5. Understanding the Risks of Healthcare Investing

Biotech investing is hard and risky. Most biotech companies fail. Biotech stocks are notoriously volatile. They are not for the risk averse and certainly not a place to invest money you need in the near future.^[1] It is hard to predict which biotech companies will succeed. Within this tough investing environment, investors benefit from understanding the drug development and approval process and other factors that affect the value of the stocks of publicly traded biotech companies and their chances of success. To access this market and minimize the great risks, investors need to invest in baskets of biotech stocks—and ETFs make it easy to do. (The various ETFs are covered in Chapter 6, “Investing in Healthcare ETFs.”)