expensive) treatments, but they are losing their core focus:
actually treating people. Doctor and writer Atul Gawande suggests we
take a step back and look at new ways to do medicine -- with fewer
cowboys and more pit crews.Politics, Policy Uncertainties Likely to Sway Markets in 2017
Politics, Policy Uncertainties Likely to Sway Markets in 2017
January 9, 2017
Barbeau: We think headlines, rhetoric and speculation will continue to spark global mkt volatility in '17. Here’s why:
For
fans of surprise endings, especially in political contests, 2016 was a
banner year. Unexpected election outcomes swung global equity markets
both up and down and continue to influence the outlook for many sectors
and companies. And Coleen Barbeau, director of portfolio management,
Franklin Equity Group, says the volatility likely will continue into
2017. In fact, she believes this year may be even more unpredictable, as
additional elections are held and policy changes play out across the
globe. While these events may sway equity markets, Barbeau maintains
that stock fundamentals should—eventually—resume their place as the key
determinant of stock value.
Coleen Barbeau
Senior Vice President, Director of Portfolio Management
Portfolio Manager
Franklin Equity Group
After the UK Brexit vote and the US presidential election, international equity markets should be accustomed to the unexpected by now.
And as 2017 unfolds,
we believe uncertainty is likely to persist. Instead of trading on underlying corporate fundamentals, we think this uncertainty creates the potential for markets to trade on news headlines as well as on rhetoric and speculation about policy changes coming from a number of Western capitals.
We believe the potential for significant policy change in the United States is what has largely driven the surge in equities since the presidential election in November. Growth stocks have drastically underperformed value stocks, as investors favored financial and energy names while selling what had been strong performers in the information technology and health care sectors. Bank stocks, in particular, have moved in dramatic fashion—rerating not on a near-term change in profit outlook, but simply on optimism about possible industry deregulation and a more rapid pace of interest rate increases.
Also, hopes for greater fiscal spending in the United States, along with the subsequent rise in bond yields, have led to a move into stocks that could benefit from faster growth and greater inflation—the so-called “reflation trade.”
Infrastructure and defense-related names—especially those sporting low valuations as measured by price-to-earnings ratios—surged at the expense of what we view as higher-quality stocks that generally offer more sustainable earnings growth, cash flows and dividend streams.
While these moves may mark the dawn of a new period for global equity markets, in our view, not much has changed fundamentally. According to the International Monetary Fund, the pace of global economic growth is likely to remain steady in 2017, with global gross domestic product growing a projected 3.4% after a 3.1% expansion in 2016.1
Underpinning these forecasts is relatively robust growth in emerging markets and more modest expansion in developed economies, including somewhat faster growth in the United States, a slowdown in Europe and the United Kingdom and continued sluggishness in Japan.
Although the US Federal Reserve may continue to raise interest rates modestly over the course of 2017, the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of Japan are likely to continue asset purchases as they look to support growth and bolster inflation in their respective economies.
We anticipate that this liquidity should continue to buoy international equity markets, even as the ECB begins to taper bond purchases in April 2017. Additionally, a stronger US dollar is likely to put a cap on US equity markets, after the recent move higher has left them trading at the top of their historic valuation range.
With many US stocks potentially at their peaks, we see greater opportunities to seek best-in-class, non-US companies that are positioned to take advantage of growth opportunities around the world.
Moreover, unlike US stocks, many of these companies have traded sideways over the past few years, and their valuations look more compelling to us.
For instance, our bottom-up research has led us to individual opportunities more recently in the United Kingdom and Japan.
We are focused on companies which garner most of their revenues abroad, as they leverage their robust business models to capture growth opportunities in faster-growing regions like the United States or emerging markets.
Politics remain the wildcard. What a combination of lower taxes, looser regulation and potentially greater protectionist policies in the United States may mean for the economy and global trade remains to be seen.
Increased protectionism, in particular, could upend supply chains and make doing business globally more challenging. The populist rhetoric might also increase across Europe in 2017 as French, German and Dutch voters head to the polls.
Although political rhetoric, a changing regulatory regime and potentially more protectionist policies may influence how markets trade from day-to-day in 2017, we believe fundamentals will ultimately matter. As markets get more clarity on the emerging policy backdrop, we believe companies with strong growth potential that the market has overlooked will likely fare well over the longer term.
Get more perspectives from Franklin Templeton Investments delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to the Beyond Bulls & Bears blog.
For timely investing tidbits, follow us on Twitter @FTI_Global and on LinkedIn.
______________________________
1. Source: International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, October 2016. There is no assurance that any estimate, forecast or projection will be realized.
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