Nektar Therapeutics (NKTR) is a biotechnology firm that partners with drug-makers like Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), Pfizer (PFE) and AstraZeneca (AZN) to improve upon pre-existing drugs and treatments. Once these products are approved by regulators, the company generates revenues through royalties. After yesterday’s close, NKTR reported second-quarter earnings. The company reported revenues of $23.32 million which was below estimates of $26.65 million.

Today, the stock is trading 32.4% lower but the drop wasn’t entirely due to earnings. NKTR also announced that one of its pipeline drugs being developed with BMY had manufacturing errors that caused issues in its clinical trials. This resulted in multiple analyst downgrades; tacking on another of many negative catalysts the stock has seen in the last year. In addition to this most recent issue, in late July, the company had disclosed delays concerning another drug after the FDA considered opioid regulation changes.

The last year and a half has been tough for NKTR, what’s even worse is that all of the problems for the stock started to happen right when it was added to the S&P 500 in March 2018. NKTR has now been in the S&P 500 for 352 trading days and during that time it has averaged a daily decline of 0.36% with the stock dropping from $105.01 to below $20 today. That’s a decline of over 70%. For comparison, in the same number of days leading up to its inclusion to the S&P 500, NKTR had averaged a daily gain of 0.7% and had increased 740.8%. Talk about a bad case of the index curse! 

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