Uncle is sending more troops to Romania to try to stop Putin from hitting Ukraine. One result: gold and the Euro are up as the greenback loses traction.

Drugs

*Qualcomm, my largest US holding, gained nearly 4%. QCOM.

*Thermo Electron got a higher price estimate of $5.26 vs 5.23. TMO.

*Novo Nordisk of Denmark said a US House Committee report accusing it of coordinating insulin price hikes with Eli Lilly and Novartis was mistaken. NVO beat last year's sales forecasts by 14% and operating profit beat by 13%. It declared a dividend of 10.4 Danish Kroner. It actually had lower insulin sales but gained from EU approval of Ozempic and sales of 5 bn K for Rybelsus. It expects 6-10% increases this year in constant currencies. It also had higher sales of rare blood disease and endocrine products. But it has a problem getting US syringes for its Wegovy jab.

*Swiss Novartis NVS fell 3.13% on a sales miss on Sandoz which it hopes to spin out or sell. It sold $1.4 mn generics vs an estimate of $1.42 mn.

*Israel has been hit with a new subvariant of Omicron called BA.2 and this now accounts for 11% of those infected. This will spread. The news took down TEVA which fell 3.4%.

*Bioline RX lost 3.7% today. BLRX.

*Zymeworks fell 6.3% today, the 2nd worst performer in this sector. ZYME.

*Worst was ESTE, Esterline, at one point down 8% on acquisition the market did not like.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Telco and Tech

*Nokia will report on Q4 after the close. It is expected to have had lower earnings per share, lower revenues, and lower operating margins, maybe not. NOK.

*IBM was downrated to hold from buy with a target price of $1.45/sh vs prior 1.54.

*BAE Systems sold $14 mn for artificial Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity to speed up radio frequency signals for the USA. BAESY is British. 

*Microsoft rose over 2% today. MSFT.

*Vodafone rose another 3.27%. VOD.

*Cabot was given a $75 target price up from 70. CBT.

*Tiktok of China may wind up penalized for security risks.

Vehicles

*Auto supplier Plug Power fell 4.84% today. PLUG.

*Finally a price for SHEL as re-ticketed, now down a mere 0.57%.

*Alvarion was given a 12% higher target price by Jefferies.

*GE was upgraded to buy from hold and given a .383 target price, up 2 cents plain. 

Finance

*Banco Santander fell 0.14% today. While it barely beat prior Q4 targets it handily beat full-year ones by 44%. SAN.

Funds

*Canadian Brookfield Renewables bought Urbangrid of the USA tripling its presence with 13 Gigawatts of solar and 7 GW of storage in 12 states.