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"I don't think that there really is any such thing as a widows-and-orphans stock anymore," said Chris Orndorff, head of equities at Payden & Rygel, the investment management firm based in Los Angeles. Stocks are simply more volatile today and many industries are less regulated, he said.

Pfizer's Plunge Will Have Side Effects for Investors By PAUL J. LIM THERE was a time not so long ago when shares of major drug makers like Merck or Pfizer were considered the modern equivalents of the old-fashioned "widows and orphans" stocks. In other words, investment advisers felt that these shares were safe enough to entrust with anyone's assets, without much concern for diversification. Who can blame them? For a long stretch in the 1990's, after the health care reform debacle in the early days of the Clinton administration, drug stocks went on a tear. "It was a charmed group," said Herman Saftlas, senior investment officer and pharmaceutical analyst at Standard & Poor's. Mr. Saftlas noted that in the mid- to- late 1990's, the earnings of drug companies were growing faster than profits for the S.& P. 500 as a whole, and their dividends were rising more quickly as well. You can't beat that combination. Indeed, S.& P. maintains a list of what it calls dividend aristocrats - companies that have managed to increase their dividend payments every year for the last 25 years. There are only 58 companies in the S.& P. 500 that make the cut today - and five of them are major drug manufacturers. But the market's violent reaction last week to troubling news from Pfizer highlights the underlying danger of assuming that there is such a thing as a can't-miss blue-chip industry - like Big Pharma - let alone a can't-lose stock. Pfizer's shares, for example, fell more than 11 percent on Friday after a clinical trial of its blockbuster painkiller Celebrex in cancer treatment showed increased risk of cardiovascular damage. That shaved about $24 billion in Pfizer's market capitalization in a single day. Someone pass the Zoloft. Pfizer's troubles come in the wake of a similar crisis for its rival, Merck, which pulled the painkiller Vioxx from the market after a study showed that the drug also led to increased risk of heart attacks. Unlike Merck, however, Pfizer has not recalled its drug. "I don't think that there really is any such thing as a widows-and-orphans stock anymore," said Chris Orndorff, head of equities at Payden & Rygel, the investment management firm based in Los Angeles. Stocks are simply more volatile today and many industries are less regulated, he said. Investors who think that the Vioxx and Celebrex news is simply an aberration in an otherwise healthy pharmaceutical industry may need to reconsider. In addition to well-reported problems in filling depleted pipelines with profitable new drugs, the industry faces other uncertainties, including Medicare's impact on pharmaceutical prices and major soul-searching at the Food and Drug Administration, Mr. Saftlas said.