Gilead Sciences Inc.: Best Buy In The Market?

As the bull market pushes past its seventh year and the stock market averages triple in value off their great recession lows, it can become increasingly difficult to find good companies trading at reasonable values. As Buffett famously said “You can buy a good company, but at a bad price it can still turn into a bad investment.” The S&P 500 currently trades at 17x forward earnings and 19x TTM earnings. While this isn’t bubble territory when factoring in generational lows in the risk free rates, it’s far from cheap.

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Which brings me to Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD), it currently trades 7x forward and TTM earnings (5 year average is 21x) and 3.9x sales (5 year average is 7x) for a company that grows revenues at an average annual pace of 32% for the last 5 and 10 year period and grows earnings at a pace of 40-50% annually for the past 5 and 10 year average (chart above). The company also displays operating and gross margins well above the industry average.

Now there are always two sides to every trade and the bears are looking at the overhead potential of drug pricing reform and more specifically what other generic drugs may cut into Gilead’s future revenue and earnings growth potential. There aren’t ever any certainties in the markets but what we can say is that it’s usually a good idea to buy good companies with a margin of safety. In this case we have a solid company with good competitive advantages, exemplary management, and revenue growth that exceeds even Amazon’s, trading at a fraction of it’s historical average.

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Taking a look at the weekly chart, GILD looks to have a confluence of support between the $82.50-$84 with the 200 week ma just below.

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Next we take a look at the entire biotech sector chart. Here we see that the entire sector has been under pressure since the 2015 highs, down 40%. The sector appears to be stabilizing and a break above $289 would bode well for all those beaten down biotech names such as Gilead, Regeneron and Allerghan.

Gilead Sciences reports earnings after the market closes on Monday. The street is looking for earnings of $3.02/share on $7.85 billion in revenue. The bar appears to have been set quite low for the quarter, and the future for that matter.

Disclosure: Long GILD, REGN, AGN.

Nothing on this article should be misconstrued as investment ...

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