You should hear about it now, so we’re sending Altucher Confidential early. 

$6.3 billion worth of crypto and stablecoins was reportedly stolen from Binance – the world’s largest crypto exchange. 

To put this number into perspective, the previous record belonged to the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in 2025.

This one was four times larger.

Bitcoin is now trading around $77,000, while tech stocks are also in freefall following a string of weak earnings reports.

Here’s what we know so far. 

How Did Hackers Steal $6.3 Billion?

So far, the company believes the attack started with a compromised laptop belonging to one of its engineers.

That compromised laptop allowed the attacker to access Binance’s internal systems where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions.

Binance says it has found no evidence that the private keys protecting its crypto wallets were leaked.

Instead, they appear to have compromised the infrastructure Binance uses to operate them and found a way to make unauthorized withdrawals look legitimate to the system.

Cybersecurity researchers at TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence believe North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking group was responsible.

The group has previously been linked to some of the largest crypto thefts in history, including the $1.5 billion Bybit hack.

Binance says it plans to release a full technical report once it has verified the details and is working with law enforcement to identify the attackers.

Stealing the Crypto Is Only Half the Battle

Moving $6.3 billion into North Korean wallets is one thing. 

Actually being able to use those funds is a different story. 

Within hours, some of the biggest companies in crypto began freezing assets linked to the attack.

• Tether froze more than $1.5 billion worth of USDT.
• Circle froze more than $800 million worth of USDC.
• Ripple helped stop roughly $200 million more.

Altogether, Binance says approximately $3 billion of the affected assets have already been frozen.

That was possible because stablecoins such as USDT and USDC don't work exactly like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has no company sitting in the middle with the ability to freeze someone's coins.

USDT and USDC do.

Tether and Circle can blacklist wallet addresses holding stolen tokens, preventing those tokens from being transferred or redeemed.

The hacker may still control the wallet, but the frozen stablecoins inside it can't simply be moved to another exchange and cashed out.

That's why the final loss could end up being substantially smaller than the $6.3 billion headline.

What Does This Mean for Crypto?

There's no way to sugarcoat a $6.3 billion security breach at the world's largest crypto exchange.

And history shows that incidents of theft and fraud involving crypto giants like Mt. Gox and FTX were followed by prolonged bear markets.

But it's important to separate what happened to Binance from what happened to the underlying cryptocurrencies. 

Bitcoin itself wasn't hacked. Neither was Ethereum, Solana, or the underlying blockchains.

The vulnerability was inside Binance, a centralized company that holds and moves crypto on behalf of its customers.

When you keep crypto on an exchange, you're trusting that company to protect it. That's fundamentally different from holding crypto yourself, where you control the private keys. (No method is foolproof: If you go the hardware wallet route, always buy straight from the company. No third parties.) 

For more actionable steps on protecting your data and crypto, check out last week’s Altucher Confidential on the coming “cyberpandemic.” Cyberattacks are ramping up. Crypto is one vector of attack, but far from the only one. 

For Binance customers, the company says their funds are safe and has promised to cover any losses. So the biggest question now is how much of the stolen crypto can actually be recovered.

Roughly $3 billion has already been frozen, and investigators will continue tracking the remaining assets as the hackers attempt to move, swap, or cash them out.

Binance also needs to confirm exactly how the attackers gained access and whether the vulnerability has been completely eliminated.

The company says it will release a full technical report along with an updated Proof of Reserves once that process is complete.

Those are the two things I'll be watching from here: how much of the money is ultimately recovered and what Binance's investigation reveals about the breach.

For now, this looks much more like a failure of a centralized exchange than a failure of crypto itself.

It was about crypto. 

A crypto exchange called Hyperliquid was trading oil around the clock. No trading floor. Weekends included. The company asked regulators to take a hard look.

Their warning: an unregulated, round-the-clock market where traders don’t have to say who they are could skew global oil prices, invite manipulation, and help people dodge sanctions.

This week, that same owner stopped complaining and signed up.

