Ionis Pharmaceuticals
IONS on Nasdaq. Ionis Pharmaceuticals sells RNA medicines to patients with serious diseases. Market value $9.0bn.
Not on tonight’s list. It failed one of the two tests; the numbers are below.
For every $100 of what the whole company costs, it produced $-3.55 of spare cash last year. A savings account pays about 4.
The filings do not give us enough to work this out.
Each dollar kept in the business earns -18 cents a year. Above 10 is good.
Five years of cash, in billions
| Revenue | $440m | $152m | $325m | $227m | $203m |
| Operating margin | -6.9% | -270.1% | -109.0% | -209.7% | -187.7% |
| Debt to equity | n/a | 2.05 | 3.21 | 2.04 | 2.72 |
| Shares outstanding | 0.14bn | 0.14bn | 0.14bn | 0.15bn | 0.16bn |
Health checks
- Free cash flow positive1 of 5 years
- Accounting checksSkipped: company is not yet profitable
- Debt2.72× equity
- Revenue growth, five yearsShrinking, 17.6% a year
- Buying back its own sharesNo, 13% more shares since 2021
Dates
Funds that own it
| Manager | Value | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Tweedy Browne | $181m | Held |
| Gotham Asset Management | $10m | Added 23% |
From 13F filings for the quarter ending 30 June 2026. These are reported 45 days late and only show long positions.
Insiders
We do not track insider filings for this company yet.
What could go wrong
Cheap for a reason is the question the numbers cannot answer. Whether the price already reflects the risks is what the deep dive is for.
The deep dive
Everything above is arithmetic on public filings. The deep dive reads the last ten years of annual reports, the proxy statements, and the earnings calls, then argues the case the way Buffett, Klarman, and Hohn would, and checks every claim against the source.
- What the business is worth, as a range, and the margin of safety at today’s price
- Prices to start buying, buy, and buy hard
- The three things that would make this a mistake
- Every number footnoted to the filing it came from
Your first deep dive is free.
Not advice. Numbers on this page come from SEC filings and are updated each night; the five-year figures are rounded.