Eli

Florida-based wealth advisory J. L. Bainbridge disclosed a purchase of Eli Lilly and Company valued at approximately $45.6 million for the quarter ended September 30, according to an SEC filing released on Friday.

What Happened

J. L. Bainbridge & Co. Inc. significantly increased its stake in Eli Lilly and Company (LLY -1.94%), acquiring 61,258 additional shares during the quarter. The estimated value of the purchase was $45.6 million based on the average closing price for the quarter. The position was reported in the firm’s quarterly Form 13-F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

What Else to Know

This buy brings the position to 3.9% of J. L. Bainbridge & Co. Inc.’s 13F reportable assets.

Top holdings after the filing:

• NASDAQ:MSFT: $164.85 million (13.9% of AUM)
• NASDAQ:AAPL: $122.68 million (10.4% of AUM)
• NASDAQ:GOOGL: $116.65 million (9.9% of AUM)
• NYSE:GS: $71.43 million (6% of AUM)
• NYSE:ETN: $59.86 million (5.1% of AUM)

As of Friday’s market close, shares of Eli Lilly and Company were priced at $802.83, down 11% over the past year and far underperforming the S&P 500’s nearly 14% gain over the same period.

Company Overview

Company Snapshot

• Eli Lilly offers a broad portfolio of pharmaceuticals for diabetes, oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and other therapeutic areas, with leading products including Humalog, Trulicity, Jardiance, Verzenio, and Taltz.
• The company generates revenue primarily through the discovery, development, manufacturing, and global sale of branded prescription drugs, leveraging both proprietary research and strategic collaborations.
• It provides pharmaceuticals for chronic and complex diseases worldwide.

Eli Lilly and Company is a global pharmaceutical leader that maintains a diversified portfolio of innovative therapies for high-burden diseases. Its scale, established brands, and strategic partnerships provide competitive advantages in the rapidly evolving healthcare sector.

Foolish Take

Florida-based J.L. Bainbridge & Co. boosted its exposure to Eli Lilly last quarter, purchasing roughly $45.6 million worth of shares even as the stock has endured a difficult stretch. Shares are down 11% over the past year, pressured by valuation concerns and, most recently, political commentary on potential weight-loss drug price cuts. The decline followed remarks by President Donald Trump, who suggested GLP-1 treatments like Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound could face price reductions—a move that briefly sent shares tumbling more than 4% on Friday.

Despite near-term volatility, Bainbridge’s purchase reflects long-term conviction in Lilly’s fundamentals. The pharmaceutical giant remains a dominant player in metabolic and diabetes care, with GLP-1 demand still far outpacing supply. Analysts at BMO Capital Markets called the recent selloff “overdone,” noting that most insured Americans already pay modest out-of-pocket costs for these drugs.

For Bainbridge, whose portfolio is anchored by Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet, the addition of Lilly underscores a strategy centered on durable growth and innovation-led healthcare exposure. Long-term investors may see current weakness as a potential entry point into one of the most profitable franchises in global pharmaceuticals.

Glossary

Form 13-F: A quarterly SEC filing by institutional investment managers disclosing their equity holdings.
AUM (Assets Under Management): The total market value of investments managed on behalf of clients by a fund or firm.
Reportable AUM: Portion of a fund’s assets that must be disclosed in regulatory filings, such as the Form 13-F.
Top holdings: The largest investments in a fund, ranked by their value as a percentage of total assets.
Trailing twelve months (TTM): The 12-month period ending with the most recent quarterly report.
Stake: The ownership interest or position an investor holds in a company, usually measured in shares or percentage.
Strategic collaborations: Partnerships between companies to jointly develop, market, or distribute products or services.
Pharmaceutical portfolio: The collection of drugs and therapies a company develops, manufactures, and sells.
Underperforming: Delivering a lower return or performance compared to a benchmark or peer group.

Eli Lilly (LLY -0.82%) has been one of the best-performing healthcare giants over the past decade. It now stands as the largest in the sector by market cap.

Even with headwinds it has encountered this year, the drugmaker is arguably one of the top stocks in its industry to buy right now. Here’s why.

Image source: Getty Images.