Let’s talk about what just happened, why it happened, and what it means for crypto-at-large. 

The Big Bet

The company is Intercontinental Exchange. ICE. 

It owns the NYSE and some of the biggest futures markets on Earth.

Today, ICE signed a deal to bring 24/7 perpetual futures to America, built on Hyperliquid’s technology, pending approval. It’s also taking a stake in Trade[XYZ], the company that designs markets on Hyperliquid.

Then legendary investor Stan Druckenmiller said he’d invested in Trade[XYZ] too. He plans to use the product “to enhance my investment process.”

Scrutinize it. Study it. Build on it.

That’s how Wall Street comes to the public blockchains. BlackRock spent three years on private bank blockchains that went nowhere. ICE is taking a different approach: it’s moving into where the action is.

Why Hyperliquid?

A perpetual future, or “perp,” is a bet on an asset’s price that never expires, so traders can hold it as long as they like. Perps have taken over crypto trading, making up as much as 90% of derivatives volume on major crypto exchanges.

Hyperliquid is the biggest blockchain-based perpetuals exchange in the world. It holds more than half of all blockchain perps open interest. It also sends nearly all of its trading fees into buying back its token, HYPE.

Companies that launch markets on Hyperliquid must lock up 500,000 HYPE for at least six months. Every new builder takes HYPE off the market. 

And it now has two planned roads, regulations pending, into America: Kraken’s licensed exchange and ICE’s.

One Easy Way to Play it

Buying HYPE directly requires a crypto account

But earlier this month, on our Monday Moonshots call, James pointed to a simpler way in: Hyperliquid Strategies (Nasdaq: PURR).

PURR is a public company that holds HYPE. About 29.3 million tokens as of August, all staked and earning. No debt. Its CEO calls it a “fortress balance sheet.”

For anyone who wants Hyperliquid exposure in a brokerage account, it’s the cleanest door. PURR also has listed options and joined the Russell 3000.

3 Things We’re Watching

Three things decide how big this gets.

The approval. ICE’s market still needs a green light from the CFTC. Timing is the open question.

The money trail. ICE runs the US market and holds the license. It hasn’t said how much of that American trading revenue flows back to HYPE holders. If the answer is “a lot,” the bull case for the HYPE token gets much bigger. That’s the number we’re watching.

The price you pay. PURR’s share price can drift above or below the value of the HYPE it holds. Check the premium before you buy. Expect volatility. Size accordingly.

Big picture, this is much larger than one crypto exchange. 

For 15 years, Wall Street treated crypto as the casino next door. Now it’s building an American market on a public blockchain’s technology. 

Five months ago, ICE wanted crypto reined in. Now it wants a piece. Watch who follows.

You probably never ate it. Most didn’t. I might have been the only one. 

Product 19 was Kellogg’s “vitamin cereal.” Gone since 2016. No explanation. No apology. I looked. 

Then the former CEO of Kellogg agreed to come on my podcast. I asked him directly. 

He said it happened after he left.

I'm still upset. It was the one thing Carlos Gutierrez couldn't give me.

From Cuba to Kellogg to the Cabinet

Carlos left Cuba as a kid after his father tempted fate with Che Guevara. The family lost everything. 

He started in sales at Kellogg and climbed all the way to CEO. Then George W. Bush made him Secretary of Commerce. Then, at 65, a doctor told him he had ADHD.

He wrote a book about all of it called Sheer Will: Learning to Lead When There is No Path. I loved it. 

Here's what I learned from Carlos. 

1. Speed is a luxury. And you have it.

I asked Carlos if Washington taught him anything about buying and selling companies.

He said the two worlds barely compare. At Kellogg, he made the call. Sometimes the board had to approve it. Sometimes. Then he ran with it. 

In Washington, almost nothing gets decided without going through someone else who then has to go through someone else. 

Speed is a luxury of the private sector. (That means you too.)

This is useful to know for investors. I use the same rule when I hunt for buyout opportunities. Find the buyer who doesn’t need permission.

