Market Tips:Allergy and Speedy Hire

Allergy Therapeutics yesterday passed a significant landmark in recruiting 1,000 hayfever sufferers to late stage trials of its Pollinex Quattro jab. With summer looming it had only a few weeks to set up the study. Failure could have put the project back a year.

Tests will be carried out on people allergic to grass pollen, though it is also developing a vaccine against ragweed spores, responsible for the vast majority of hayfever cases in the US. Pollinex is now on course for launch in 2009.
AT reckons it has the edge over existing treatments. Recently launched Grazax requires patients to take a pill a day for three years at a total cost of £2,500. The alternative is a course of 50 injections.
Pollinex, although administered by hypodermic, requires only four jabs.
The market for hayfever cures and potions is an astonishing £6bn in the US alone. Brokers value the shares at up to 260p. They closed up 6p at 120½p.
1-yr share performance: +21% Verdict: Not to be sneezed at
Speedy Hire is a steady bet
For any company to launch its biggest acquisition coupled with a £54m fundraising and see its shares rise is a tribute to its stock market credibility.
Speedy Hire plans to pay £115m cash for Hewden Tools, part of the Hewden Stuart plant hire group now owned by Finning of Canada.
Half the cost will be raised by placing shares at 1250p. Issuing more paper normally depresses the price, but Speedy rose 35p to 1275p.
It forms a group with 100,000 customers and more than 540 outlets, but still less than 10% of the UK market.
Broker Altium reckons Speedy is paying 4.9 times operating profits, well below the eight times paid for HSS this week.
It expects earnings per share of 79p this year, putting the shares at 16 times.
One-year share price performance: +46% Verdict: Could go higher, but it may not be speedy.