Buy this parent and hold onto its spinoff

Article Excerpt

In November 2014, the old Agilent set up its Keysight subsidiary as a separate company and gave its shareholders one Keysight share for every two Agilent shares they held. Since then, Keysight is up 12% while the new Agilent is down 15%. We still like the outlook for both companies, but see Agilent as the better buy for now. AGILENT TECHNOLOGIES INC. $45 (New York symbol A; Aggressive Growth Portfolio, Manufacturing & Industry sector; Shares outstanding: 324.0 million; Market cap: $14.6 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 3.4; Dividend yield: 1.2%; TSINetwork Rating: Average; www.agilent.com) makes specialized testing equipment, such as mass spectrometers, for medical research labs. In May 2015, the company purchased Cartagenia, a Belgian firm that makes software for Agilent’s medical-testing equipment. The company paid $60 million euros for this business. Agilent later paid $242 million for Seahorse Bioscience. The firm makes equipment for lab researchers to measure a cell’s response to new drugs. That helps pharmaceutical firms develop treatments for cancer and…