THE BIG IDEA
There’s a dangerous virus spreading through the market — and it’s not biological.
It’s political identity masquerading as investment analysis. Last week's news from Moderna is another example of the contagion.
You would think that news of a new and effective treatment for a form of cancer would please just about everybody. You would be wrong.
There is a faction of the investment community that holds such strong political views about health care that they cannot accept any positive news from a company like Moderna.
For years, we personally liked to laugh at the people who repeatedly tried to call the bottom in the share price for MRNA. Our laughter was not politically motivated. It was based on our reading of the stock charts and Moderna's status as a "one trick pony" with a COVID-19 treatment.
Six years ago this month, MRNA peaked at $497 and then spent much of 2025 in the $20s.
The facts changed and, fortunately, so did our view of the company as an investment. We have owned shares of MRNA since May.
If you don't want to invest in Moderna, or any other company, because of what they do or what they represent, that is absolutely fine. There are plenty of other ways to invest your money, plenty of other profitable trades you can make.
OTOH, if you are actively shorting MRNA or buying Put options based on your political views, you risk being blind to what the market sees.
The opposite is true, too. Investing your stash based on political identity can be equally as tragic. Ask the shareholders of The House Of Doge (for the daring, the ticker is HODO).
As a rule of thumb, if you have a strong emotional association - either positive or negative - with a stock it is best to keep it out of your account. You are going to have a hard time making clear-headed decisions about it.
And BTW, according to official records, Donald Trump himself has apparently been buying shares of MRNA this year.
SEEN ON THE INTERNETS
This weekend, we spotted the chart copied below on the Stocktwits website. It was provided by Larry Thompson, CMT who posts as HostileCharts.
The chart shows us that while Info Technology makes up 37.4% of the S&P 500, the Health Care sector accounts for 27.1% of the stocks currently near 52-week highs.
What Thompson concludes from it is that the S&P 500 is missing many of the current leaders.
It is a little bit of comparing apples and oranges, though. The orange bars are market-cap weighted and the Info Technology bar includes mega-caps like Nvidia and Apple. The blue bars are democratic, 1 stock = 1 vote.
Sometimes, the charts you see on the internets mean less than what they appear to mean.
NUMBERS ONLY
5.32% | The yield on 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds went as high as 5.32% last week, the highest since 2001. |
1 | Last week, only 1 of the NASDAQ 100 stocks made a 52-week low. That’s you, Applovin (APP). |
+ 6.30% | Despite a down week for the market generally, the notorious ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK) was up by 6.30%. |
SWINGEX INDEX
As of market close on: 21 August 2026
Swingy says: Some big gorillas named Nvidia and Warsh might make some noise next week. Trading conditions look good otherwise.
Learn more about how the Swingex Index works here.
WATCHER
Stocks highlighted here each week are not recommendations to buy or sell. They are provided as ideas for swing traders to follow up on with their own research.
PCAR (Paccar, Inc.): This summer, we have been (mostly) avoiding tech stocks and that is again the case this week. Today we will consider commercial truck maker Paccar.
We thought about adding a statistical indicator to the chart to help us detect whether there might be any trends present. Without the benefit of such an indicator, you might still be able to use your pathetic human eyes to recognize a trend or two.
The right-hand-side of the chart is, of course, the most important. There we see that on Friday PCAR seems to have arrested its downtrend.
If PCAR is, in fact, reversing it does not necessarily have to be straight up from here. There could be a period of back and forth before finding some direction.
There is a key area at $126 which was a congestion zone in April, resistance in July, and support last week.