Beware the market’s careless whisper

The cardiology biotech Amarin had what appeared to be a great quarter. Sales of Vascepa, it’s sole product, grew 67% year over year, a record revenue number for the small company. So why did its stock price fall?

As STAT’s Adam Feuerstein reports, that’s because of what Wall Street calls a “whisper number.”

Institutional investors are sophisticated, and they have means of tracking just about everything, which includes prescriptions. The underlying demand for Vascepa looked strong, and so the market expectation for revenue — the whisper number — was higher than what Amarin ended up reporting.

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