Eli Lilly (LLY), with its nearly half trillion of market caps, witnessed the largest growth of 36.1% over Q2 2023. It is truly outstanding achievement among big pharma companies, compared to 2.3% average gains for the global top 20 stocks of the segment. Yet, its share price added another 18.5% since early July, including more than 5.5% after our forecast was released on August 9. Current price levels for LLY are above $556 vs less than $525 two weeks ago and against $430 per share at the beginning of the summer.

The dominating contribution to this record performance was made by growing sales of Eli Lilly's diabetes drug Mounjaro, as well as a significant progress with a cure for early Alzheimer's diseases, which provided much hope by slowing cognitive and functional decline in a Phase 3 study this spring, so that the corresponding drug is awaiting U.S. regulatory approval. At the same time, the recent pace of an upward momentum for the stock became extraordinary strong, following an announced results from the LIBRETTO-531 study that evaluate an experimental Retevmo's effectiveness in a stage of initial treatment for patients with advanced or metastatic rearranged medullary thyroid cancer (MTC).

An unusually explosive rise of the company's share prices makes us think about a moderate profit taking action towards the end of the week, given increasingly volatile behaviour of the market ahead of the Federal Reserve's symposium at Jackson Hole and price corrections that recently affected more popular tech giants. At the same time, a smaller portion of the trade in Eli Lilly stocks would be left intact to wait for a possible next target above $600 per share for the mid-term.