Realising the loss is worth doing regardless of what you think of Novo — it does not depend on the investment view at all. Whether the money then goes back into Novo is a genuinely close call, and the number that would settle it arrives in nine days.
A $52,522 realised loss on a $50,000 position, because the loss per share is larger than the share price. Worth $7,900–12,500 gross depending on bracket. Doing nothing forgoes it for no reason — that is the one branch that is clearly wrong.
+4.4% a year after tax against +2.3% for cash. A real if unexciting premium on a 0.36-beta defensive name. Redeploying elsewhere only wins if you have a specific alternative in mind — "something better" is not one.
The two are separable, which is the whole trick. You can harvest the loss and keep the position by selling and buying back 31 days later. So the tax benefit is identical either way and tells you nothing about whether to stay invested. It only tells you not to sit still.
Price broke, not demand. US sales fell 11% in Q1 on lower realised prices, but oral Wegovy did nearly double its expected revenue in its first quarter and passed 3 million prescriptions by June. Novo lost the injectable share war to Eli Lilly — 60.5% to 39.1% by end-2025 — but is currently outselling Lilly's rival pill roughly 7.5 to one on weekly scripts.
Prices fall on 1 January 2027, and that is real: a Medicare negotiated price of $274, a $245 most-favoured-nation price, and a list cut to $675. But these apply to different channels rather than stacking, and Novo's realised net price is already near $569 after rebates — so the commercial cut is closer to neutral than the headline suggests.
Medicare started paying for obesity drugs on 1 July 2026. The GLP-1 Bridge gives roughly 3.8 million eligible beneficiaries a $50 copay, runs through the end of 2027, and covers both of Novo's obesity products but only one of Lilly's.
It comes from the same November 2025 deal that set those price cuts. Quoting the price side as settled fact while omitting the volume side was the single biggest error in the original analysis — the bear case rested on the reset being unoffset, and it is not.
Toward selling: US realised price falls again on 5 August; the Bridge is not renewed past 2027; Lilly's retatrutide lives up to its Phase 2 data when it files in early 2027. Toward holding more: realised price flattens; Bridge uptake runs ahead of expectations; CagriSema approves cleanly in Q4.
The honest summary is that this is close, and the first version resolved a close position with a confident verdict by making four errors that happened to point the same way. That pattern is worth more attention than the conclusion it produced.
Twenty slides: the scenario model benchmarked against published consensus, the 2027 pricing arithmetic by channel, the Medicare Bridge, the patent timeline, every analyst target marked by whether it could be confirmed at the issuing bank, and a corrections log.
A first version of this analysis concluded sell. It was then put through an independent adversarial review — a separate pass, with no knowledge of the model, instructed to attack the conclusion rather than confirm it. The review found four errors, and all four happened to point the same way:
It also missed the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge entirely — live three weeks before the original was written, and directly relevant because the bear case rested on the 2027 price cuts being unoffset.
Corrected, the sell case does not hold, and the recommendation above is the result. Four errors leaning the same direction is not four mistakes; it is a model fitted to a conclusion, which is worth knowing about a piece of analysis regardless of what it concludes. The full log is on the final slide of the deck.