More AbbVie Inanity On Seeking Alpha With A Dose Of Penny Stock Promotion

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Set a million monkeys loose with Yahoo Finance and a word processor, and what do you get? The answer, it would appear, is Seeking Alpha, a content farm with no particular editorial standards.  We wrote last week about blatant, significant errors being covered up without acknowledgement.  This morning, we encountered another wastebasket-worthy piece on AbbVie(ABBV).

Imagine writing about Coca Cola(KO) without discussing soda, or Microsoft(MSFT) without discussing Windows.  For AbbVie, Humira accounts for over 50% of revenues and over 70% of profits. For all intents and purposes, AbbVie is Humira, and Humira is AbbVie. How then, can we take seriously this morning’s piece by Seeking Alpha contributor Josh Hutheson?  The article never mentions Humira by name; it blithely states “although ABBV has some drugs coming off patent over the next couple of years” without mentioning the extreme dependence on Humira, which will be coming off patent in 2016.   Says Hutheson “AbbVie is a research-based pharmaceutical company with a broad and sustainable portfolio of market-leading proprietary pharmaceuticals and biologics sold worldwide.” Broad and sustainable? Hardly!  Hutheson is bullish on the pipeline, without acknowledging the high failure rate of drugs in even late stage clinical trials.

Perhaps most disturbing, the article inexplicably contains a paragraph discussing a biotech penny stock named Amarantus Biotech(AMBS). This company has no revenues, a whopping three employees, and a market cap of $22 million. Did we mention that it has no cash either?  Someone more cynical than us could be forgiven for assuming the author’s intent in writing this article was to promote this vaporous company.  There is no conceivable way that the mention of this firm can shed any light on the putative subject of the article, AbbVie.

SeekingAlpha has a real credibility problem and, based on my correspondence with them, no interest in addressing it.  There is a lot of great financial content being produced but a lot more awful, misleading, and fraudulent content.  It’s time for a value-added aggregator with high standards that is willing to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Disclosure: The author has no position in any stock mentioned

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3 thoughts on “More AbbVie Inanity On Seeking Alpha With A Dose Of Penny Stock Promotion”

  1. Clever nickname

    Good looking out, but it’s probably time to let it go. Anyone on here should be doing their own homework/valuation, and that shouldn’t really include random internet opinions. And forget journalistic integrity. Even(especially) the highest paid analysts are in bed with the companies they cover, so you really only trust yourself.

    Love the site, but I’d rather see posts about spins I’d never heard of (Kazakhstan!) than about how a worthless analysis became slightly more worthless.

  2. Inelegant Investor

    We’re also just a random internet opinion, but we aspire to a higher standard, and wish others would too.

    Glad you love the site and that you enjoyed the Kazakhstan post. We’ll keep reporting on both well-known and obscure spin offs. Keep reading and keep the feedback coming!

  3. Gusto

    WHY WASTING YOUR TIME ON IT? Who wants to read about SA’s editorial policies?

    They hosted for a long time Garry Weiss’s smear campaign on Overstock, too. But from time to time there are good authors. Still why read here (frequently) about SA’s editorial policies?

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