Innovation pays off

It’s hard to find a drugmaker that has proven more innovative than Eli Lilly in recent years. Within its core areas of diabetes and weight management, Lilly launched tirzepatide, marketed as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity. Tirzepatide was a significant breakthrough, as the first dual GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide-1) and GIP (gastric inhibitory polypeptide) agonist, a medicine that mimics the action of these two gut hormones.

That’s one of the reasons tirzepatide has proved more effective than traditional GLP-1 drugs, and is racking up sales the likes of which have almost never been seen in the history of the industry. That’s not hyperbole. Most compounds never reach $1 billion in annual sales. Most of those that do, never get to $5 billion, and those that do, typically take years on the market to get there. In its third full year on the market, tirzepatide will generate well over $20 billion this year.

The next chapter

Last year, Eli Lilly earned approval for Kisunla, a medicine indicated to treat Alzheimer’s disease, an area that had long been considered the graveyard of investigational medications. So Lilly’s innovative prowess extends beyond its core markets. And the company is leveraging its success in weight management and obesity to establish a strong foundation for the future.

Thanks to acquisitions and licensing deals, it has significantly expanded its pipeline, which should power clinical and regulatory success over the next few years and strong financial results well into the next decade. That’s why Eli Lilly is one of the top healthcare stocks to buy right now.

Over the past five years, Eli Lilly (LLY 1.43%) has outperformed the broader market, largely thanks to its progress in the GLP-1 arena. Its major breakthroughs in the field are already leading to incredible commercial success.

But Lilly isn’t done just yet. Recent clinical developments may set the stage for further stock-market gains, and potentially allow the drugmaker to maintain that momentum through the end of the decade. Let’s find out what Eli Lilly has been up to, and what that means for investors.

The next generation of GLP-1 medicines

Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide, marketed under the brands Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight management, is highly effective — and generating billions of dollars in sales per quarter already. However, the medicine is administered subcutaneously once a week. This route has several drawbacks compared to oral pills.

First, the latter are often cheaper to manufacture. With an oral GLP-1 medicine, drugmakers might be able to pass cost savings onto consumers, making them more accessible than their subcutaneous counterparts.

Image source: Getty Images.

Second, oral pills are easier on patients who abhor needles and injections. That’s why Lilly and other companies in the field have been racing to develop novel oral GLP-1 therapies. There is already one such treatment on the market: Novo Nordisk‘s Rybelsus, which was first approved in the U.S. in 2019 and is indicated for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

But Eli Lilly is on the verge of launching its own oral option. The company’s orforglipron performed well in a series of phase 3 studies in diabetes and obesity. What’s more, Lilly recently released results from a 52-week study in diabetes patients that pitted orforglipron and Rybelsus head-to-head. During the trial, the highest dose of orforglipron resulted in an average blood-sugar reduction of 1.9%, compared to 1.5% for Rybelsus. Additionally, orforglipron induced an average weight loss of 8.2%, versus 5.3% for Rybelsus.

Once again, Lilly is showing its dominance in this area, even against the company with a first-mover advantage. And if orforglipron is approved by year-end, Eli Lilly’s shares could soar. Although the pharmaceutical giant has yet to complete regulatory submissions for orforglipron, some Wall Street analysts believe that the medicine is an excellent candidate for a new program launched by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which reduces the 10-month review time for drug applications to a mere one or two months.

Is Lilly overvalued?

No one would question that Eli Lilly is performing extremely well. In the past couple of years, it has arguably produced more positive clinical data in the rapidly growing field of weight management than the rest of the industry combined. And the drugmaker is reaping the rewards of a job well done; its financial results speak for themselves. Second-quarter revenue jumped by 38% year over year to $15.6 billion, while non-GAAP (adjusted) net earnings per share grew 61% to $6.31. Lilly even increased its guidance for the full year 2025.

However, the stock was recently trading at 24.7 times forward earnings estimates, while the average for the healthcare industry is 16.5.

That said, Eli Lilly is worth a hefty premium. Its revenue and earnings are already growing faster than those of its peers. And there are good reasons to believe the pharmaceutical leader will keep that up through the next few years (at the very least), as it continues to benefit from its groundbreaking work in the GLP-1 market. According to some analysts, orforglipron could generate as much as $12.7 billion in revenue by 2030.

