 maker facing fraud and racketeering charges. Amid a national opioid addiction crisis, John Kapoor, the founder of INSIS, Therapeutics and a group of his colleagues are accused of offering kickbacks for physicians who wrote large numbers of needless prescriptions for opioid products. Federal prosecutors in Boston accused the group of offering bribes to doctors who prescribed a highly addictive and potent opioid spray named subsist. The medication is meant really only for cancer patients in extreme pain. Most of those who received the prescriptions weren't cancer patients. The group is also accused of conspiring to mislead and defraud insurance providers who were reluctant to approve payment for the drug when it was prescribed for patients without cancer. After setting the $1 million bail for Kapoor, the judge included two requirements, the wearing of an electronic monitoring device and the surrendering of his passport. An Amazon has been granted approval to operate as a wholesale pharmacy in 12 states. Rumors have swirled in recent months over this very thing. And Amazon has kept very quiet. Joining me to discuss as Amazon steps over the threshold of pharmaceutical supply chain management is Melissa Armo, founder of the stock solution. Melissa, thank you so much. Big news. It was a bombshell yesterday. What were your thoughts when you first heard that news? Well, thanks so much for having me, Lindsay. Great to be here. I was really surprised. And I think the timing of it was spectacular because they had earnings reported last night for third quarter. So they absolutely leaked that news right before the earnings came out. And Amazon had a record, record-breaking day today. So it definitely helped the stock. So it helped the stock and obviously a lot of excitement. But major players in the drug distro game have been a little iffy, it seems. I mean, we saw this stock drop minutes after the report came out. Just take Express Scripts just as one example. From high of $61.95 a Wednesday, we saw a severe drop right after the news broke and spread around. It opened at $58.59. It's recovered to $62. Is this going to be a continuing trend for pharma stocks until we get more details on the full plan? Is it just going to be a bit manic? What do you say? Well, I think the interesting thing about this is that Amazon wants a piece of everything. So this is actually, while it's good for the stock, it's actually worse for the pharmaceutical companies. So it's going to have a worse effect on them than the good effect on Amazon, if you know what I'm saying. Right. CVS dropped even more today. It's had two really down days, two bearish days. Merck dropped today, Etna dropped today. And yesterday also it came out that there's rumors that CVS is going to purchase Etna. And so that might push through. I mean, nobody knows what's going to happen with that yet. But I think that Amazon has a great way of talking people into buying stuff from them because they make it so easy. They take away the friction. The interesting thing is that Amazon wants to get into all of the regulations that are involved with issue and drugs. You were just talking about that opioid crisis. You know, I mean, who are they going to hire pharmacists? Are they going to outsource it? On the call last night, on the earnings call last night, someone asked about Amazon. Are they going to be selling the drugs now in whole food stores where you would go in and pick up your drugs at a whole food store? So all of these things are possibilities for the future. But I think it's going to have a negative effect because Amazon cuts into the competition. And really, as far as I'm concerned, stock wise and company wise, Amazon doesn't really have any competition. They are in a category alone by themselves. So expect them to continue growing. But this is the first wave of it. And as you said, they got licensed to issue pharmaceuticals in 12 states. They're going to end up getting licensed in every state. Yeah. Of course they will. And you know, I think you and I were watching this come out at the same time last night. And I immediately started watching CVS, Express Scripts, all of it to see how far down it would go. I was surprised it recovered. For those invested right now in companies like Walgreen, CVS, and Express Scripts, what kind of advice would you give them? Should they be worried about price fluctuations that much? Are we going to see it drop off the charts now? I mean, these people can't just go by Amazon right now. It's too expensive. Should they just dump these stocks or wait it out? Wait to see what the plan is. You know what? I think right now, if you look at the charts, Walmart is still a very strong chart. CVS is starting to break off. The chart doesn't look so great in CVS. So I'm not bullish on CVS whatsoever. Walmart is still a very bullish chart. They offer other products and services. CVS is right now looking bearish. However, like I said, if they end up buying it, it could change. But the thing is that with Trump running through this whole health care system, no one knows what's going to happen in 2018 with the whole Obamacare. So I would say it's a very risky stock. Any of the stocks, any of the health care stocks, the health care sector, all of it, pharmaceuticals, health care, all of it are risky investments right now. I'm not bearish really on any of those charts. I'm not bullish on any of those charts. I'm bearish on those charts right now. Right. OK. So these rumors, though, have been going around for a while. Any solid indicators early that Amazon was going to move in this direction? We'll say one thing. When Amazon reported last quarter in July, July 27th, then July 28th, the stock gap down. And it traded in