Merck ($MRK) podcast mentions
Um, I hate to do this. I have been recording all day today and now have to get to editing and processing everything I've recorded. Um, so I'm gonna have to start to begin to wrap things up here. Um, Axel, you mentioned gold. Um, I know that's a, uh, one of the many specializations of you and your firm there at Merck Investments. Obviously, a rate hike should weigh on the gold price because it makes real interest rates in theory larger. Gold and silver, they sort of sold off initially. I'm now looking at them in the after-hours futures. They're up a bit here. So I'm guessing, you know, like the rest of the world, precious metals traders sort of anticipated that Fed was going to hike here. What is your general outlook on the precious metals?
Adam Taggart · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · SPECIAL REPORT: Fed Hikes Rates! | Axel Merk · 2026-09-17And we as a country, or we as in Merck Investments? No, as a country. Okay.
Adam Taggart · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · SPECIAL REPORT: Fed Hikes Rates! | Axel Merk · 2026-09-17merckinvestments.com is our website. We have a newsletter. I can't talk about our investment products here, but merckinvestments.com, you can have links there. I'm active on Twitter @AxelMerk, where I muse about the markets. When the Fed does something, I tweet up a storm. And so lots of tweets today. Um, but, um, and I'm quite approachable, so you can engage me either on social media or send me a message through Merck Investments.
Axel Merk · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · SPECIAL REPORT: Fed Hikes Rates! | Axel Merk · 2026-09-17So for example, Alpa Romeo is the world's first thinking self-driving car. And by thinking, by reasoning, you don't need as much data as— you don't have to train on a few billion hours of road data because you could reason about it, break down the problem into, oh, I've seen this before. It's not exactly the same, but it's largely the same as that. And so Alpamayo, why is it necessary? Well, there's a whole bunch of car companies. Every car in the world is going to be autonomous. But beyond that, every agtech, every truck, every van, and most of them aren't big enough in scale to be able to build that whole stack. So I'll build an extraordinary stack for them. They do last mile adapting for their application. Now everything that moves in the future could be autonomous. If not for us building some of the biology models, the world wouldn't have it. The ESM2 protein language model, we created that. ESMFold, OpenFold, AlphaFold2, all the stuff with, with Q-Equivariant, All of that stuff, technology, wouldn't have existed if we didn't build it. One of my favorites, Proteina Complexa, synthesizing next generation proteins and its binding. It's groundbreaking stuff. We built that. We'll build that because Lilly needs it and Merck needs it and others need it and they don't have the capability to do it or they're not yet there. We can make a real contribution. I do everything out of need. I'm not trying to disrupt. I mean, we don't wake up in the morning, try to disrupt anybody, right? We just wake up in the morning, try to help everybody.
Jensen Huang · All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Jensen Huang: The Doomer Hoax, Superintelligence Is Here, and The Future of AI (ft. President Trump) · 2026-09-14Well, I am very excited as I see what's happening with AI as it pertains to healthcare, to put a little bit of a more positive follow-up to our earlier discussion. You know, This is a space where you're not maybe seeing as much of the flashy use cases of AI that we do in other industries. What AI is doing in healthcare is it is really helping to refine and optimize the long health processes of drug development, discovery, optimizing clinical trials. You know, it's not replacing doctors and scientists. It's helping companies develop, you know, commercialize, manufacture, and optimize really the entire timeline from drug discovery to approval, to getting it into the hands of patients at a much more favorable rate. I mean, you have to think about how the average drug, it can take over a decade, a couple billion dollars on average to bring a drug to market. 90% fail in later stage trials anyway. And so AI is really being used as an automation and data engine to attack a lot of the bottlenecks that have historically made drug development so slow. And you can see that everywhere from, you know, the big pharmaceutical companies that are leveraging AI models behind the scenes to biotech companies that are that are much more kind of upfront about the use cases for which they're finding, you know, value in AI. I mean, you know, Moderna is a great example, right? Obviously they're working on their cancer vaccine with Merck. This has been something that's gotten a lot of attention from investors recently. Well, they have their own, you know, system called Maestro that helps orchestrate these personalized vaccines. It reads a patient's tumor sequence, it predicts the best immune response. Crystal Biotech is another really interesting company. They make redosable gene therapies for a rare skin disease, and they are using AI and machine learning to run real-time quality control in their production lines. So seeing the way this technology shows up in really practical use cases, as someone who is following AI broadly but is also a healthcare investor, that's really exciting. And I think it creates a lot of opportunity for investors.