Right now, that’s Elon Musk. He controls more than 80% of SpaceX’s votes. He’s the CEO and the chairman, and he picks the board. And SpaceX just raised $75 billion in the biggest IPO in history. That’s where I’m watching. 

2. Refusing to be average starts with proving someone wrong.

I asked him what "relentless refusal to be average" meant in his book. He said it's what's left over from being the disorganized ADHD kid everyone expected to fail. He wanted to prove them wrong. He learned to welcome struggle. It’s the price you pay. 

He added that America is the only country where calling someone ambitious counts as a compliment.

3. The weakness was hiding a strength.

In hindsight, the ADHD diagnosis explained a lot about his career. He would drop everything and hyperfocus on one presentation for three weeks. That helped him more than any weakness hurt him. His one wish: that someone had told him about the upside sooner.

Most of us spend years apologizing for the thing that makes us great.

4. Be bad at a lot of things.

At community college he got Ds in every class except one. Public speaking. Later he found financial management. Those two skills carried him to the top. I asked if it's a numbers game. He said yes. You have to be wrong about many things to find the two you're good at. He still gets it wrong today. That’s OK. 

5. The first year as boss is supposed to hurt.

His biggest early mistake as CEO was hiring outsiders. He wanted to show Kellogg that fresh blood adds value. They didn't fit. He tells new CEOs to expect a rough first 12 months. 

In that first year, he made decisions based on how he thought a CEO was supposed to act. After a year, he stopped. He went with his gut, backed by 30 years at the company. That changed everything. 

6. Make the hard call or hand over the job.

His father told him: if you can't make the tough decisions, someone else should have your job. When Carlos closed Kellogg’s Battle Creek plant, he kept that line in his head. Explain the decision. Stay firm on it.

Over the next five years, Kellogg’s sales grew 43%. Its stock nearly doubled.

7. Walk in with one ask.

China once wanted intellectual property left off the agenda for an annual meeting. So Carlos gave a public speech announcing he was canceling the trip. It worked.

That’s the thing about China. Most meetings were a grind. America showed up with 20 problems from American companies. China showed up with one or two asks, like lifting export controls. Then China tied everything to those. No progress on their list, no progress on ours.

A short list is leverage. 

Also the minute your plane lands, China treats you like the most important person on Earth. Then it’s harder to be tough on such gracious hosts. It works.

8. Politics runs on perception.

Everyone in Washington believed the economy was "fundamentally sound" in March 2008. Back then, he said, the numbers backed it up. Then the subprime collapse hit. His summary of Washington: "Politics is the art of perception. Business is the art of results."

9. AI helps your competitors too.

I asked if AI makes starting a business less risky. He said AI helps everyone, so you still have to beat everyone. Starting a company will always be hard.

10. Stay put.

His advice to a 25-year-old: find a company you love and give it five to ten years. Most quit right before the payoff.

Carlos left the cabinet at 55. He said the years after were his hardest. He chased things that sounded great and didn't have the same hunger.

I'm 58. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do.

Maybe that's the real lesson. Nobody figures it out. The good ones just keep asking. (And the really good ones bring back Product 19.)

His crime? He’d been spying on the British army. 

Badly, it turned out.

He wrote everything down and sent it to Dr. Joseph Warren, the guy who sent Paul Revere on his midnight ride. Then Warren got killed at Bunker Hill, and the British emptied his pockets.

Rule one of espionage: don’t put it in writing.

Rule two: if you must, put it in code.

Rule three: don’t sign it.

Lovell broke all three.

The British threw him in a cell for 18 months. 

Five years later, as fate would have it, he sat in Congress with a pile of stolen British letters.

One problem: they were gibberish. Rows of complete nonsense. The original cryptography. 

The Original AI 

The man’s name was James Lovell. Maybe you've heard of him. I hadn’t until recently. 

Apparently, nobody trained Lovell to break codes. He taught himself. (A man who spends eighteen months in jail over a letter tends to take an interest.)

