We share weekly commentaries with investors on stocks in our strategies that have appreciated or dropped more than 15% in a day during the course of the week. We hope you find this commentary useful.
2U (TWOU)
-18%
Shares of 2U fell 18% on Wednesday after Piper Sandler downgraded the stock, highlighting regulatory risk and university insourcing as potential issues. We believe 2U’s cloud infrastructure offers the best online education platform and that its acquisition of edX, a massive online course provider created by Harvard and MIT, will be game-changing.
Shares of Nurix Therapeutics dropped 19% Thursday, then recovered 9% on Friday. The company’s recent volatility might involve speculation around the addition of 40 patients to a clinical trial cohort in response to positive initial data readouts. Nurix Therapeutics is a small molecule therapeutics company developing drugs that exhibit heterobifunctional protein degradation activity.
Shares of Archer Aviation rose 18% on Friday as its competitor, Joby Aviation, received FAA certification to operate aircraft commercially and signaled significant regulatory progress for the entire electric vehicle takeoff and landing (eVTOL) industry. Our research suggests that an eVTOL service could transport individuals from big cities to airports in a fraction of the time and for the same cost as taxi rides today. Archer Aviation is an aerospace company aiming to revolutionize mobility with its eVTOL products and services.
Shares of Arcturus Therapeutics traded up 25% on Friday, perhaps in response to strong 3-month durability data for its COVID vaccine. The vaccine also demonstrated efficacy against both the BA.1 and the BA.2 subvariants of COVID. Arcturus Therapeutics develops mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics for the treatment of infectious and rare genetic diseases.
Shares of Farfetch appreciated 26% today on “better than feared” results after the company reported first-quarter earnings that missed Wall Street estimates for both revenue and non-GAAP EPS. Despite Covid-related weakness in China and a halt to its operations in Russia, Farfetch’s revenue and gross merchandise value (GMV) increased 6% and 2%, respectively, on a year-over-year basis. Excluding Russia and China, Farfetch’s GMV grew 20% year-over-year. Our conviction in Farfetch's ability to execute, once the world stabilizes, remains high. Farfetch is a London-based e-commerce platform for personal luxury goods.
Shares of Iovance Biotherapeutics traded down 53% today after the company announced results from its autologous tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) treatment targeting melanoma. While it did not publish the complete dataset, Iovance disclosed that the second of four cohorts demonstrated a 29% objective response rate (ORR) compared to the first cohort’s 36% last year, and that the duration of response was 10 months, much lower than the 36 months still in progress for the first cohort.
Shares of Zymergen traded up 18% on Friday with the broader market rally, buttressed by the company’s new partnership with Octant. Zymergen will provide Octant with its scalable, modular lab automation tools and software. Zymergen is a product-oriented synthetic biology company with a strong technological backbone in enzymatic and microbial engineering.
