Illumina Inc (NASDAQ:ILMN)

Lackluster research environment

Takeover is off the table for now, but the valuation is still too high given the fundamentals.

I recently conducted a series of interviews with a group of Chinese doctors, top-shelf people at the peak of their profession.

When I asked them what the biggest medicinal breakthroughs of the foreseeable future will be, almost all of them replied, "personalized care based on DNA."

Given this specialized guidance from a flock of well-informed geniuses, I think it's wise to buy and hold shares -- a lot of them -- of the company that has a stranglehold on DNA sequencing technology.

takeover target

Very interesting company for a long run buy. Great prospects as a company. Genome sequencing will only become more popular over the next few years and Ilumina is the leader in this field. As they make advances in this field driving down the price it will become more affordable to everyday people and soon be an essential part of modern healthcare as genome sequencing can be very useful as a preventative measure for almost all major illnesses.

A takeover target.

I am a believer in personalized medicine (think DNDN -- not a great stock so far, but a great approach to a difficult cancer) - diagnosis of problems (and treatments) through (increasingly cheap) DNA mapping is the future. I am not sure if ILMN is better than LIFE (or possibly AFFX) but it is a great company with great prospects. The reason for my 2-4 year timeframe is that I think it will be bought by a bigger firm.

Although largely dependent on the research arena (heavily dependent on state funding) currently, genomic sequencing is beginning to make its way into the clinical setting and is being used by pharmaceuticals to help find biomakers for monoclonal antibody development. This transition will be slow progress at first, but will quickly pick up as clinical applications are supported with mAbs directed at specific biomarkers from the genotyping.

Illumina is a Stock Advisor pick that happens to be a local company here in San Diego. I always like it when a company makes something that other compnanies need to do business and the life science community here is vibrant, to say the least.
Good future here despite patent disputes in this industry which are a fact of life.

What a gift to give to your kids for Christmas--their very own genome. This is better than a car!

There are currently 1410 ILMN shares in my "fund" with break-even of around 41.38 USD. http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/fund-trades/678775.

"It appears that production got ahead of demand, though we won't know more about this until the company releases results later this month."

This is exactly what happens with Boom and Bust cycles. What the Fed did in 2009 to stimulate the economy caused a lot of companies to invest in longer term production and now with the end of QE there is a lot of downsizing a liquidation. Investors don't know which companies will survive liquidation and which will go bust, so they are pulling a lot of their money out of the market.

ILMN with their connection to research and academia is the typical company to which stimulus dollars went. I know because I am connected to academia and I work on research, and I saw a lot of scrambling then to hire and increase capacity in order to spend stimulus dollars. Now the stimuls is gone and the economy is not growing. Add to that the coming cuts and you have a recipe for liquidation.

So the main question is the following. What is ILMN's ability to adapt, liquidate and downsize? That depends in how much debt they have and how much cash they have. If you can answer these questions, you will know if this is a hold or a sell.

Put in this category all the alternative energy companies. The ones making solar panels, bateries, windmills, etc.

Initiate 1/4 position

Yooperking pick and Oxford Club recommendation that looks good.

The next big thing

One of a kind technology creates demand and growth.

Even if it never climbs back to where it was before the huge drop earlier, it should still prove successful over the long term.

Company will profit greatly from increased interest in genomic mapping for various diseases and looking at protein interactions with the genome. Beginning to be the new big thing in research and with a high quality reputation.

Powerful sequencing technology.