Is Moderna $MRNA still a good buy?

To answer the question in the title, I don't know. I am not a trading/investing expert and as usual this is not a financial advice. This is what I am pondering once again - to buy $MRNA or not to buy. A couple of month ago I wrote a post titled Is Moderna $MRNA a good buy at $69?

At that time I did end up taking a small position and sold the stocks after few weeks for a small profit. $MRNA went up as high as $80 and since then dropped back down again and currently trading at around $67.50.

I still believe the market cap of the company is overvalued, but at the same time Moderna's mRNA-1273 candidate for vaccine puts it in a position as a potential solution for some aspects of the Covid-19 crisis and makes $MRNA an interesting investment opportunity.

Moderna is not the only company that is working on a vaccine for Covid-19. There are other players too. But it seems Moderna is among the leaders. There were couple of companies that announced pauses on the phase-3 trials due to side effects during trials. I haven't seen any news like this regarding Moderna yet, although I haven't been following news closely either. Yet the price of the stock has been dropping.

On Thursday Moderna reported its fiscal Q3 2020 results, which showed significant increase in revenue at $157.9 million. However, its expenses saw significant increase as well and much higher than revenue at $393 million. Purely looking at these numbers, Moderna is losing money. On the other hand, I would think large amount of expense would suggest they are working hard on delivering a successful vaccine. In the end, the successful delivery of an working and effective vaccine would be the ultimate indicator of what will happen to its stock prices.

On a positive news, Moderna was able to get its phase 3 trials to full enrollment with 30K participants. It was able to acquire $1.2 billion in customer deposits and has comfortable amount cash flow. We may find out more about the regarding first interim data on its trial sometime in November. Its management seems to be happy with the progress thus far.

I am interested to buy the stock again. What worries me is not the stock itself, but how the overall stock market has been performing lately. I will probably keep monitoring $MRNA and consider taking a position if it drops more. What do you think? Is it still a good buy? Too risky?

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