Will this medicine cannibalize sales from Lilly’s other GLP-1 products? Not at all. Tirzepatide is still growing strongly and could generate nearly $62 billion in revenue by 2030, a figure unheard-of in the industry. A few years ago, some analysts predicted that tirzepatide would peak at $25 billion, which would have been pretty impressive. It’s already set to eclipse that number this year, just three years after it first hit the market. Lilly’s success in the GLP-1 market has been remarkable and should continue driving solid top-line growth.

Furthermore, several other products will contribute. Lilly’s Alzheimer’s disease medicine Kisunla has grabbed barely any headlines, but it could also achieve blockbuster status, as could Ebglyss, a new treatment for eczema.

Eli Lilly’s outstanding results and prospects justify its valuation, leaving plenty of upside for the company. The stock might not soar based on the recent clinical trial data for orforglipron showing its superiority to Rybelsus unless it leads to regulatory approval by year-end. But Lilly still looks likely to deliver market-beating returns over the next five years.

“Eureka Day,” a comedy by Jonathan Spector that wades into the debate on vaccine mandates, has only become more explosively topical since its 2018 premiere at Aurora Theatre Company, in Berkeley, Calif.

The play, which is having its Los Angeles premiere at Pasadena Playhouse, seems like it could have been commissioned to skewer this destructive, benighted and completely mortifying anti-science moment. But Spector wrote the work before the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed our political demons and made stupid great again.

“Eureka Day” takes its name from the fictional private elementary school in Berkeley that is the setting for what is both a satire of anti-vaccine culture and a comedy of woke manners. Held in a determinedly cheerful Bay Area classroom (brightly summoned with all the necessary social justice touches by set designer Wilson Chin), the play unfolds as a series of meetings of the school’s executive committee.

Don (Rick Holmes), the head of school, is ostensibly in charge, though his duck-and-cover strategy for dealing with conflict has a way of protracting problems. Four parents, one a newcomer still acclimating to the school’s strenuously progressive rules, are part of the executive brain trust.

The first discussion of the new school year is relatively innocuous though no less testing for being so. Eli (Nate Corddry), a stay-at-home dad who made a fortune at Facebook, has proposed adding “Transracial Adoptee” to a drop-down menu on an admissions form already burgeoning with identity subcategories.

Suzanne (Mia Barron), a mother who has sent so many children through Eureka Day that she has a proprietary attitude about the place, doesn’t think this additional category is necessary. She’s sensitive — self-consciously so — to Eli’s good intentions, but she persuades the group that no changes are necessary at this time.

“Persuades” might be a euphemism. Suzanne has an iron will that she thinly veils with a solicitous smile.

One of the quirks of the executive committee is that it operates by consensus rather than a majority vote. This can lead to some “very long meetings,” Suzanne informs Carina (Cherise Boothe), the new Black lesbian mom who recently moved from Maryland.

Suzanne claims to want everyone to feel “empowered,” though her controlling temperament pokes through her welcoming facade. Meiko (Camille Chen), who knits during meetings with a subtle air of annoyance, has to loudly ask Suzanne to please stop speaking on her behalf.

Cherise Boothe in “Eureka Day” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

These blind spots, a standard ingredient of comic characters, are particularly glaring in Suzanne’s case. When Carina tells her that she didn’t homeschool her son for kindergarten but sent him to public school, Suzanne is mildly horrified. She also makes the assumption that Carina is not a “full pay” family.

There’s even something passive-aggressive about Suzanne’s show of concern for all viewpoints, a trait that becomes all the more conspicuous after a crisis erupts at the school. A mumps outbreak forces Eureka Day to temporarily close its doors.

Don informs the executive committee that the health department has issued a letter stipulating what parents must do for their child to return to school. The subject isn’t open for debate, but Suzanne is uneasy about how this letter is being “framed.”

She’s an advocate of parental choice when it comes to vaccines, not trusting the experts who have determined that only children who are vaccinated can return to school when there’s a risk of infection. She believes vaccines stand in the way of natural herd immunity.