When British mail came in, it landed on his desk. Scrambled. Unreadable. He started with what he knew about English.

He knew "e" shows up more than any other letter. He knew "the" appears everywhere. He knew what a British officer would probably say next.

Guess a letter. Check it. Guess the next one.

The gibberish cracked. By the fall of 1781, Washington was outside Yorktown, reading Cornwallis’s letters. Lovell had sent him the key.

Here's why I’m telling you this: Lovell basically invented ChatGPT. Stay with me. Because this weird fact answers the question everyone’s asking: is AI a bubble?

From Quill to Chatbot

Jump ahead 160 years. 

Alan Turing breaks the Nazi Enigma code. The machines built for that job lead to the first computers.

Then Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician who worked on wartime codes, runs a strange experiment. 

In 1951, he handed people a piece of English text and asked them to guess the next letter. Then the next. Then the next. He wants to measure how predictable language is.

Answer: very.

Lovell's method. Now with math.

Fast-forward 70 more years. Every AI you use runs on that same idea. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Predict the next word. Then the next. 

That's the whole trick.

Five Codes, One Key

With ChatGPT, everyone expected a fancy autocomplete. Then the predictions got good enough to write software. Draft contracts. Pass the bar exam.

Here's the thing about codes…

They’re everywhere. 

1. Software is a code. AI now writes a big chunk of it. Ask any programmer.
   
   
2. DNA is a code. Google DeepMind's AlphaFold cracked how proteins fold. Its creators won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
   
   
3. Law is a code. Contracts repeat patterns. So do court rulings.
   
   
4. Medicine is a code. Symptoms. Scans. Lab numbers.
   
   
5. Markets are a code. Earnings calls. Filings. Price charts.

For 250 years, cracking any of these took a Lovell. Rare talent. Years of training. Hours per job. 

That scarcity set the price. It's why a specialist costs what a specialist costs. Few people could read the code, so the few who could got paid.

AI now reads all of them. 

Cheaply. Fast. Tonight.

Crowns, Wars, and Elon’s Fortune

Is AI a bubble? Here’s my test: a bubble is when the price runs far ahead of the use.

So look at the use. At Google, AI now writes three of every four new lines of code. The FDA has cleared over 1,600 AI medical devices. Half a million people a week already pay a robot to drive them home. Scientists used it to crack protein folding and won a Nobel.

That’s use. 

Some prices will run too far ahead. But the use won’t go backward. Why? Because while bubbles come and go, codebreaking never dies. 

Every cracked code in history has handed someone a crown, a war, or a fortune. They put America into World War I, won Midway, and cost a queen her head.

On Wall Street, one of the most valuable codes right now is the buyout. When a deal goes public, the target’s stock can soar in a morning. Most investors read about it after the jump.

But big deals leave a trail. Filings. Hiring sprees. Patents. Executive flights. Too many signals for any human to read.

James now has a new AI system that reads all of it. While Wall Street sleeps, it’s combing through every major company, hunting for the next deal.

This week, the trail led to Elon Musk.

In June, SpaceX raised more than $75 billion in the biggest IPO in history. Now Elon has to spend it.

James’s system has flagged the company he believes Elon buys next. And you can own it today, before Wall Street catches on. 

Click here to see what James’s system found.

I'm going to start a travel agency that sends people to Saturn.

Luxury accommodations. Great views of the rings. Maybe a complimentary breakfast.

Stupid idea, right?

Not according to ChatGPT.

Ask it to help you build this business and it'll happily get started. It'll brainstorm names. Create a marketing plan. Figure out pricing tiers.

It might even generate a beautiful hockey-stick chart showing Saturn tourism growing from zero to $80 billion by 2028. 

This is a problem.

AI wants you to be happy. And sometimes the easiest way to make humans happy is to make them all feel like geniuses. 

I brought this up recently with my friend Tom Bilyeu.

Tom cofounded Quest Nutrition, built the enormously successful Impact Theory media company, and is now developing a massive video game called Kyzen.

