OFFICIAL STOCK MARKET AND ECONOMY THREAD VOL. A NEW CHAPTER

always do DD and trust no one. whatever someone says is just a starting point for your own personal journey.
they probably have something in their TOS that prevents them from being liable. it is dirty that they did that. but Wall Street is a dirty game to begin with. this will hurt their IPO tho. CashApp should get more attention from this, Jack needs to add options trading and charting to the app.

Btw now that the bs is done, please read Ark's big ideas for 2021

this is fantastic info, im going to synthesize when im done reading and think about which stocks fit each theme.
Thanks for the link! I read a TL;DR from someone else. Going to delve into this this weekend.
 
Come on, I showed y’all the put I bought on this :lol:. Everyone saw the crash coming, but to say retail wasn’t a major part in this when they basically shut down retail investors from trading the stock is crazy to me.
They got the credit and the blame. Retail investors make up such a smaller %. They were the front, the shill, the fall guy.
 
JRS was like a security guard looking out for everyone on a Black Friday morning :lol:

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Motley Fool pumps MRNA
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Buy Moderna
Tom King January 28, 2021 Recommendation , Buy Recommendations
CURRENT PRICE: MRNA $ 164.11 $ 8.38 (5.4%) Price as of January 28, 12:08 p.m. ET
MODERNA IN 1 MINUTE
WHAT IT DOES
Moderna is a biopharmaceutical company developing therapeutics and vaccines based on messenger RNA for the treatment of infectious diseases, immuno-oncology, rare diseases, and cardiovascular diseases.
WHY BUY
  • Moderna has created one of only two authorized vaccines for the SARS-CoV-2 virus — a novel mRNA vaccine.
  • As a pioneer in mRNA therapeutics, the company is working on a broad pipeline that goes far beyond vaccines.
  • Even if revenue from the current vaccines drops significantly in the next few years, it is giving the company more cash with which to pursue a broad pipeline.
BUYER'S GUIDE
  • Industry: Biotechnology
  • Size: Large Cap
  • Regions: U.S., Europe
  • Jan. 27 Price: $155.73
  • Allocation: Many Fools choose to start with a small amount — 2% of their portfolio's overall value, for instance — and add a little at a time. You can also explore different models of portfolio allocations with our Allocator Tool.
KEY DATA
  • Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
  • Website: Moderna investor relations
  • Market Cap: $58.2 billion
  • Cash/Debt: $3.3 billion / $212 million
  • Revenue (2018/'19/TTM): $135.1 million / $60.2 million / $246.7 million
  • Earnings (2018/'19/TTM): ($384.7 million) / ($514.0 million) / ($597.9 million)
Add MRNA to Your Favorites
Financial data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Data as of Jan. 27, 2021.
The pandemic has turned a lot of things on their heads, but this month's recommendation may be one of the more enduring examples of adversity leading to creative transformation. Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) has become something of a household name over the past several months — which is pretty unusual for a biotech that went public only in December 2018. But we think today's headlines are overshadowing the real promise behind the company's achievements.
Good News Now...
There's a good chance you already know that Moderna has made one of the only two (as of this writing) authorized COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. You may even know that it is an entirely new kind of vaccine based on messenger RNA. While we'd normally spend a fair amount of space trying to shed some light on what that means, one small silver lining of the past year is that there is an abundance of available online explanations about mRNA vaccines and how they work.
The bottom line is that you can think of mRNA as a "digital" rather than an "analog" template for vaccines. Scientists find the protein they want to create, then identify an mRNA sequence that encodes that protein. That's something Moderna did within two days of the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2 (the official name of the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19 illness) first being shared online on Jan. 11, 2020. By Feb. 24, the company had used that sequence to manufacture the targeted string of synthetic mRNA and encapsulate it for use in the body. This was the first batch of vaccine meant for testing, but it is no different than the vaccine now being produced for distribution. Moderna had created a safe, highly effective vaccine against a previously unknown virus in just six weeks.
Management recently revealed that advance purchase agreements for its vaccine total $11.7 billion for fiscal 2021, not counting options to expand delivery. Given the company's current operations, that's going to generate a lot of profits. Moderna is probably trading at a forward P/E ratio under 10, making it look like quite a bargain, at least in the very near term.
But with that said, if this were just about the COVID vaccine, we'd be looking elsewhere.
Why? Because as we look further into the future, the prospects for this particular vaccine get much hazier. Even if we end up getting yearly vaccinations for the foreseeable future (which, unfortunately, looks at least reasonably likely), Moderna will be facing more competition and more cost pressure. Longer-term, COVID vaccination may end up looking a lot like the influenza vaccine market.
That's certainly a considerable opportunity — flu vaccine sales were around $2.6 billion in the U.S. in 2019 and are expected to keep growing. But ongoing COVID vaccine revenue will be shared among multiple players and will come at significantly lower margins, making it hard to justify Moderna's $56 billion market cap.
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...Better News Later