Rachel Warren · Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · AI Leaders Want to Slow Down Development For… · 2026-09-14Yeah. And, uh, you know, I've had a number of people on the program say that, but, but Axel Merck, who has been following the Fed closely for most of his career, has been hammering on that long before Warsh came into the chair and is, is somewhat hopeful that Warsh might actually bring us closer back to that, that period of time. Um, all right, let's—
Adam Taggart · Thoughtful Money with Adam Taggart · We're Going To Pay A Heavy Price For Creating A Generation Of Speculative Drunkards | Lance Roberts · 2026-09-12I think, I think a comp that I would give is like all of like kind of like the internet infrastructure companies. Like everyone who is doing fiber and internet and like, and CPU is in RAM. I would say that is like the closest comparable thing to data companies nowadays. Like you're building the foundations, like all the data company really is like Merck Corp, all those guys, they just go out and buy, like capture stuff from the real world and then give it to a lab, which isn't, you know, like if you're buying CPUs, you're just constructing stuff in the real world and giving it to like a large cloud to then like service their customers. So I think that would be the closest comparable thing that I can think of. There has been a question about the viability of these businesses. But I will say is that I think the viability of these businesses would be the exact same as the viability of, let's say, NVIDIA. I think for AGI, for ASI to come, there are only two bottlenecks right now. We have no bottleneck with architecture or compute or agents or anything. It's data and compute. Compute is the biggest bottleneck. But now we're going to have 10x more compute coming online in the next 2 years. So then compute even more becomes data. So because that is like, if you're scaling law pilled, and if you're pilled in all the ways that these AI labs are, then data is the actual bottleneck. Like the new DeepSeq model that came out last night, the reason that's like a crazy dominating model is because they spent all the time on amazing data. That's it. Like, all they did, like most of the time was on compute. Curating amazing data. That's pretty much all they did. But yeah.
Om Buddhdev · TBPN · YC Demo Day, Spoon = Bent (Again), iPhone Duo Reactions | Garry Tan, Om Buddhdev, Karen Serfaty, Antonio Li, Edward Ge, Alfredo Gonzalez · 2026-09-10But defense in fantasy is a bit different because you can also get upside from sacks, turnovers, and especially defense and special teams touchdowns. So for our stock market equivalent, I think that Merck's a good fit as a drug company. Merck's inherently defensive in nature. It does fine even in a bad economy. Good if the Fed chooses to jack up rates. Right. At the same time, it can also give you real upside, as we saw when Merck's partner Moderna put up some promising melanoma vaccine results. There's a reason Merck's now up 41% year to date. In terms of the NFL, that reminds me of the L.A. Rams defense. The only concern is age. The Rams have to do well this year because They're up. It's a ticking clock for them given that the team has so many older players. Merck, too, is racing against the clock to build a pipeline of new drugs that could offset some big upcoming patent expirations from their fantastic Keytruda oncology platform. Finally, we have to round out what our fantasy roster with a kicker. In fantasy football, you can get negative points if they miss extra points or field goals. So you really got to have someone with accuracy, but you can also get a nice bundle of points for a long field goal. So a kicker with range is a nice bonus. As I see it, a kicker is kind of like— it's like a good energy stock. It's like Chevron. It usually doesn't trade with the rest of the market because higher oil is bad for everybody else's business. Plus, it's got an excellent 3.4% yield. That's like a steady flow of extra point kicks. But as we've seen, there are times like this year where oil prices are rising and Chevron can give you great returns. So far this year, the stock is up nearly 40%. That's like a season when your kicker hits a couple of 60 plus-yard field goals and earns you a surprise win or two. A couple years ago, Chevron officially moved its corporate headquarters from California to Houston, Texas. So we think a good NFL analog is Houston Texans kicker, Kimi Fairbairn. He's the second best— Kimi Fairbairn, it's the hardest name to spell in the whole thing— he's second best kicker in fantasy football this year.
