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Stockwatch: Get Ready For Pharma's Predictable Half-year Surprises

 
• By John Hodgson

It is coming up to half-year results season and two things are entirely predictable: there will be many surprises and hardly any of them will be good.

Starting this week with Novartis AG, Johnson & Johnson and Roche followed next week by Eli Lilly & Co., GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Bayer AG , AstraZeneca PLC, Sanofi and Merck & Co. Inc. , the pharmaceutical majors will roll out their big wheels to tell investors how things have been going in the first half of the year and how forecasts of just six months ago need to be tweaked in the light of reality.

Results seasons traditionally are turbulent: it is not a coincidence that when CEOs open their mouths to express naked financial truth, more investors than usual change their minds about the wisdom of holding shares in drugs companies. On the day Alex Gorsky announced J&J's 2015 full year results back in January, for instance, 19 million J&J shares changed hands, over three times as many as on an average day

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