One pitfall most people don’t realize when trading biotechs is an expectation that the stock will pop going into events like conferences etc. While it happens from time to time when company presents unexpected data, most of the time these are non-events. In order to spike a stock, there needs to be unexpected news. However, these conferences are expected by everyone and most of the time merely a “sell the news” opportunity.

I was looking at the Bio CEO conference (http://www.ceo.bio.org) attendees to see if there are any opportunities. The conference starts tomorrow. Just for reference, I went back one year and selected a bunch of last year’s attendees. Then looked at their performance in the week of the conference. Results weren’t surprising, most of the stocks went down or did nothing with only a few showing significant gains. I’ll share the graphs below. (Click if they appear small)

Note that the market was mostly flat that week. Of course this is not a big enough sample size and doesn’t indicate that we’ll get similar behavior this year. But I see it as a good starting point, better than nothing.

I personally wouldn’t get too excited about this conference unless you know your stock well and expect something out of the ordinary for this conference. I will still be watching attendees I list below for breakouts, based on either their recent price action or historical performance around these events:

OPXA ARNA AVNR ANDS MITI GERN ISTA IMGN ATHX

I’ll put alerts on key levels and if I see volume, I’ll jump in for probably some scalps.
Good luck everyone.

Disclosure: I don’t have any positions in any stock mentioned above at the time of writing.