Cramer’s Play on Diabetes

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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On tonight’s MAD MONEY on CNBC, Jim Cramer said the action of the Defensive Stocks makes you need to watch the drug stocks in case the Fed doesn’t actually cut rates like they should.  Cramer has some picks in the sector from overseas, because these could be immune from the same pressures that domestics could be under in a democratic environment. 

Novo Nordisk (NVO-NYSE) out of Denmark is the best play he has in the foreign drug stocks because they have 50% of the global diabetes market in its insulin treatments.  It outsells Pfizer (PFE) and Sanofi Aventus (SNY) in these analog insulins.  Its patents are good through 2011, longer than most.  It already sells its old fashion human insulin play at low prices so it is insulated against pressure there from generics.  It also fell after failing a Phase III trial in a non-diabetes treatment drug for an expanded use that wasn’t really important to Cramer.  He likes it purely from the diabetic perspective. 

If this stock is familiar sounding from us, it is because this one of our "15 Second Line Defensive Stocks" we ran as a stock to hide out in when the market was crummy.  Do you think diabetics will stop taking insulin if the economy softens or if they are losing too much money in their tech stocks? We don’t think so either.

Jon C. Ogg
March 21, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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