the title arose 26.49% since the time I posted, let's see tomorrow..
In 1999, when the Celera Genomics company announced they had sequenced the first human genome before the International Consortium, the value of their actions raised quickly from ~7$ to ~200$ each, to slowly return to the original values after a few years.
So, investing on a biotek company is in general a lot risky and you have to look for a company that is developing something that will interest the media, e.g. a new drug or a new important technology.
On which biotek/bioinfo company would you invest if you had enough money? I don't think there are many bioinformatics companies indexed on the market yet, but maybe some of those working in the 'Sequence your personal genome' business are there. The situation is different for some biotek companies, there are more in the market and some of them are developing new interesting technologies.
Have you ever tried to invest money on a biotek company? How much would you recommend? By chance, can anyone here borrow me some spare millions of dollars to invest and become rich? :-)
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An interesting case is the one of a company called Dendreon which is testing a vaccine against prostate cancer. This article on Nature/News (I hope it is accessible to everybody) explains that on the next May 1st the FDA will judge whether the vaccine can be used on humans or not. The same article has a nice chart explaining how the value of this company has changed over the years.
It will be interesting to see what will happen after the FDA's decision.. will its price grow if the drug is approved?
This is a nice blog to have informations on the Merck Company:
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Giovanni, this should be a community wiki, as it is a broad question without possibility of being solved by one of the awnsers. It should also be tagged 'subjective'. As a matter of personal opinion, the 'hope' and 'becoming-rich-eventually' tags may be better removed.
ok, I have done it.