He spends a LOT of time with AI.

And he told me something that completely changes how you should use it.

Make Your AI Hate You

Tom doesn't want ChatGPT to tell him his ideas are brilliant.

He wants it to tell him why they're terrible.

Before he starts a project, he gives his AI instructions explaining that he has absolutely no interest in being agreed with.

He wants evidence that contradicts his assumptions.

Then he asks one question: "Why is this going to fail?"

Not how can I succeed.

Not how can we make this happen.

Why will it fail?

And here's my favorite part.

If Tom doesn't know enough about the industry to challenge the AI's answer, he asks:

"What are the smartest minds who think this idea is stupid? What do they say? What's their logic?"

Now he's not brainstorming.

He's conducting an interrogation.

I love this.

Because most people use AI like a very expensive imaginary friend.

Tom uses it like a hostile investment committee.

And I think he's onto something.

Three Months. One Afternoon.

Tom told me something else that blew my mind.

His team is building a video game with an entire procedurally generated world. Think Minecraft, but with creature capturing, combat and a world roughly the size of Earth.

Creating a single usable asset for the game used to take three months, involving four or five different people.

Then AI came along.

The same basic process suddenly took an afternoon.

Think about that.

Three months of work compressed into a few hours.

Now multiply that across every business on Earth.

But here's the catch.

If Tom can do that, so can his competitors.

The technical advantages that used to protect businesses are disappearing.

The ability to build something is becoming less valuable. Knowing WHAT to build is becoming more valuable.

And that's where most people are going to get into trouble.

Because AI can build your terrible idea faster than ever.

It can help you spend six months' worth of money in six days.

And congratulate you the entire time.

The New Competitive Advantage

Sum it up in one sentence: The better your questions, the better your AI.

I think that's exactly right.

Two people can use the same AI model.

One asks it to write a business plan.

The other asks it to identify an unmet customer need, find evidence people will pay to solve it, investigate failed competitors and explain why the entire premise might be wrong.

Same technology.

Completely different results.

The first person gets a beautiful document.

The second might get a business.

This applies to investing, too.

The next time you're excited about a stock, don't ask ChatGPT to explain why it's going to double.

Ask it to construct the strongest possible argument against owning it.

What am I missing?

What assumptions have to be true?

What happens if they're false?

Then go verify the answers.

You might save yourself a fortune.

Let AI Ruin Your Dreams

For the first time in history, almost everyone has access to something resembling a team of extraordinarily knowledgeable advisers.

And most people are using that team to tell themselves what they already believe.

Don't.

The greatest advantage AI gives you might not be the ability to produce more. It might be the ability to discover you're wrong before it costs you money.

And if you're still determined to open that travel agency to Saturn? I'll invest. As soon as you get back.

Click here to listen to the full podcast.

Don’t skip it.

Because inside I’m going to show you what’s happening to the internet right now. Who’s breaking in. Why a break-in now costs pennies on the dollar. 

Then I’ll show you FOUR things you can do about it before dinner. Will they be fun? No. Flossing isn’t fun either. But nobody ever regrets flossing.

“Shut it All Down!”

On Wednesday, the Dutch government’s cybersecurity agency unplugged its own website.

Then the national login system people use for taxes and benefits went dark. Then Parliament. The Port of Rotterdam. Hospitals.

Germany followed. France. Finland. Belgium. The Czech Republic.

All falling like dominoes. Boom. Boom. Boom.

In Washington, the NSA told organizations to do the same if they couldn’t fix the problem fast. In Tokyo, the prime minister went on X: “We have an urgent request for everyone to take action tonight.” Tens of millions saw it.

What problem?

Two flaws in software you’ve probably never heard of. It’s called PHP. It runs about 70% of the world’s websites. Including, most likely, some you visited today.

The flaws have a nickname: PHP2Shell. In plain English, a stranger could walk into the computer behind a website and take control. No password needed.

