News and analysis

The Graph (GRT) is up 8.0% this week to $0.1365, outperforming the broader crypto market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is rising by 2.7% to $97,820. The altcoin is now trading slightly above the level where the Trump-driven rally began last November. After gaining 159%, GRT has since lost most of those gains, bottoming out at $0.1026 on February 3.

GRT's price movements are largely influenced by the overall crypto market trend. If BTC manages to stay above $90,000 by the end of February, GRT could see a strong recovery from the $0.1000–$0.1500 levels.

Eli Lilly (LLY) got another boost to grow stronger. A high-speed racing biopharma monster just confirmed the globally rising need in its weight-loss drugs at the practical level. What we can ascertain is that the price bottoming stage is finally complete after an overlong correction from early September 2024 to mid-January 2025. As we pointed to a chance for Eli Lilly's brief visits to the major technical support area between $700 and $750, before inevitable recovery to the levels above $950, that's how it perfectly goes. A cowardly attempt to retest its November 18 intraday low at $711.40 per share was limited to touching $725 after two months on January 17. Now the price is soaring to nearly $888 on solid quarterly numbers issued in the first week of February. Zepbound treatment to make it easier to fight obesity cases is another brand name for tirzepatide, which was initially developed as Mounjaro for diabetes. This dual action injection drug, approved by the U.S. FDA in May 2022 for type 2 diabetes and then in November 2023 to reduce excess body weight and maintain weight reduction long term. Backed by a celebrity effect from Hollywood stars, this kind of medicare gradually became crazy popular among hundreds of millions of patients. Temporary signs of weakness in sales of the drugs last autumn were rather related to logistical bottlenecks. For this reason, sales of Mounjaro were $3.11 billion, and Zepbound sales amounted to $1.26 billion in Q3, even though analyst polls predicted $4.20 billion for Mounjaro and $1.69 billion for Zepbound. It was too optimistic scenario, and failure to meet it disappointed market bulls, following the stock's doubling in value in the previous two years. This problem appears to be fixed after the most valuable healthcare company in the world reported Q4 sales for its Zepbound and Mounjaro of $1.91 billion and $3.53 billion, respectively. The total increase was almost 25% over the course of one quarterly period. The company's current estimate is that U.S. growth of its diabetes and weight-loss drugs to be consistent with 2024, which apparently satisfied the investing crowd.

Lilly also projected its annual profit well above Wall Street estimates, as it is planning to grab between $22.50 and $24.00 per share in 2025, compared to average bets on $22.86 per share, according to LSEG data, with the midpoint of the announced range being 32% up from the last year. This means it is back on track hopefully after a harsh period with restoring order in supply chains. In addition, Lilly CEOs noted they are building manufacturing capacity for its new experimental oral obesity drug Orforglipron to ease some worries over its advance cycle. Eli Lilly is launching its Mounjaro in new markets like China, India, Brazil and Mexico, for both diabetes and obesity. Analyst polls expect revenues of above $59 billion for 2025. Lilly's rival Novo Nordisk, a Danish producer of Wegovy drug, forecasted slower growth vs its results in 2024. JAMA Internal Medicine reported that patients taking Mounjaro were 76% more likely to lose at least 5% of their body weight, more than twice as likely to lose at least 10%, and more than three times as likely to lose 15% or more of their weight, compared with patients taking the second-place drug by Novo Nordisk.

The entire market for weight-loss treatments is widely estimated at more than $150 billion by the early 2030s. To put it in perspective, Eli Lilly is three times larger in terms of market value than Merck and five times more expensive than Pfizer, the other two giants of the pharmaceutical industry. Eli Lilly's achievements include the U.S. regulatory approval of Kisunla, the brand name of Donanemab, which is a treatment of Alzheimer's disease, and of Jaypirca in Japan to treat lymphoma.

Coin 98 (CNE) is down 12.7% this week to $0.0867, underperforming the broader crypto market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is trading neutral at $96,831. The altcoin remains under pressure following Binance's decision to delist the CNE/BTC a month ago due to low liquidity. While other pairs with CNE are still available, they too face the risk of delisting for the same reason.

