The Whole Grail

Patti the Biotech Maven won plaudits for a US stock idea which I have written about from time to time, Illumina, ILMN, a developer of systems for sequencing a person's genome, the key to personalized medicine according to Barron's staffer Leslie Norton. Leslie, very much back in view in the magazine now that her son is going to school, said the announced retirement of long-time CEO Jay Flatley hit the stock price creating an opportunity to buy ILMN. Never a cheap stock, but currently a cheaper one than it was. Leslie writes that Flatley's successor Francis de Souza, 45, who will take over in July when Flatley becomes chairman. He himself has an interesting genetic heritage, with a father who was half-Portuguese and half-Indian, who moreover grew up in Ethiopia and Dubai before heading for MIT at age 16. Leslie stressed that the impetus to search for cancer cells in DNA in peoples' bloodstream under the Grail label is another reason for her calling ILMN at potential $200 share (from $147). Grail got funding from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and is being run by a former Google exec, Jeff Huber. But the only investible part of the new entity is ILMN.

Roger Agnelli, the former CEO of Brazil's Vale (VALE), who built it into a global iron ore player before being forced out by the Dilma Rousseff govt and union pension plans (which were shareholders) has died with members of his family in an airplane crash. They died shortly after their private plane took off at Campo de Marte field near Sao Paulo.

One reason that Vale had seen its stock soar so far this year despite political troubles for the Dilma govt is that Agnelli, a former banker, rallied foreign investors and private sector institutions to prevent the unions, led by Lula, and his hench woman Dilma, from gutting the independent management of what then was Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, CVRD. That was the name of its first iron ore mine, site of a disastrous dam breach last Nov. The airport has always terrified me because you are so near suburban homes.

Now that I have said nice things about Leslie, I want to berate Barron's for increasingly leaving out of its stock tables NYSE-listed ADRs of foreign companies. This presumably is a way to make room in the mag for puffery about asset managers and, in tomorrow's issue, the World's Best CEOs. Among them, before he was ousted, was Roger Agnelli, so that is not the worst of what the Dow-Jones mag is dumping on US retail investors. But it is not appropriate and will not substitute for full coverage of NYSE-listed shares. Even if they are not American enough for Donald Trump, ADRs are American enough for us, and more American than Rupert Murdoch.