The 15 Most-Watched Life-Sciences Stocks

People watch stocks for different reasons -- they're waiting for a dip in price, watching for a specific catalyst, gathering all the news and information that might affect stocks they already own, or considering a sell. Regardless of their motivation, we can better understand market sentiment by seeing who's watching what. With the Fool's free My Watchlist service, we have tens of thousands of people telling us the businesses that have, for whatever reason, piqued their interest.

With this data we have come up with a new metric, watch interest, to inform investors what stocks their peers keep tabs on in each industry. In the case of the life-sciences industry, watch interest is the percentage of people keeping an eye on life sciences stocks in general who are specifically watching each company. By looking at what stocks people are most interested in within an industry, you can get ahead of the curve by finding hot stocks that you might have otherwise overlooked.

The most-watched life-sciences stock is ...
Looking at the aggregate data, we see that Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A  ) is above the rest in terms of watch interest and for good reason. As CAPS player sintellectualres wrote last month:

Things need to be measured. Agilent is the measurer. In a world of technology and innovation, low tolerances are key, and Agililent ensures.

Here are the rest of the top 15 most-watched companies in the industry, and their watch interest, along with the stocks' CAPS rating to show the sentiment of our investing community.

Rank	Company	Market Cap (Millions)	CAPS Rating (out of 5)	Watch Interest
1	Agilent Technologies	$12,735	***	13.8%
2	Illumina (Nasdaq: ILMN  )	$6,597	****	10.1%
3	Pacific Biosciences of California (Nasdaq: PACB  )	$347	****	9.5%
4	Sequenom (Nasdaq: SQNM  )	$582	***	6.9%
5	Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO  )	$20,552	*****	5.9%
6	Techne (Nasdaq: TECH  )	$2,675	*****	5.3%
7	Life Technologies (Nasdaq: LIFE  )	$7,563	***	4.3%
8	Pharmaceutical Product Development (Nasdaq: PPDI  )	$3,022	*****	3.6%
9	Harvard Bioscience	$128	*****	3.5%
10	Affymetrix (Nasdaq: AFFX  )	$336	**	3.4%
11	BioDelivery Sciences International	$105	***	2.3%
12	Waters (NYSE: WAT  )	$7,127	****	2.0%
13	PerkinElmer (NYSE: PKI  )	$2,537	*****	2.0%
14	Covance (NYSE: CVD  )	$3,103	****	1.5%
15	ICON (Nasdaq: ICLR  )	$1,221	*****	1.5%

Sources: The Motley Fool, Motley Fool CAPS.

Whether you're keeping an eye on the industry stalwarts like Agilent or are watching an up-and-comer like Harvard Bioscience, it pays to watch. We can help you keep tabs on your companies with My Watchlist, our free, personalized stock tracking service. Get started now!