But here's the thing: Moderna's original aspirations didn't involve vaccines. Its technology, at core, is about getting the body to churn out any target protein you care to program.
The idea of producing therapeutic proteins has driven much of the biotech industry for decades. Insulin, for example, is a secreted protein that, with the right mRNA, a person with Type 1 diabetes could generate themselves. The entire global industry for monoclonal antibodies — representing around $150 billion in sales in 2019 — is based on manufacturing proteins and then giving them to people. Theoretically, the right mRNA sequences could turn your own cells into a biofactory.
To be clear, these and other applications are just possibilities — not current reality — and we certainly don't want to make this sound easier than it is. As a concept, mRNA drugs have excited scientists for decades. But there have been fundamental challenges. For one thing, mRNA isn't very stable, so Moderna had to engineer a synthetic form that lasts longer in the body but is still recognized by intracellular machinery as the real deal. Secondly, if you're injected with mRNA, your body will treat it like a virus and try to wipe it out before it ever gets into cells. Thus, delivery technology like lipid encapsulation has been vital to getting it in cells where it can work.
The current COVID vaccine is an amazing proof of concept, but the challenges aren't over. Moderna has been famously closed-lipped about its science and unwilling to share much data. There is reasonable speculation that the company has focused on vaccines — not traditionally thought of as a very profitable business — because patients need to be dosed only once or twice at a relatively low level. That gets around a traditional problem of mRNA drugs: toxicity related to the delivery mechanism. It's the reason big companies like Novartis (NYSE: NVS), Merck (NYSE: MRK), and Roche (OTC: RHHBY) got out of the field.
Yet right now, that looks more like an opportunity than an obstacle. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY), for instance, has shown RNAi call be delivered safely in repeated doses. That's not the same as mRNA, but the delivery vehicles are similar.
Indeed, Moderna's pipeline shows surprising breadth. For example, the company hopes to use mRNA to help people rebuild heart muscle after a heart attack. The concept is straightforward — just activate production of a protein, called VEGF-A, on the surface of heart tissue. But most means of doing this have proven unworkable. Making VEGF-A in a vat and injecting it into heart muscle at required doses causes too much circulating protein, leading to serious side effects. Using a gene therapy approach means the body churns out heart muscle indefinitely, which does far more harm than good. Using mRNA opens new venues of treatment. This particular program, called AZD8601, is in phase 2 development with AstraZeneca (NASDAQ: AZN) under a 50-50 partnership.
And that's just one example. The company has over 25 programs in development, and only about half are vaccines. Others include cancer treatments and drugs to produce intracellular proteins for rare diseases, among others.
Risks and When We'd Sell
Beyond the company needing to prove its technology outside of vaccines, there's the matter of competition. As many people are aware, Moderna isn't the only game in town. It was actually beaten by a couple of weeks in getting emergency authorization for an mRNA vaccine. Pfizer(NYSE: PFE) and German mRNA company BioNTech (NASDAQ: BNTX) claimed the prize. Nor is it clear exactly how much control they have over mRNA intellectual property. About half of all patents on mRNA are owned by four companies — Moderna, BioNTech, CureVac(NASDAQ: CVAC), and GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK). But the rest are spread out across dozens of companies, and we shouldn't assume that all the fruits of a great technology will accrue to Moderna alone.
Moreover, the company's future isn't guaranteed even for vaccines. By the time you read this, Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) will likely have results for its own COVID vaccine. This isn't an mRNA vaccine, but rather it uses another novel approach: an adenovirus vaccine. While it lacks some of the advantage of mRNA, it has others of its own — including being hardier, simpler to store, and very cheap to produce. It could be that the market ultimately turns toward these rather than mRNA vaccines.
The Foolish Bottom Line
Moderna is a true Rule Breaker — a company that deliberately stayed in stealth mode for as long as possible, then raised an amazing $2.7 billion in venture capital on the strength of what was, at the time, a largely unproven concept. The past year has put the company in a position it would have otherwise taken years to reach. The stock is more expensive, yes, but the company has cash, cache, and a large pipeline it can move forward aggressively. If mRNA continues to live up to its promise, Moderna will be able to address disease in an entirely new way, making today's valuation look like a bargain.
Karl Thiel contributed to this report.
Foolish survey
DAVID CALLED IT: Do you agree that Moderna will beat the market over the next 3-5 years? (After voting, buy shares to invest right away or add MRNA to your Favorites for alerts later.)
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Tom King owns shares of BioNTech SE and Moderna INC. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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MRNA S&P 500 Index

1W1M3M6MYTD1Y5Y10YMAX
PriceVs S&P
From the Company Page
Last updated January 28, 12:08 p.m. ET
Current Price$164.11
Today's Change$8.38 (5.4%)
Exchange / SymbolNASDAQ: MRNA
Market Cap$62B
Beta1.83
Earnings Per Share (Trailing 12 Months)-$1.63

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