Trading The Crackdown on Opioid Companies
Back in August 2017, we published an article on How to Make Money off America’s Opioid Epidemic which looked at the major players in legal opioids. At least a few of them were selling legal Fentanyl – you know, that extremely dangerous drug you keep hearing about on the news these days. In our article, we cited speculation about a coming DEA crackdown and proposed two parts to a possible investment thesis.
- Investing long in those stocks that benefit from selling drugs that help people overcome their addictions
- Selling short those providers of opioid pain killers.
Here’s what we had to say about a company called Insys Therapeutics (INSYQ):
Given that Insys sells nothing but fentanyl at the moment, they’re probably the best option of the bunch for shorting based on the “DEA crackdown thesis”.
Turns out it was way worse than we could have imagined. A few days ago, shares of Insys fell -74% in a single trading session as “the company warned that it may seek bankruptcy protection after bleeding tens of millions of dollars on legal settlements and defending former executives convicted of bribing doctors to prescribe a powerful opioid.” That’s according to
