Back in May, I bought some Moderna. At the time, the AI/tech trade was just starting to get going, and most of the attention was still in the obvious place. Semis, memory, AI infrastructure, all of it was working. But MRNA had started quietly retaking key levels and basing out higher, so I took a shot.

The read was not wrong, but the timing was early. Moderna then took a lovely little trip through chop city before finally trading to where it is today.

That is usually the cost of straying too far from the current action. The market does a pretty good job of showing traders where the focus should be, and fighting that too early can be expensive.

But when price keeps speaking, it becomes hard to ignore.

A trend usually does not announce itself all at once. It starts with quiet repair, higher bases, reclaimed levels, and volume slowly improving while nobody really cares yet. Then, if the move is real, the narrative eventually catches up. By the time the megaphone shows up, the market is usually already much higher and bigger players have already taken large positions.

Over the last few weeks, biotech and biotech-adjacent healthcare names have started acting a lot better while the AI trade has become more selective. Earlier this month I started posting about it to Stable members in the morning updates.

I should state, I do not think AI is dead, or that semis are done forever. I think the easy phase of that trade, where anything attached to AI could work, has probably matured into a much harder phase where the market starts asking who the actual winners are. That is usually when capital starts looking for the next clean pocket of growth. Right now, biotech is starting to check that box. A lot of these names were dead money for a long time, but recently they have been retaking technical levels, breaking out of cleaner bases, and starting to see better volume expansion. That matters because the story is not just improving, the tape is finally starting to confirm it.

This tweet captures such an important point. The natural progression from the looksmaxxing trend is healthmaxxing. People spent the last few years obsessing over looking better, feeling better, losing weight, optimizing hormones, fixing sleep, and tracking every metric they can get their hands on. The next version of that is not just looking better. It is living longer, catching disease earlier, and using better medicine before things become irreversible.

There is no real point in being wealthy if you cannot live longer, look better, or improve the quality of the years you actually have. That sounds dramatic, but it is probably the most obvious consumer truth in the world. Once people have money, they spend more of it trying to buy time, health, and optionality.

This is where AI starts to matter in a more serious way. I do not think the thesis should be that AI magically replaces drug development. That is too clean and probably wrong. The better thesis is that AI helps speed up the front end of biology: drug design, protein modeling, genomics, diagnostics, trial selection, and eventually cell therapies. Over time, the goal is to make fatal diseases more manageable, catch cancers before they spread, and identify risk before it turns into something much worse.

The market loves a story when the charts are broken. It just usually does not pay you for it. The difference now is that some of these names are no longer just stories. HIMS, MRNA, ABSI, CMPS, ABCL, and GALT are all on my screen because the group has started to repair technically. Some are reclaiming major levels, some are breaking out, and some are beginning to show the kind of volume that tells you new attention is coming into the space.

That does not mean the move should be chased blindly. In fact, once a theme becomes more obvious, the better trade is usually not to pile in after the first big move. The better gameplan is to identify the leaders, see which ones hold up best on weakness, and then look for the first real washout or controlled pullback that gives you a cleaner entry.

That is especially true in biotech because the group can move violently both ways. These are not all the same kind of businesses. Some are real revenue stories, some are platform stories, some are trial or headline names, and some are mostly sentiment, and some are the equivalent of high school science fair projects. So the focus from here is not 'buy biotech.' It is find the names that are leading, find the names with real volume, and then wait for the market to give a better pitch.

I am not going to pretend I am the person you want doing a deep dive into the science or drug pipelines of every biotech name. Most of these names have some kind of catalyst attached right now, but for me the first filter is still price. I want to see whether the market is actually arriving and validating the idea.

“Ask the market about the market”

If the story is real, it usually starts showing up in the tape first. Reclaimed levels, higher bases, volume expansion, relative strength. The fundamentals and narrative can come later, but the technicals often lead the way.

Charts are bullish, and all averages across higher timeframes are supportive. Average daily ranges and relative volume are all also picking up, which is exactly what you want to see whether you are trading intraday or over multiweek timeframes. Moderna as an example cleanly broke out of the 2026 range and retested it before pushing higher.

The options activity has also been adding to the case. I do not want to overcomplicate this because most people do not need to be options experts to understand the signal. The simple version is that we have seen meaningful bullish call buying across a handful of biotech and healthcare names, including QURE, SLS, KYMR, VKTX, TENX, MRNA, ABSI, and HIMS.

Some of the more interesting activity has been in longer-dated calls, which can matter because it suggests people are not just gambling on one headline tomorrow morning. They are paying for time. Names like QURE, SLS, KYMR, VKTX, and TENX stood out because the premium was large and, in some cases, the size was big relative to existing open interest. MRNA and ABSI also showed bullish activity, while HIMS has been active too, although I would classify HIMS more as healthcare/consumer medicine than pure biotech.

The caution is that options flow is never proof. A call buyer can be hedged, part of a spread, or wrong. But when bullish flow starts showing up at the same time the charts are reclaiming levels and the sector is starting to outperform, I pay attention. That is when the signal becomes less random.

I am not looking at this as a reason to abandon AI. I am looking at it as a sign that the market may be broadening into the next AI-adjacent growth theme. AI hardware was the first obvious trade. AI applied to biology may be the more interesting second-order trade.

Short term, this group can trade on headlines and is plenty active to focus on intraday for aggressive traders. Mid term, it can trade as a sector rotation. Long term, it could become one of the more important AI applications because biology is one of the few places where better data, better models, and faster testing can actually change the real world.

From here, I want to monitor the leaders, not chase every green candle. The names I am watching most closely are HIMS, MRNA, ABSI, CMPS, ABCL, IOVA and GALT, along with the stronger flow names like QURE, SLS, KYMR, VKTX, and TENX. If the theme is real, there should be more than one chance to get involved. The first clean dip that holds, especially after a washout in the leaders, is where this gets much more interesting. I would set alerts for the first real washout again back to between the 9 and 20 EMAs.

I think right now it is important to understand that this is not a completely new discovery, the relative strength has become a bit more obvious and trading above key levels in price and trend means that there are people aware of and reinforcing the trend. The question is if the momentum sticks.

For full disclosure. I own some of these names. This is not a recommendation, instead are just my opinions, and I may trade around the positions I have. What I like is relative strength, volume expansion, and the catalyst backdrop. The risk is that if it loses structure, the thesis weakens because it is not the darling of the market right now. If that is the case, Biotech is extremely speculative and the reversals can be violent.

Trade safe.