The fix was due Thursday. Then details leaked. One research firm accidentally posted a video showing how the break-in works. The fix went out a day early.

Then the race began.

The Doorknob Test 

Cloudflare guards millions of websites. It counted thousands of break-in attempts in the ten hours before the announcement. Tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after. Millions by the next morning.

Amazon says someone was already trying the break-in on October 17. Four days before the public knew.

That’s why governments unplugged.

Here’s what worries me. 

About 2.6 million of these website computers are reachable online. More than a million run versions so old PHP no longer sends them fixes. And changing the lock does nothing about a burglar already inside.

Some people are already calling this month Black October. Here’s what else happened this week:

• Stop & Shop, Food Lion and Hannaford, three big grocery chains, had their websites and apps knocked offline for days. The stores stayed open. Online orders didn’t.
  
  
• State Bank of India, the country’s biggest bank, confirmed 3,897 customers’ personal details turned up for sale online.
  
  
• A crime group used AI assistants working as a team to target more than 400 banks and payment companies in Latin America.

None of these are connected to each other. That’s what’s scary.

AI helped researchers find PHP2Shell. AI also helped criminals hunt those banks. Same technology. Both sides.

One hacker typed an instruction under 100 characters long and let AI do the rest. The AI broke into more than 100 companies, including John Deere. Cost per break-in: about $50.

America’s biggest banks aren’t waiting. JPMorgan, Schwab, Citi and Bank of America now block outside AI programs from logging into customer accounts.

Flaws that used to take months to turn into weapons now take hours.

So here’s what you need to do. 

1. ASSUME SOMEONE HAS YOUR INFO. Change your important passwords. Freeze your credit at all three bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. It’s free and takes ten minutes. If anyone asks for any account code just sent to your phone, it’s a scam. If someone calls you from Google, your bank, Robinhood, or Coinbase? IT’S A SCAM. Every time.Also, don’t panic. Panic is what scammers count on and it’s the one thing that makes you vulnerable.

2.GET AND USE PASSKEYS, PREFERABLY HARDWARE KEYS. First thing, open your phone company’s app and look for a setting called SIM Protection, Number Lock or Account Lock. Turn it on. Those six-digit codes your bank texts you? A criminal (or even an AI) can trick your phone company into moving your number to his phone. It’s called a SIM swap. Then your codes go to him. Turning on SIM locks will offer a layer of protection.

Second thing: a hardware key, like a YubiKey. This is a small key that plugs into your computer or phone. No physical key, no login. Unlike a password, a hacker in another country can’t steal it. Attackers would have to take it from you physically. And even then, they would still need your password or PIN. Password managers, Google, Apple, Microsoft and the big crypto exchanges allow you to use them. Buy at least two and keep one hidden as a backup. Always buy direct from the manufacturer.

But these keys take a few days to arrive. In the meantime, wherever a site offers a “passkey” or an authenticator app, turn it on. 

The ranking:

1. Hardware keys and passkeys: strongest.
2. Authenticator apps: good.
3. Text-message codes: weak.

3. UPDATE EVERYTHING. Your phone. Your computer. Your web browser. Your home Wi-Fi router. When the Settings menu says an update is ready, install it. That’s you changing your own locks. If you bought your router and it’s old, flip it over and find the model number on the sticker. Search that number with the words “end of life.” If the maker says it no longer supports that model, replace it. If your internet company gave you the router, call them. They can tell you if it’s current. It sucks. But do it. One warning: never install an “update” from a pop-up on a website or a link in a text or email. That’s a classic scam.

4. SHUT THE SIDE DOORS. Every account, app and gadget is another way in. Delete apps you don’t use. Unplug smart gadgets you don’t need. If you have an Alexa, go to settings and turn off voice purchasing. (Also, press mute when you want the microphone off.) Use a different password for every account; have your passkey-protected password manager remember them. Never give your bank login to an app or AI agent. And for the next few weeks, don’t type a password or card number into a website you don’t know. 