In addition to this, a generally negative market sentiment is weighing on CNE, leading it to set a new all-time low at $0.0698. If the trend continues, the token could decline further towards the $0.0500 mark.

Here is the problem, which is nearly at a primary school level. A simple logical puzzle. A shopping street has two grocery stores. One of the stores is much more popular than the other. But both shops are full of customers every day. So both shops are raking in money. Sales output of a more popular store roughly doubled over the past year, from $14.5 billion to $30.8 billion - oh, yes, it's a very big shop - which led to tripling of its market value. Meanwhile, sales in the second store have already grown by 69%, albeit by its lower standards, namely from $2.3 billion to $3.9 billion. Please draw a conclusion, by what percentage the market value of the second store could increase, assuming that professional appraisers are rather objective. It seems ridiculous, but the correct answer is that the second store's market value lost 35% within the same year, and it even dropped by 50% from its peak price of the last spring. Holy Cow! That was a story of some failed expectations of mine. Since the big store is, of course, Nvidia, and the small one (and also, in fact, quite a prosperous marketplace) is Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). And their goods are not essential food, but chips for artificial intelligence (AI) related data centers, which are also in high demand.

Moreover, AMD shares reportedly tumbled 10% additionally on February 5, only because the firm's AI chip revenue failed to be exactly in line with elevated projections of Wall Street analyst pool, which somehow bet on a 80% pace of data centre growth to as much as $4.15 billion YoY. Okay, one might say that Nvidia's "store" sells 8 times more chips that everyone needs. And even remember that Nvidia chips are of better quality, that Nvidia occupies about 80% of global chip market share. Again, Nvidia's last quarter will be finally counted only by February 26, when Nvidia's financial report is scheduled, a month later than in AMD's case. Like most large investment houses, here I have provided growth metrics regarding the major data center segment, which is a proxy for the AI playground, where AMD struggles to compete with Nvidia. Well, AMD CEO Lisa Su admitted that her company's data center sales in the current quarter may go down about 7% from the just-ended quarter, but this announcement was exactly in line with an overall expected decline. Is it really such a big deal that AMD shareholders have to experience pain from seeing their chosen stock falling to a 14-month low, with further need for a 100% rally just to match last year's record prices?

The same Lisa Su declined to give the particular forecast for the company's AI chips, but she said that AMD expects "tens of billions" of dollars in sales "in the next couple of years". And I see no reason to doubt her words. AMD CEO added that the firm is now working to compete against Broadcom (AVGO) in collaborating with its customers like Meta and Microsoft to create custom AI chips for their purposes, as Broadcom helps its partners to design their own chips, contrary to mostly "off-the-shelf" processors by AMD and Nvidia. They know their weaknesses as opportunities for strengthening to work in that direction, so what's wrong with the market's adequacy of perception? Perfect Nvidia is the enemy of good AMD, according to the crowd's opinion. Besides AI chips, AMD is also one of the largest providers of personal computer chips. Until recently, this point was generally the source of their main income. Consumers continue to buy new PCs, which also can handle generative AI tasks, by the way.

Actually, AMD has been the only loss-making company in my large portfolio for a long time, so it even makes me smile now. At least, because it is only a matter of time before AMD's pogo stick ultimately uncoils to come loose. Record annual revenue and earnings have to entail recovering to record market value eventually. I am not sure this will happen in the first half of 2025, even though AMD forecasts its revenue rise between $6.8 billion and $7.4 billion for the current quarter, with the market consensus midpoint being slightly lower at $7.04 billion. If you don't believe me then analysts at Stifel are of the opinion that AMD is well positioned for AI compute and "It is likely" that some of its customers "are waiting for 325/350 systems, which should drive a much stronger second half". Again, the median estimate by the Wall Street's analyst pool was now declined to about $150 per share vs $166.5 before the last downside move, yet even $150 sounds much better compared to $112 on closing price this Wednesday or an intraday low at $106.56 during the last trading session. Anyway, there is a strong technical and psychological support zone near the round figure of $100, from where AMD stock had begun its cool ascension in late 2023.