🚨 LLY: The Foundayo bull case requires assuming people don't fuck 🚨

***Not financial advice.***

Listen up degens. I'm here to tell you the entire bull case for Lilly’s Foundayo rests on a single unspoken assumption: **nobody in the target demographic is having sex.**

**The facts:**

1. Oral Wegovy is straight up more effective than Foundayo. \~14% vs \~11% weight loss at max dose (I know there’s a lot of different numbers and I don’t care – It’s a real, nice and meaningful gap).
2. The injectable GLP-1 market is kinda old people. These are postmenopausal women and middle-aged dudes with metabolic syndrome. They signed up for needles, cold chain, and insurance fights. They have demonstrated they don't give a shit about friction.
3. The pill market is different. Younger. Lower BMI. Price-sensitive. Needle-averse. Convenience-maximalist. This is where Foundayo's growth has to come from.
4. Here's the kicker nobody is pricing in. Foundayo's FDA label requires women on oral birth control to either switch to non-oral contraception OR use condoms for 30 days after starting AND 30 days after each dose escalation. That's 3-6 months of continuous backup contraception to reach max dose.
5. Oral Wegovy has no such warning. Semaglutide was directly studied for oral contraceptive interaction. No clinically meaningful effect. Zero friction ;-)

**The thesis:**

Imagine you're a 32-year-old woman on the pill. You want to lose 20 pounds. You have two options:

* Oral Wegovy: Take it in the morning, wait 30 min to eat (you already skip breakfast anyway). \~14% weight loss. No change to your birth control.
* Foundayo: Take whenever you want. 11% weight loss. Also: use condoms for the next 3-6 months. Every time your doctor bumps your dose, the 30-day clock resets. Tell your boyfriend that his cucumber will be residing in a wet plastic bag for 6 months.

**Which one do you pick?**

This is not a hard question. This is the easiest A/B test in pharma. Lilly is saying that their products add “convenience”. However, that’s only if you are a male, menopausal, or don’t like sex.

I spun up a Jupyter Notebook, found some demographic data (birth control usage, age of GLP1 patients, gender of the patients), and did some calculations:
My best guess is that 10-15 percent of the potential patients will be affected when you factor in that the mean age of the users will be lower for the pill. That is a huge number in my humble opinion… Also, because I don’t factor in the narrative aspect of this problem: Lilly is trying to brand themselves as the “convenient” choice - but they could very well end up as the “sad-sausage-boyfriend” choice.

**Why this isn't priced in:**

Clinical analysts read efficacy tables. Commercial analysts build models. Nobody at a bank has the job of considering the sexual aspect. Maybe they should hire a Chief Friction Analyst?

The BCP warning is in the label. The efficacy gap is in the trials. The demographic skew is in the claims data. It's all public. Go look.

**Catalyst:**

Q1 earnings April 30. Watch the early Foundayo script data. If Novo's oral semaglutide is specifically winning the young female segment - not just winning in aggregate - the thesis plays out over the next 2-3 quarters.

**TL;DR:**

Lilly's bull case on Foundayo requires the marginal patient in its growth segment to be a woman who is either (a) not having sex, (b) already on an IUD, or (c) willing to use condoms for half a year instead of just taking the better-performing Novo pill. Pick one.

**Position: Long NVO. No position in LLY.**

***I can't read. The FDA label gave me PTSD. Yes, I’m a chatbot paid by Novo Nordisk. Yes, my numbers are all wrong. No, I'm actually not a bag holder!***