When it comes to the healthcare debate, let’s keep one obvious fact in mind: Expenses are out of control and must be reined in. That’s true with or without a massive reform bill.

And that plays right into the hands of Medidata Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: MDSO).

The company is a leading provider of electronic data capture (EDC) and clinical data management systems (CDMS). In laymen’s terms, it helps drug companies go from the Dark Age into the Digital Age.

And it’s a transformation that we desperately need. Here’s why…

Anyone For a Tedious, Time-Consuming Paper Trail?

Roughly 75% of all clinical trials – the most critical function of drug companies, yet also the biggest drain on resources ($45 billion, annually) – are done on paper.

That’s right. Even in today’s high-tech world, in three out of four clinical trials, information for each patient is literally recorded on pre-printed paper, specifically a case

Medidata Solutions: The One Healthcare Stock That’s Not Sucking Up to Washington

by Louis Basenese, Advisory Panelist

When it comes to the healthcare debate, let’s keep one obvious fact in mind: Expenses are out of control and must be reined in. That’s true with or without a massive reform bill.

And that plays right into the hands of Medidata Solutions Inc. (Nasdaq: MDSO).

The company is a leading provider of electronic data capture (EDC) and clinical data management systems (CDMS). In laymen’s terms, it helps drug companies go from the Dark Age into the Digital Age.

And it’s a transformation that we desperately need. Here’s why…

Anyone For a Tedious, Time-Consuming Paper Trail?

Roughly 75% of all clinical trials – the most critical function of drug companies, yet also the biggest drain on resources ($45 billion, annually) – are done

Wall Street “gurus” come and go, but in the case of Bob Farrell legendary status was achieved. He spent several decades as chief stock market analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. and had a front-row seat at the go-go markets of the late 1960s, mid-1980s and late 1990s, the brutal bear market of 1973-74, and October 1987 crash.

Farrell retired in 1992, but his famous “10 Market Rules to Remember” have lived on and are summarized below, courtesy of The Big Picture and MarketWatch (June 2008). The words of wisdom are timeless and are especially appropriate as investors grapple with the difficult juncture at which stock markets find themselves at this stage.

1. Markets tend to return to the mean over time When stocks go too far in one direction, they come back. Euphoria and pessimism can cloud people’s heads. It’s easy to get caught

Hundreds of economic and stock-market indicators exist, but many won’t be relevant – even if you could decipher them.  Here are a few stock market indicators that are both reliable and readable to everyday investors.

U.S. stocks just capped off their strongest two-week performance since 1938. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index is surging toward its third straight week of gains, something it’s done only three times since the bear market in U.S. stocks started 78 weeks ago.

And the Nasdaq Composite Index has erased its year-to-date losses and is now is up for the year.

The path of least resistance is now higher,” Miller Tabak & Co. LLC equity strategist Peter Bookvar told MarketWatch.com, citing such factors as not-as-bad-as-feared economic reports, optimism over Obama administration economic fix-it plans, and a recent jump in commodity prices that “has done

Global credit markets have led the downturn in equities since early 2007, and that reflects two thing in my experience, apart from the historic collapse in confidence and liquidity in derivative debt instruments initiated by the sub-prime debacle. Firstly, the collective intelligence of the fixed income markets exceeds that in equities by a margin; secondly, equity analysts are generally far better at P&L than balance sheet analysis. In the current environment, earnings forecasts can become academic overnight if insolvency risk has been underestimated, and that goes for the market as a whole as much as individual stocks. Right now, imputed credit market valuations on most blue chip US corporates are a third to a half of those in the stock market. Either corporate bonds are the buy of the century, or stocks are dangerously overvalued. Equity markets are still childishly obsessed with the silver bullet, one …