Even activist investors can’t get people excited about biotech

Not too long ago, news that an agitated shareholder was pressing a biotech company to sell itself was sure to prop up the stock price, stoking investors’ dreams of a high-dollar buyout or at least a short-term opportunity to dump a losing company.

But in 2018, with biotech deep in the red and the broader market no better, that doesn’t seem to work anymore. A hedge fund called Armistice Capital is pressuring Clovis Oncology to sell itself, Bloomberg reported yesterday, wielding a 9.8 percent stake in the company and emboldened by GlaxoSmithKline’s recent deal for Tesaro, a Clovis competitor.

And yet Clovis’s share price fell about 9 percent on the news, a particularly painful drop considering the company has lost about two-thirds of its value since the start of the year.