No. of Recommendations: 1
Yup. Agree (or at least nolo contendere) with all your points, but will reinforce one and add another:
But 6 months is way too soon to judge who's right.
Expanding on why I chose 24-60 months as my parameters: I think the two-year lower bound allowed for expansion of the market with increased FDA approvals and more pressure on insurance companies to fund as the data continued to pile up (here's my additional point: Lilly's Zepbound/tirzepatide just granted authorization for sleep apnea this week, a condition with very limited other therapies), and for pipeline issues to work out (e.g. the autoinjector bottleneck).
I still think there will be lots more competition from other drugmakers in the next few years and it will be hard for them to sustain the price of their drugs and thus their current share price.
The five-year upper bound was with an eye to your point of patent expiration/emergence of competitor drugs and generics. But I think the first-mover advantage that LLY and NVO have will slow down in a period measured in years, not a few quarters: they have the pipeline, as well as in-progress looks at their clinical trial data.
Besides, I don't think I can pretend to see much further than two years out on just about anything. The risk of one or all of these drugs having an unsuspected Achilles heel is nontrivial, as is unexpected success of a non-LLY/NVO oral substitute.
Nonetheless, having the reigning champion a half-lap ahead only a short time after the starting gun certainly reinforces my putting down only a percent or two of my BRK on this.
You may well be right, or maybe not come mid-2026 to mid-2029 (and I get to choose the exit day). We'll see.
--sutton
