cvs got into this line of business when they bought caremark for $21 billion back in 2006 and after a bumpy start, it began to seem like this combination of pharmacy and pharmacy benefit manager could be incredibly lucrative for shareholders. look, for years that's exactly what happened. if you owned shares in cvs, you made a killing as the stock tripled from the summer of 2011 through the summer of 2015. it went from 33 bucks up to $112. but since then, the stock has gone into freefall. tumbling to $76 as of today, a that's a terrifying move when you consider that this is an $81 billion drugstore chain. stocks like cvs aren't supposed to experience such wild gyrations. before we can get our heads around the recent decline, though, you have to understand why cvs was such a terrific outperformer until about a year and a half out. the company was firing on all cylinders. the real standout here was indeed their pharmacy benefit manager, which consistently put up some excellent double-digit growth. at the same time, cvs spent years optimizing the drugstore business. for example, in 2013 t

and that would be by 2017, we will see costs will be around 20%, 19.5% if you use cvs caremark and of. that is significant. because unfortunately, the cost of the traditional drugs doesn't offset the costs that you then incur with specialty drugs. yes, sir? >> you are saying that we're going to get a 22% rise in the specialty drug area roughly? >> right. >> 21.. but the graph seems to be coming down for some reason. explain what that is. >> if you look across from 2013-17, you'll see that we started at a low point, because really specialty drugs started creeping into the trends somewhere around 2012-2013 and really hit in 2014, whenever the hepatitis c drugs came on and it just exploded since then. so what we're doing here, saying that costs won't increase, as much as it did in 2015, which was the high-cost year. it will still maintain a 20% growth or 20% change in costs. >> it reminds me of the federal budget. we have an increase that is not as much and we call it a decrease. >> that is correct. >> thank you. >> i'm still having trouble with that, 2014, 32. 4%. 2017 is 19.5%. it's mi

however, it was really the pharmacy benefit management division, the old caremark, that set cvs apart from its drugstore competition, who had to walgreens got into a huge spat with express scripts in 2012. for about six months, people couldn't get the prescription filled at walgreens. you had to go somewhere else if you wanted the insurers to cover the cost. that gave cvs a boost. right before cvs stock seemed to run out of gas, they raid two acquisitions that were wildly praised by analyst. the company announced it was buying omni care. that was a $12.7 billion deal. then a month later, cvs snapped up target store within a store pharmacies for $1.9 billion. in another transaction that was viewed positively. but from the summer of last year through this past may, the stock drifted gradually lower. six months ago, cvs reported a strong quarter, and the stock surged back up to $106. ever since then, though, the company has been put through the meat grinder, and its stock has become a real problem child of late. for years cvs had been the pbm of choice for california public employees ret