There’s nobody better than a stock market analyst to find opportunity in the strangest of places. Send news of a terrible earthquake that’s killed hundreds, and they will be calculating the impact on the price of coffee beans. An awful war in the Middle East? Sounds like a good reason to buy shares in Australian oil and gas.
Their latest idea is to place bets on the impact of the new class of weight-loss drugs, such as Ozempic. Already millions of people are injecting themselves, despite their expense. The analysts are now forecasting a point where the price comes down, they are available as a pill, and half the wealthy world will be glugging them down.
The stock market is salivating over the money-making potential in the weight-loss wonder drug. Credit: Bloomberg The result, they claim, will be a radical reduction in obesity, with widespread impacts on everything from fast food companies to health insurance. According to one analyst, there will even be an impact on airlines: they will become more profitable because transporting thin people requires less fuel.
The latest target is the Australian company ResMed and its sleep apnoea devices. Shares dropped 13 per cent on a single day this week after a study concluded that in this newly thin world there will be less snoring. Haven’t we lived through this moment before? Researching my book The Land Before Avocado , I spent months buried in the pages of the Australian Women’s Weekly from 1965 to 1975.
So many of the advert.