Jim Cramer · Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer · 'Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 9/8/26 · 2026-09-08I like Amgen. I think the doing a lot of good things. Look, the guys who know how to buy— I think that Merck is the company that knows how to make great acquisitions. They've done acquisition after acquisition to stop being dependent on Keytruda, and they've done a magnificent job. I don't think that they get enough credit.
Jim Cramer · Squawk on the Street · 9am Hour: OpenAI Urges Caution, Qualcomm & Amazon Partnership, Novartis’ Drug Trial Setbacks 9/8/26 · 2026-09-08Yeah, I think 30% is a, is a huge number and it feels impossible to imagine today, even in 2026, not that many of the world's drugs for patients, populations around the world are from China, but it's definitely set to change. If we look at the percentage of out-licensing deals of Chinese drug assets and pipelines to global markets signed with global multinational companies, the numbers have just been exponentially accelerating. So the often quoted impressive figures are something like in 2021 or 2020, 5, 6 years ago, it was Chinese out-licensing drug and biopharma deals were about 5%, the ones above $50 million. And then last year, so 5 years later, it jumped from 5% to 30%, which is huge. And then now this year, we're only about halfway through 2026, but also already in the first half of the year, it's 42%. So another 12-13% increase, which is more than 90% of what was there, the total last year. So the numbers of out-licensing deals are truly impressive. And you see these multinational companies, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck, and so on, sign huge, huge deals. In March of this year, when ex-Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the UK visited China, AstraZeneca signed the biggest global deal to date with CSPC, that was at $18.5 billion. So, you know, huge numbers. But I would say whilst the numbers represent assets and potential drugs, in biopharma, it is well known that the chances of success are always low. There's no predictions. This is biology, this is nature in medicine. And so perhaps 90% of those deals won't go anywhere. They will fail along the way. You know, some phase of the clinical trials and they will never come to market. But because of the momentum and the scale and the number and frequency of these deals, it means that, of course, some of them will go through to the final stages and will reach patients around the world. So I would say 30% sounds ambitious. I personally can't predict what a number might be, but, you know, it can be likely. And this is one of the reasons why I wrote my book. I just felt like there was not yet an accessible narrative focused on China and health, even though it's such an important and urgent sector.
Ruby Wang · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · China Decode: What's at Stake Ahead of Trump and Xi's September Meeting, and China's Biotech Surge · 2026-09-08Yeah, it's, it's, as I always say, oh, I love this story, but I do love this story. This is the story of the Yellow Fleet. The, as you're describing, this was, had, canal had closed before, it had closed Most parts of it had closed between 1967 and 1975 between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. I hope I have that right between Israel and Egypt in terms of the order. These 15 ships get stuck and the shipping industry has to respond. So how they respond is they then head to the Cape of Good Hope, which is Africa. That planning and having to do it remained consistent for decades. Shipping companies are really old. They've been— Merck and all, they've been around a really long time, over a century. Century in most cases. So they head to Africa because they got to deliver their goods, and they take into account cost and time and, and safety. It's, it's more dangerous to go that way, but they know how to do it under, under the worry that the Suez will close. And they don't know why, right? I mean, the boom— as I said, the boom could happen. Who would have thought in 2021 it would be the Ever Given, you know, turning the wrong way at the wrong moment and getting So the Ever Given shuts down the Suez. No one can— no ships can pass. It's not at all clear when it's going to reopen. As you said, it didn't look like they had their act together. It reopened within a week. But what you saw almost immediately, especially with the major companies that are part of this global supply chain economy, is they just shifted. They just did. And we didn't even notice it. I mean, there were disruptions, but they weren't disruptions of the magnitude that a shipping industry that was just backed up. At Suez would have been. And so they start heading to the Cape of Good Hope. The prices increase because it's more expensive, whatever. We can absorb that for some period of time. And so when people think about the Suez Canal and the Ever Given being stuck and the bulldozers are trying to go out there, "Oh God, what a disaster. What a disaster."