Mia Barron, left, Rick Holmes, Cherise Boothe, and Camille Chen in “Eureka Day” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Meiko is less vociferous in her anti-vaccine stance than Suzanne, but she has her own skepticism about modern medicine and doesn’t want to be told what to do. When her daughter develops mumps, it becomes an emergency for Eli, who’s been having an affair with Meiko. The two arrange their assignations around playdates, and their kids were recently in contact.

Eli, who’s married but in a complicated open relationship situation with his increasingly resentful wife, would rather not have to choose sides in the vaccine mandate debate. But when his son gets sick after spending time with Meiko’s unvaccinated daughter, he finds he can no longer stay on the fence.

The well-programmed comedy hilariously runs its course in the leadership vacuum created by the school’s over-accommodating culture. Don is so worried about seeming to favor one parental faction over another that he allows Suzanne to become the dominant voice in the room.

The production, directed by Teddy Bergman, has a field day with the woke-run-amok ethos of Eureka Day, where kids at the school cheer the other team’s goals at soccer games. But Bergman’s approach is more schematic than Anna D. Shapiro’s Tony-winning Broadway revival.

Perhaps the urgency of the moment calls for a clearer moral stand, but the comedy has lost some nuance. On Broadway, Jessica Hecht made Suzanne seem totally oblivious to her own rage. She really believed that she was seeking consensus, tolerant of all perspectives as long as they didn’t impinge on her beliefs, the origins of which are poignantly related later in the play.

The fury of Barron’s Suzanne is much more on the surface. The humor is more direct — Barron can be very funny — but the debate is less trenchant. Bergman’s production, marred by blasts of jarring folk music between scene transitions, is a little too on the nose.

Boothe’s Carina, by far the strongest performance in the cast, is our rational surrogate in the play — a parent trying to fit in without betraying her intelligence or child’s welfare. I appreciated the way Holmes lets us come to our own conclusions about Don’s go-along-to-get-along style of running the ship.

Meiko is woefully underwritten, and Chen’s performance, while amusing when Meiko erupts, sometimes seems disconnected. Corddry refuses to play a tech industry cliché, but Eli, a bland creep, comes off as unnecessarily vague.

Bergman has trouble locating that sweet spot between jokey exaggeration and multidimensional authenticity. Comedy trades in types, but the cast could have benefited from more fine-tuning.

Perhaps that’s why the funniest scene in the play involves the live chat portion of a virtual meeting that’s organized for Eureka Day parents alarmed about the quarantine situation. Avatars square off against one another in a vaccine debate free-for-all that puts the lie to the school’s “community of respect” motto with uncensored savagery punctuated by missile-like emoticons.

“Eureka Day” will make you laugh, but how much this production will make you think is an open question.

A hopeful report about a potential blockbuster drug currently in development and news of an expansion of manufacturing capability helped push Eli Lilly (LLY 2.09%) stock skyward on Tuesday. Shares of the massive U.S. pharmaceutical company closed the day more than 2% higher in value, on a session when the S&P 500 index landed slightly in the red.

A quickened approval process

Reuters published an article speculating that orforglipron, Eli Lilly’s next-generation obesity drug currently in development, could earn Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval by the end of this year.

Image source: Getty Images.

The report was anchored by several analysts tracking Eli Lilly who believe a fast-track review process recently launched by the regulator could put orforglipron on pharmacy shelves very soon. Under the FDA’s Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher, the process for qualifying investigational drugs can be shorted to within 1-2 months. That’s well down from the roughly 10 months for a standard review.

The news agency quoted one of those analysts, Jefferies‘ Akash Tiwari, as saying that “We think orforglipron is a prime candidate for this pilot program as it treats a high-burden chronic condition and can be priced at parity.”

Virginia expansion

Meanwhile, Eli Lilly announced that it aims to construct a new manufacturing facility in Virginia. This factory, estimated to cost $5 billion, will concentrate largely on the production of antibody-drug conjugates, medications that are designed for delivery directly to affected cells in the body.

The Virginia plant is part of an assertive “capital expansion” program. Eli Lilly said it has devoted $50 billion to activities such as factory builds since 2020.