Moderna’s skin cancer breakthrough, a cheap stock for the Community Portfolio & can you time your investments?

**Bryce Leske** (0:00)
Moderna may have just cured cancer.

**Alec Renehan** (0:01)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:02)
Is that pushing it?

**Alec Renehan** (0:03)
That's the clickbait headline if you were writing for an ad-based publication. Moderna certainly didn't cure cancer, but it has taken a big whack at it, I think. We want to just unpack the story, talk about the scientific breakthrough, but also the share market implications, because there's a few fascinating lessons to unpack there.

**Bryce Leske** (0:25)
Welcome to another episode of Equity Mates, the show where we explore what's possible in the world of investing. If you've just joined us for the very first time, a huge welcome to our community. My name is Bryce.

**Alec Renehan** (0:35)
I'm Wren, and today we're looking at Moderna's amazing announcement and the stock price response. Our community portfolio is back, we're checking in on how we're going, and we're answering one of your questions on managing volatility around reporting season. Bryce, another big episode.

**Bryce Leske** (0:51)
Always a big episode, Wren. Always a big episode here, and there's always big things to talk about at the top of the episode, and as we have for the last couple of weeks, that starts with FinFest, because there is nothing bigger that Equity Mates is doing this year outside of FinFest.

**Alec Renehan** (1:04)
Yes, FinFest is less than 10 weeks away. One session I'm incredibly excited for is our high conviction stock picks. We're going to get experts, we're going to line them up back to back. We're going to schedule them back to back. They're not going to stand back to back, but they're going to have 15 minutes to pitch their best idea. We're going to go one after another in an hour block. We've got a few of them scheduled throughout the day, so that's going to be super exciting. And if that's not a reason to get your ticket to FinFest, I don't know what is.

**Bryce Leske** (1:30)
Tickets are $55 on sale now. Over 1,500 people have already secured theirs, so don't miss out, equitymates.com/finfest.

**Alec Renehan** (1:38)
FinFest is proudly supported by Betashares.

**Bryce Leske** (1:45)
All right, we're just going to cover one story this morning, Ren, because it's a big story.

**Alec Renehan** (1:48)
Yeah.

**Bryce Leske** (1:48)
And it is that Moderna may have just cured cancer.

**Alec Renehan** (1:54)
That's the clickbait headline if you were writing for an ad-based publication. Moderna certainly didn't cure cancer, but it has taken a big whack at it, I think. So we want to just unpack the story, talk about the scientific breakthrough, but also the share market implications, because there's a few fascinating lessons to unpack there. But let's start with the context. So Moderna became a company that we all became very familiar with during COVID because of their MRNA vaccines, messenger RNA vaccines, or the technology that got turned into those early COVID vaccines. And at the time, we were told, this technology is going to have a lot more use cases than just COVID vaccines.

**Bryce Leske** (2:35)
Game-changing technology.

**Alec Renehan** (2:37)
And now we're starting to see it, what, five years later.

**Bryce Leske** (2:39)
Yeah. So the story Moderna and Merck unveiled an MRNA-based cancer vaccine that cuts the spread of melanoma.
Huge.

**Alec Renehan** (2:50)
They announced it last Wednesday.
Shares jumped 177% in a day.
Shares almost tripled in a day. Merck's shares didn't do as well. They jumped, but they're obviously a bigger company, a lot more diversified. But Moderna up 177% in a day, which was good news for long-suffering Moderna shareholders. Because if people have held since COVID, they've had a terrible time. Even after it's 177% gain, it's still down 60% from its all-time highs. So there's a good investing lesson there. If a stock drops 90%, it then needs to jump 900% to get back to even. And you do simple math. It's like $100 down to $10 a share, 90% drop. Well, then you need 900% gain to get back to that $100 share price.

**Bryce Leske** (3:41)
So a bit of a...

**Alec Renehan** (3:43)
It's on its way.

**Bryce Leske** (3:44)
Yeah.
A few more of these announcements would be good. All right.

**Alec Renehan** (3:48)
Well, let's dig into the announcement and what we actually learned.

**Bryce Leske** (3:51)
So the vaccine is called Intismarine. It's an experimental vaccine that trains the patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting mutations in cancer cells. It's developed alongside pharmaceutical giant Merck, and they tested the vaccine with immunotherapy drug Ketruda.
It is currently the leading treatment in the space.

**Alec Renehan** (4:13)
Now, the details are still sparse on this.
They made the announcement, Merck and Moderna, but detailed results will be released at an upcoming medical conference. So the full details aren't out yet. But there's enough details to obviously get markets excited. There's also enough details to burn the fingers of short sellers. Because Moderna has been quite a heavily shorted stock, and some of the analysis found that short interest in Moderna's shares was about 13.5% of shares on issue, of free float. So it was one of the most shorted large stocks.