Juliette Kayyem · The Lawfare Podcast · Lawfare Archive: Juliette Kayyem on Dealing with Disasters · 2026-09-05This is a very different market from what we were dealing with just a week ago. Last Friday, our new Fed chief, Kevin Walsh, went on the warpath against inflation. And then this week, the war with Iran got explosive again, pushing up the price of oil. Now, all that means that bond yields are on the rise. When that happens, Wall Street loses faith in high-growth, expensive tech, even when major tech companies keep reporting spectacular earnings. Doesn't help that data centers have become pretty unpopular. This election year. So we've seen lots of money rotating out of expensive tech and going into sectors that really thrive when times are tougher, like healthcare. Which brings me to one of my absolute favorites, and that's Cardinal Health. That's a drug middleman that we own for the terrible trust— middleman I should have put in quotes because people like to call it that. Cardinal, along with McKesson and Sincor, the old Merck, Schwarzberg, are the three big drug distributors. Politicians from both parties love to criticize these guys, but all three stocks have been incredibly great long-term performers. Why? Because they perform a valuable service for the drugmakers. Cardinal and his compadres help handle the logistics side of the pharmaceutical industry. And within this group, Cardinal has been running circles around McKesson and Sakura. They consistently put up the best numbers because this company's gradually become less of a commoditized service provider and more of a specialized player. Higher multiple. Cardinal's been making major inroads with specialty pharma, meaning more complex drugs with unique handling requirements. And they made a big push into generics. At the same time, these guys have this small medical products distribution business, and lately they've been getting into more auxiliary businesses— at-home health solutions, nuclear medicines, patient services. These are areas with higher growth and higher margins than the traditional drug distributor business. Put it all together and Cardinal Health's been cleaning it up. After an odd pullback from early March through mid-May, fueled in part by a misunderstood quarter in April, the stock started rebounding. Stock went from hated to loved practically overnight. It had drifted below $180 at its lows and we bought some more for the Chapel Trust after the April quarter. Then by the end of June, it charged up to $240, now stands at $245.
Jim Cramer · Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer · Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 9/2/26 · 2026-09-02I— it's funny, I was noticing this morning, Jim, I mean, many of the names that we follow are up at least 20%. Merck has had a big up 30%. Even Pfizer is up 14%.
David Faber · Squawk on the Street · 9AM HOUR: Oil and Yields Watch, Dell Surges, Chevron CEO "First on CNBC" in Venezuela 9/2/26 · 2026-09-02Pfizer, Pfizer, 28%. I was going over with Jeff Buckley, but Chapel says maybe we should buy Pfizer. He said, why? I said, because it's Pfizer. Remember the old days? It's Pfizer. Yeah, but David, I've got to tell you, the Merck move was amazing. Yes. New drug.
Jim Cramer · Squawk on the Street · 9AM HOUR: Oil and Yields Watch, Dell Surges, Chevron CEO "First on CNBC" in Venezuela 9/2/26 · 2026-09-02Before Moderna's mRNA platform helped produce a COVID vaccine, the company was already working toward another goal: using mRNA to fight cancer. A decade later, that bet has reached a major milestone. A16Z general partner Jorge Khande sits down with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel following positive Phase 3 results from Moderna and Merck's individualized mRNA treatment for melanoma. It's the culmination of a project Moderna has been working on for roughly a decade. Stefan explains how Moderna takes a patient's tumor, sequences it against their healthy cells, identifies the mutations unique to that cancer, and uses that information to manufacture a personalized mRNA designed to teach the immune system what to attack. And because roughly 90% of the selected antigens differ from one patient to another, personalization isn't an edge case. It's fundamental to how the treatment works. They also get into the extraordinary operational challenge behind this. How do you manufacture thousands of different medicines, one patient at a time, quickly and reliably enough to make personalized medicine work at scale? And finally, they look at where the platform could go next, from other cancers to rare genetic and autoimmune diseases.
Speaker C · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02