a solid range for about three months. Now I'm a technical person. I look at the charts, it was not moving. Market kept making new highs. We made record-breaking highs in the NASDAQ today. So in that range, it was a wait-and-see period. This was a really important, really important earnings report for Amazon last night, not just because of the news that was leaked yesterday in reference to getting into the pharmaceuticals, but because they had bought Whole Foods. So this was the first report since they bought Whole Foods. And I'm telling you that Amazon is higher. The health care stocks, like I said, I'm not bullish on those. I'm bearish on those that don't look so great. But Amazon was trading in a range for literally three months, which was highly unusual, mainly because the stock moves a lot, has a lot of volatility normally. And the market was hitting new highs almost every day. I mean, if you look at the last three months of the market, almost every day the markets were making new highs and Amazon wasn't going with it. And Amazon is still a strong stock. I mean, it was even when it was basing, but it finally broke out. But it just goes back to what I was saying that, you know, Amazon continues to innovate. One of the reasons I think the stock broke out today and ran up, so it had such a big move. And it's higher, by the way. It's higher, even probably in the next week, because next week is a big week for the market, too, because Apple reports next week, Facebook reports next week, Alibaba reports next week. So other stocks, Google reported last night with Amazon, but other stocks in the sector report next week, too. So really big names. So expect the market and Amazon and Google to continue higher into the next week. You know, I've got to ask. You mentioned the pharmaceuticals and healthcare stocks. Haven't these guys realized that where Amazon has strengths, which is lack of friction, like you mentioned simplicity, that people are hungry for that in the pharmaceutical supply chain as well and they should have gotten on board with creating some sort of an easy storefront for drugs? It seems like they were just waiting. I know. I mean, who's to say? I mean, actually, you know, the ownership of Amazon, they're highly intelligent. They're very sophisticated people and they're making all the right choices. They're out there. They're ahead of the game. They're forward thinking. You know, it's probably going to come to a day where you know how it is with the Alexa and you just say you want something and you say, oh, I want more paper towels and it orders it. Eventually, it's going to be something in your car or in your refrigerator where it just automatically orders whatever you need from Amazon when you're all out. I mean, they are just the greatest innovators. Not only do they make it easy and take away the friction like a set of buying, but they take away the thought processes. Everybody's busy. Everyone is busy. And so the problem with CBS is they have too many brick and mortars. They haven't made it easy enough to do things like Amazon online. I think probably the thing with that is really going to change the game for them because getting into the insurance, but right now, ever since you look at the stocks previous high in CBS and a lot of those ones in the healthcare sector, the last time they made new highs was 2015. I mean, we're talking like two years ago. So Amazon made brand new highs today. The market did. Any stock that is not hitting over and making brand new all-time highs right now with this market is not bullish in my opinion. So that's why I was saying CBS, it ran down for two days. Merck ran down today too. These things, if you're long them and you're still long them, you know, I don't think that they're great holds. I think they got to do something and maybe the buyout of that know will be it for CBS. But when you're looking at Amazon as a competitor, no matter what thing you're doing, whether it's the food industry, whether it's pharmaceuticals, any of that stuff, it's they're hard to beat. I mean, they had the cheapest prices. They got free shipping. They got the prime days, the specials. It's hard not to sound like an advertisement for them when you talk about everything they're doing. I know prescription drugs. It's hard not to because you're literally listing a litany of things people don't want to have to do is go out to the store in the middle of the night and get something, refill a prescription on a Sunday at five o'clock. And so I think it'll be interesting to watch the movement in pharmaceuticals in the next six months as folks try to ramp up an approach to this and not really know where that's gonna come from. But amazing news. Go ahead. Well, I was gonna say you were saying watch for the next six months. These charts cannot lag. I'm talking about the healthcare sector, okay? Not the tech stocks. The healthcare sector cannot continue to lag while the market keeps going like this every second. It can't, that's not what you wanna see. That's the opposite of what you wanna see. So I'm just saying, if you wanna look at the next six months you watch these things going into 2018 or the next earnings for these stocks, they gotta get their butts moving higher. Otherwise, if the market keeps going and these stocks are lagging, why would you wanna own them? Why wouldn't you wanna sell your shares if you own these healthcare stocks? And then why wouldn't you wanna buy something like Amazon? If you can afford it at that point, thank you so much. So we gotta bring you in to follow this story with us because it is fascinating stuff. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Melissa Armo, founder of the Stockswish LLC. Thank you very much. Thanks.