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.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Read More from Mad Money with Jim Cramer
The Catch-22 Behind the Bull
Next Blockbuster Drug Stock?
Dell Bidding War - Cramer's Ultimate Winner
------------------------------------------------------------------

"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."

View the original article here

Top Biotech Trades

 Highlight transcript below to create clipTranscript:  Print  |  Email Go  Click text to jump within videoThu 10 Jan 13 | 05:53 PM ET Biotech stocks are outperforming the major indices, and are up 3 percent over the past week. CNBC's Seema Mody is tracking which stocks are trending on Twitter.

View the original article here

Banks Get Delay In New Rule, Keeping Taxpayers On The Hook For Risky Trades

Regulators have decided to delay rules that would have required Wall Street banks to isolate some of their risky derivatives trading in entities not backed by taxpayers. Banks will now have until at least 2015 to comply with the rules, Bloomberg News reports:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Bank of America Corp. won a delay of Dodd-Frank Act requirements that they wall off some derivatives trades from bank units backed by federal deposit insurance.

Commercial banks including the Wall Street firms may get as long as an additional two years — until July 2015 — to comply with the rules, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in a notice yesterday. The provision was included in Dodd- Frank, the 2010 financial-regulation law, as a way to limit taxpayer support for risky derivatives trades…The so-called push-out provision of Dodd-Frank requires that equity, some commodity and non-cleared credit derivatives be moved — or pushed out — into separate affiliates without federal assistance.

“The procrastination of both regulators and the banks on this portion of Dodd-Frank has been pretty amazing,” said Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform. “The swaps-pushout provision is a really important part and something that absolutely should be a central part of the regulatory framework.” As economists Jane D’Arista and Gerald Epstein wrote, “the intent is to remove risky activities from the core banking functions that are essential to the economy and to ensure that those risky activities will not trigger the need for a bail out to prevent systemic collapse in the future as they did in the 2008 crisis.”

This is hardly the first rule from the Dodd-Frank financial reform law to get bogged down in delays. The Volcker Rule — also meant to rein in risky bank trading with dollars backed by the government — has been delayed, and House Republicans want to push back its implementation even further.

View the original article here