Firstly, look at the chart.
It's got a classic smiley face formation; this is a very bullish indicator. Other stocks (which I'm not going to mention because it got my post removed last time) had a similar graph before its runup, and so did many other stocks with big run-ups recently.
Secondly, there is a DD written about it on this subreddit which wasn't written by ChatGPT. That is another clear indicator that this stock will do well, just like some others.
Thirdly, it's up 12% in the past week - decent momentum.
Fourthly, and perhaps more importantly, they are trading at an incredibly cheap valuation.
* Their TTM Net Income is $123 million, and this isn't one-time non-operating income; this is one-time operating income, and therefore more likely to recur in the future.
* In addition, they had $145 million in R&D expenses, which really shouldn't be considered expenses but rather investments, since R&D expenses can be turned off at any time.
This makes for a total of around $268 million. And when excluding R&D expenses, they have been profitable for a long time, and are still growing, but are down since 2021.
For comparison, their market cap is ~~$681 million~~ $745 million and their enterprise value is ~~$78 million~~ $125 million (I started writing this DD last week and it's grown 12% since then); if they continue making money at this rate, you will get your money back in 3 years or less - 33% annual growth. And likely much more, since the enterprise value is the more relevant metric; potentially 200% annual growth if they're aggressive enough with buybacks.
And if there's another major virus, it will likely make 2021 income levels ($959 million R&D expenses + $-486 million net income = $491 million earnings before R&D).
Fair value would probably be around 4x as high as it currently is, and from momentum it could potentially reach up to 2x fair value for a total gain of 8x.
What They Do:
CureVac is an mRNA vaccine company. Their main competitor is Moderna, which has a market cap of $17.5 billion and is unprofitable (although once you remove R&D expenses, they are admittedly much more profitable than CureVac, but the profit difference is not large enough to justify the difference in market cap and certainly isn't enough to justify the difference in enterprise value). mRNA technology demonstrated its potential during the pandemic, when it helped rapidly develop vaccines to combat a novel virus. CureVac failed to create an effective enough vaccine during the pandemic, which resulted in the large stock price declines over the past few years; the reason for this is that they used unmodified natural mRNA which was less stable in the body, whereas Moderna used a modified varient. They have changed their approach in recent years, resulting in a 1.45 billion euro deal with GlaxoSmithKline, a major British pharma company.
See [this article\(https://www.labiotech.eu/in-depth/curevac-gsk-deal-mrna/) for more information (I didn't write it but did use it for research).
Risks:
* Robert F Kennedy Jr - the risk is overblown because he's going to in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, not the FDA, and therefore will not have the authority to ban their vaccines
* Competition from Moderna - Moderna has a much larger cash pile so can spend more on research and development; however, CureVac can still get some market share and has some patents (though some of them have recently been invalidated); plus if necessary, they can borrow money for R&D.
Positions: 13% of my portfolio in CVAC shares