It should go without saying that marijuana stocks have been on a tear over the last year. One out of the 13 marijuana stocks with market caps over $200 million have gained on a trailing 1-year basis, and 66% of them have at least doubled in value.
The green rush has been re-gaining traction in a big way since the start of the way, due to legal sales numbers and the public’s perception of cannabis. According to both the 2016 Gallup poll and the more recent CBS News poll, an all-time high of participants that have responded — 60% and 61%, — want to see marijuana legalized nationwide.
With the acceptance of marijuana at all time high, marijuana stock investors fully expect that recreational and medical sales will continue to grow at a rapid rate.
If we look at it solely from a sales perspective, a recent Marijuana Business Daily report titled “Marijuana Business Factbook 2017” reported that U.S. sales are anticipated to expand by nearly 30% in 2017 to between $5.1 billion to $6.1 billion, with legal recreational and medical sales combined reaching an expected $17 billion by 2021. That’s a 300% growth rate over the 5-year span, which is why so many investors have marijuana stocks at the top of their watch-list. Here are 2 marijuana stocks that you should have on watch going into 2018.
GW Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: GWPH) – The goliath of marijuana stocks recently announced financial results for Q3 ended June 30 2017. GW is a canna biotech company that focuses on discovering, developing and commercializing novel therapeutics from its proprietary cannabinoid product platform.
“I am pleased to report the NDA submission process for Epidiolex is now underway with the final sections of the submission expected to be completed in October. With a clear view now towards our anticipated approval, we are making excellent progress with preparations to ensure a highly successful launch in 2018,” stated Justin Gover, GW’s Chief Executive Officer.
Over the last 4 trading days GWPH shares have fallen 18% but as the battle for mass legalization continues GWPH remains at the forefront for the first marijuana biotech to get acquired by a big pharma company.
CARA Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: CARA) is a canna-biotech company focused on developing and commercializing new chemical entities designed to alleviate pain and pruritus by selectively targeting peripheral kappa opioid receptors.
On August 3rd 2017, the company released its Q2 2017 financial results and stock surged over 11%. Since the results the stock price per share has re-traced 13.27%. But CARA still has a lot upside with the company has enough cash on hand to fund it’s operations until 2019.
“During the quarter, we continued to make good progress with our CR845 development programs in acute postoperative pain, chronic osteoarthritis pain and chronic kidney disease-associated pruritus. Importantly, we were very pleased to receive Breakthrough Therapy designation from the FDA for I.V. CR845 for the treatment of CKD-aP in hemodialysis patients, and expect to meet with the FDA in the third quarter of 2017 to finalize our pivotal program for this indication,” stated Derek Chalmers, Ph.D., D.Sc., President and Chief Executive Officer of Cara Therapeutics.
There’s a lot to look forward to as we come into the second half of 2017 in the rapidly growing marijuana industry. We’re especially seeing a lot of action and buzz with biotechnology companies that are using cannabis for their treatments, which is why in our opinion GW Pharma and CARA therapeutics should be on your watch-list going into the new year.
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