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Results from two healthcare giants out this morning. Let's take a look at Pfizer posting second quarter revenue and earnings above expectations and raising its full-year outlook. Merk also topping estimates in the second quarter. They raised their full year sales guidance. The company did however trim its adjusted profit guidance here. There you're taking a look at shares of MRK, Merck and Company down by about three and a half percent right now. While we're on Merk, I'll stay there for a hot second. Here is I was taking a look at some of the segments and it's really kind of two core segments that you think about with this business. One is the pharmaceutical segment where they did see growth of 7% year-over-year. And then the other is essentially what they call their animal health business, which we all hope the animals do well, but at the end of the day, that was up by about 2% year-over-year. Coming back to pharmaceutical, it was really just driven by this growth in oncology, cardiovascular, and interestingly vaccines, partially offset by some of the declines in diabetes and virology in this most recent quarter.

Yeah, their blockbuster cancer drug, Keytruda strong sales there, really helping um Merk the most recent quarter. But again, when you take a look at the stock reaction here in pre-market trading, we are seeing some red on the screen and that has to do with Brad, like you were saying that profit outlook, the fact that they lowered that, they're coming in, a bit of a surprise here to the street, they lowered it on acquisition costs, and also saying that the sales of their HPV vaccine Gardasil missing Wall Street uh projections here. So that's part of the reason that we are seeing lower profit guidance coming out from Merk. Flipping it over to Pfizer because we are seeing a bit of strength there and this was really something that the street have been waiting for for quite some time. When you take a look at Pfizer's most recent results, a key worry here on the street over the last several quarters was declining sales when it comes to COVID products. So when you take a look at these results, the company has been working to cut costs. They've been scrambling to stabilize their business, and it looks like they are starting to win back investors with their shift in strategy. What was driving this quarter? You've got M&A, also that new product pipeline. That was enough to offset some of the decline that we still continue to see in their COVID business. So when it comes to the calls and what investors are looking for going forward, a lot of that is going to focus on some of that momentum from their M&A, some of that new product pipeline, and whether or not it's going to be able to continue to offset some of the declines and the weakness that we have seen now for a couple quarters in their COVID product business.

Yeah, really interesting. I think you hit the nail on the head here. Just taking a look at the longer-term chart here, year-to-date. Hopefully, and a lot of investors in this name perhaps hope that the trough is purely baked in at this point that we saw back in late April. And so now going forward from here, a larger question of where they can point investors' attention out to the future, especially if you do have to see even more of the acquisitive mindset from this larger industry and Pfizer and Merk, two of those names that have had an acquisition rich history. So if you see more of that capital have to get deployed in order to make sure they're shoring up more intellectual property so that they can build out their business from there, that's one of the headwind risks. But at least as of right now, perhaps that's already been baked in from what the company's communicated to investors and perhaps settling in on just making sure that the acquisitions that they have made are accretive to the business, at least for these next 12 months here at this juncture.