BONUS: IF YOU OWN CRYPTO. The biggest blockchains, Bitcoin and Ethereum, were designed on the assumption that everyone’s a thief. Their ledgers live on thousands of computers at once, so there’s no single one to break into. They’ve stood open to every hacker on Earth for years. 

BUT… the weak spots are everything built around them: exchanges, apps, websites. And if someone steals your coins, there’s no bank to call. Choose wisely how you hold your keys—or who holds them. If you hold crypto in a wallet, be careful clicking “connect wallet” on ANY website this month. A hijacked website can swap in a fake button that drains your wallet.

Somewhere right now, a computer that runs your bank, your doctor or your kid’s school is waiting on a fix.

You can’t fix that one. You can fix your own.

I released every single one. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Tyra Banks. Sara Blakely. Record, edit, publish.

Except one.

I recorded it at the comedy club I used to own in upstate New York. The guest was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

My producer told me later our manager walked in that day wearing a long dress covered in Marilyn Monroe’s face. Pure coincidence. (His uncle and, the rumors say, his father both had affairs with Marilyn.)

Then someone told her who the guest was. She ran next door and bought a new dress with 20 minutes to spare.

After we finished, I decided not to release it. I “banned” it myself. I had my reasons.

It sat for years. Then he ran for president. 

This week, I’m going back to that tape for a different reason.

Money.

The man I was nervous to put on the air became the most powerful health official in America. And the market didn’t react the way most people expected.

In fact, something’s happening right now I’ve never seen in my entire career. And RFK Jr. is pouring fuel on it.

The Critic Gets the Keys

In late 2024, Trump picked him to run Health and Human Services. The FDA reports to him.

Wall Street panicked. 

The day after the nomination, the biotech ETF (XBI) dropped 5%. One major Wall Street bank questioned whether the sector was even investable anymore. By spring, biotech was down nearly 30% from its peak.

Why? The industry’s loudest critic now held the leash.

At the bottom, nearly half of U.S. biotechs traded for less than the cash in their bank accounts. Wall Street was paying you to take the science.

Big Pharma noticed. 

In 2025 there were 32 biotech deals over $1 billion. That’s the most in two decades.

The biotech scare faded. The FDA kept approving drugs. The thing everyone feared showed up. The sector doubled anyway. And we think it’s just the beginning. 

Rewind the Tape

I went back and listened again with fresh ears.

Kennedy unloaded on the drug industry. Bill Gates. Measles. Mumps. Mercury. Vioxx. The evening news. 

But his real target was crony capitalism. Money buys politicians. Politicians protect the giants.

And here’s what Wall Street missed… 

His beef was with the giants and their old products. That’s why his agency is racing to approve new ones. For example, two cancer treatments recently got the green light in 45 and 55 days.

Who owns the new stuff? Mostly small companies. And the giants are forced to ride the wave. 

Their patents are running out, so they have to buy their way out. Every approval makes a small biotech more valuable. Every patent cliff hands it a buyer.

Add AI, which lets a small team do what used to take a Big Pharma budget.

Wall Street priced in the man. It missed the mechanism.

Where It Goes

Earlier I said something is happening in biotech I’ve never seen in my career. 

My research team went back through the market data. In less than three years, we found more than 230 one-day stock surges. All in biotech. Tiny stocks jumping 100%, 500%, even 1,378% in a single session.

We even caught some of them early. 

Now we have our eyes on a tiny $10 biotech. It’s in Phase 3. Its treatment could reach 320 million people. Management says results could land any day. And I haven’t been so excited about a stock’s potential in a while. 

I admit. I was afraid of that episode. Wall Street was afraid of RFK Jr. We were both wrong.

The tape is out. And our research on this stock is ready.

Ray Blanco collects dates. 

Specifically, he collects the days a biotech stock doubles, or gets cut in half. And he often circles them weeks, sometimes months, ahead. 

For example, he circled Moderna in April 2020. It ran 1,310%. He circled Definium. It ran 530%. 

