Why Incyte Corporation (INCY) is in the Spotlight

Traders are watching Incyte Corporation (NASDAQ:INCYafter Geoff Meacham of Barclays hiked his price target on the biotech to $185 per share from $135. Meacham has an ‘Outperform’ rating, citing his research with rheumatologists that gives him increased confidence for potential FDA approval of Olumiant (baricitinib). The analyst also believes that epacadostat can do well.

On the opposite side is analyst Reni Benjamin of Raymond James, who earlier downgraded the stock to ‘Market Perform’ and set a $135 target, noting that Incyte’s stock was priced for perfection.

Despite the analyst disagreement, many elite funds like Incyte Corporation (NASDAQ:INCY) given the stock’s strong growth potential over the coming years as some of the company’s R&D pipeline hits the market.

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

According to our data, the smart money was bullish on Incyte in Q4. Of the 742 elite funds we track, 45 funds owned $3.81 billion of Incyte Corporation (NASDAQ:INCY) and accounted for 20.20% of the float on December 31, up from 45 funds and $3.25 billion respectively on September 30. Julian Baker And Felix Baker‘s Baker Bros. Advisors was one of the top holders, reporting a position of 23.5 million shares at the end of 2016.

The Bottom Line

Incyte Corporation (NASDAQ:INCY) shares are trending due to a Wall Street analyst upgrade. For more reading, check out ‘11 Biggest Generic Drug Companies In the World‘.

Disclosure:None

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