We recently published a list of 10 Firms End Friday Strong; 3 Reach All-Time Highs. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Merck & Co. Inc. (NYSE:MRK) stands against other firms that end Friday strong.
Wall Street’s main indices finished the trading week in the negative territory as investor sentiment was weighed down by economic uncertainties brought about by the ongoing trade tensions globally.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell the heaviest, by 2.70 percent, followed by the S&P 500, by 1.97 percent, and the Dow Jones, by 1.69 percent.
Despite the broader market downturn, 10 individual stocks showed a strong performance during the trading session, with three companies particularly notable for hitting new all-time highs.
In this article, we listed Friday’s top performers and detailed the reasons behind their gains.
To come up with the list, we considered only the stocks with a $2-billion market capitalization and $5 million in trading volume.
A close-up of a person’s hand holding a bottle of pharmaceuticals.
Shares of Merck & Co. rallied by 1.86 percent on Friday to end at $89.23 apiece following news that it would officially launch in October this year a subcutaneously injectable version of its blockbuster cancer treatment, Keytruda.
According to the company, it targets the approval of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment on September 23 ahead of its October 1 official launch target. The peak adoption rate is expected to hit two years later.
By injecting Keytruda under the skin rather than intravenous delivery, the time it takes for patients to receive the medicine would significantly reduce.
“We’ll be shipping product immediately following approval, in the first week or two following approval is the expectation, and we’ll have more than enough supply to meet the market demand,” said Joanne Monahan, MRK senior vice president in oncology division.
“We expect the greatest uptake, at least initially, in patients who take monotherapy, oral combinations, and those who have early-stage cancers,” she added.
Overall, MRK ranks 10th on our list of firms that end Friday strong. While we acknowledge the potential of MRK as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as MRK but trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
