Cramer: Already High, This Stock Trades Higher

Biogen is a leading maker of the most effective treatments for multiple sclerosis, a disease which afflicts some 350 thousand people in the United States and perhaps two million worldwide.

"Because multiple sclerosis is a chronic condition that comes and goes, the goal of every MS treatment is simply to prevent relapses, basically to keep the disease at bay," Cramer explained. "Therefore, there's a population of people who need to take these drugs for life. The total MS market should be worth nearly $18 billion by 2016."

Among Biogen's treatments is a drug called Avonex, said Cramer.

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"It's a mature drug. Nonetheless, it still generated $2.9 billion in sales last year," he explained. "Biogen also makes Tysabri, viewed as having more side effects but also seen as a more effective treatment for MS. And just this week, Biogen received approval for a brand new MS drug called Tecfidera.

But Biogen is about much more than MS treatments. Cramer is also impressed with drugs Biogen has developed to treat other health issues.

"Biogen gets a piece of Rituxan," Cramer explained, "That's Roche's drug for non-hodgkins lymphoma and rheumatoid arthritis. Their cut is equal to about 20% of the drug's sales, and that came to more than a billion dollars last year."

Also the company is working on a hemophilia franchise that could ultimately be worth $3 billion in sales by the second half of the decade.

On top of that Cramer said they have promising new drugs still in earlier stages of development.

"Biogen has an antibody based therapy for MS that's in phase 2 development and they're partnered with ISIS on a spinal muscular atrophy drug that generated positive data just last week, but it's still only in phase one trials."

All told, Cramer likes what he sees.

"Given the strength of the company's MS franchise and their pipeline, I think there's still plenty of upside here. Of course, I hate to chase and the stock is at its 52-week high now, so I say you wait for a pullback and then do some buying—that is, if we get one."

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BRIEF-ARCA Biopharma files to make common stock offering

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UPDATE 1-Second Twitter hoax in two days smacks another stock

(Adds details, comments from traders, recasts lead)

NEW YORK, Jan 30 (Reuters) - Sarepta Therapeutics Inc became the second company in as many days see its shares plunge as a result of a Twitter hoax on Wednesday after a user posed as an influential short-seller and alleged improprieties at the biopharmaceutical company.

Sarepta Therapeutics shares plummeted 9.9 percent in a matter of seconds after someone with the Twitter user name zcitreonresearc alleged improprieties at the company.

The drop mirrored a similar incident on Tuesday, when Audience Inc fell more than 25 percent following tweets that at a glance looked to be from Muddy Waters, another short-selling firm.

Just as Muddy Waters confirmed it did not send such a tweet about Audience, so too did Andrew Left, the California-based investor who runs Citron, said his company did not send a message about Sarepta.

The twin incidents targeted a pair of Nasdaq stocks that are not among the most actively traded on a daily basis, showing how certain company shares are vulnerable to information posted on social media networks, even if the information is misleading. Sarepta, on average, trades about 1.4 million shares a day; by contrast, average daily volume in chipmaker Intel Corp is about 52 million shares.

"You need a more volatile stock for this kind of manipulation - obviously if you were to try it on IBM it wouldn't work," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey. "It speaks to the structure of the market where shallow pools of liquidity can be easily pierced on bad news, even if the news is fake."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had no comment.

Twitter did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the messaging activity, but the zcitreonresearc account has been suspended. The Twitter account zMudd1waters, whose Twitter home page looks like Muddy Waters, was still active.

The tweet, with the user name "zcitreonresearc," alleged that drug trial results from the biopharmaceutical company had been tainted and doctored, according to screen shots of the posting captured by Twitter users. Sarepta was not immediately available for comments on the trading activity or the account, which has since been suspended.

Matt, a trader in San Diego who did not want to give his last name, but who goes by the handle zgiven2tweet on Twitter, said, "There's a real severity to that tweet. It's at the core of what the company is, is this one trial."

Sarepta shares recovered after the brief fall. It was trading up 1.4 percent to $27.56 on volume of about 3.5 million shares in afternoon trading. More than 700,000 shares traded in the one minute when the stock suffered its steep decline.

The company, which has a market cap of about $692 million, is volatile, moving more than 1 percent in six of the past seven sessions. It jumped 477 percent in 2012 alone.

Audience went public in May 2012 and has a market cap of $254 million as of Tuesday's closing price, rising about 15 percent so far this year. The stock's 50-day average daily volume is slightly more than 160,000 shares, but that rose to more than 800,000 on Tuesday.

"Not really an efficient market when fake twitter accounts can crash stocks," Tim McClure, equity trader at SMB Capital in New York, wrote on his Twitter page.

Shares of Audience were briefly halted on Tuesday, but Sarepta shares did not reach a threshold necessary to trigger a halt. A Nasdaq spokesperson was not available for comment.

(Additional reporting by Daniel Bases and Emily Flitter; Editing by David Gaffen and Leslie Gevirtz)

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Stock Chart Gorgeous as Mona Lisa: Top Analyst

The key with this pattern is the neckline -- the line that connects the highs from the two shoulders.

When a stock breaks out above that line, it tells someone like Collins that it's time for a big move higher.

Pfizer's neckline is at $25.80, and it crossed over that level just last week.

But that's not all.

Last week, Pfizer broke out above a key level – a ceiling of resistance at $25.50. If the stock closes above that level again this week, Collins believes the stock could resume its long march higher.

In addition to bullish upside patterns – other patterns suggest downside may be limited.

Collins believes Pfizer has a healthy floor of support at $24.60 and even if that breaks, two more key support levels lie in the $23 range.

What's the bottom line?

"It's rare that you get a safe boring, high-yielding drug stock like Pfizer that also has a really hot chart, at least as interpreted by Tim Collins," said Cramer. "For me, that's still one more reason why Pfizer's a buy buy buy."

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