The J. P. Morgan Healthcare Conference (JPMHC) is an annual get together of pharma and biotech bigwigs in San Francisco. It’s considered common knowledge that stocks change in response to the speeches, deals, and data presented at the meeting. One article said that:
- “Biotech has historically outperformed the broader market during The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference” and
- “in the past 16 years, the NYSE Arca Biotechnology index (BTK), which measures the performance of 30 biotechnology firms, has outperformed the S&P 500 index by nearly 3 percent during JPMorgan’s conference.”
Given these claims I hypothesized that:
- Healthcare stock prices tend to fluctuate more during JPM week than any other week in the same year.
- The biotech sector outperforms the S&P 500 during JPM week more often than is expected by chance.
The analysis of these claims is performed in the .Rmd file in this repo. A summary of the conclusions from the analysis can be found at my website.