That’s why we asked him to pull back the curtain. 

In today’s special edition of ALC, Ray breaks it down: the biggest one-day gain for an S&P 500 stock in 25 years—and how beaten-down “fallen angel” stocks can turn into one-day windfalls.

Read on.

The Fallen Angel Trade

On Aug. 19, Moderna did something no stock in the S&P 500 had done in a quarter-century.

It went up 177%.

In one day.

According to Dow Jones Market Data, that was the biggest one-day gain for any S&P 500 stock in 25 years. Shares closed at $174.38, up from $62.96 the day before, on about 29 times the normal trading volume.

What happened?

The Big Day

Moderna and Merck announced that their personalized melanoma vaccine, given alongside Merck’s cancer drug Keytruda, met its goals in a Phase 3 trial: the large, final-stage study a drug needs before it can be approved.

It was the first successful late-stage trial for an mRNA cancer vaccine. Each dose is designed by a computer, which reads the mutations in a patient’s own tumor and picks the targets for that one patient.

Moderna had spent years in the doghouse. COVID vaccine sales had collapsed, and the stock started 2026 at about $30.

One trial result changed the whole story.

Why Biotech Works This Way

Most stocks drift on earnings, interest rates and mood. A biotech lives or dies on a handful of big days:

• A trial readout.
• An FDA decision.
• A court ruling.
• A buyout offer.

On those days, everything can hit all at once. The stock can double or more on good news… or get cut in half on bad.

And here’s the thing: biotech is one of the few corners of the market where you can often see those days coming months ahead.

The ride doesn’t end on the big day, either. A move that size always brings wild swings afterward, and Moderna’s was no exception.

What It Means for You

I’ve spent years tracking these dates. 

The lesson is simple: in biotech, much of the money gets made around specific days, and you can circle many of them on a calendar in advance.

But not every big day is on the calendar. Sometimes it sneaks up on you, and the best setups come from stocks everyone else just gave up on that got cut in half.

That’s what happened with a stock I bought a couple of weeks ago.

Buying the Cliff

On Sept. 30, Liquidia fell off a cliff.

The company makes Yutrepia, an inhaled drug for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a deadly disease in which blood pressure in the lungs’ arteries climbs until the heart starts to fail.

That day, a court ruling went against Liquidia in its long patent fight with United Therapeutics. Investors panicked. The stock lost 57% in a single session and another 7.5% the next day.

That’s when I bought shares in my own account, at about $26 per share.

I expected a settlement. I just didn’t know when it would come.

The Fallen Angel Trade

I call these setups fallen angels: good companies the market throws away after bad news. The trick is telling a Fallen Angel from a company that really is finished.

Here’s what I saw:

• A drug that works, and was selling fast.
• Plenty of cash: Liquidia had nearly $400 million in the bank.
• A serious, deadly disease. There was just no way a working drug for it was going to vanish from pharmacy shelves. And no company wants to be the one whose lawsuit took a medicine away from patients with a deadly disease. Really bad PR!
• A stock price that assumed the worst.

The market had priced in a disaster. I thought a deal was far more likely.

How to Play it 

After the close on Oct. 13, Liquidia settled all six lawsuits with United Therapeutics. It agreed to pay $380.7 million, spread out through 2027, and it keeps selling Yutrepia for PAH.

The stock jumped about 40% after hours. The next day was its biggest one-day gain since December 2023.

I sold at $37. That’s a 42% windfall that happened in a single day.

Notice why the deal worked: Liquidia could afford it. It had about $396 million in cash at the end of September, and it said Yutrepia brought in $222.7 million in the third quarter alone.

A company with that kind of cushion can write a big check and keep going.

That’s the pattern I look for. Bad news, a panicked price, and enough cash to survive what comes next. Then you wait for the day the market finds out it was wrong.

One of them mines iron ore. Oddly enough, its ticker isn’t IRON. Its ticker is CLF.

IRON is a biotech. So is the rest of the list. Biotech. Biotech. More biotech. Again.

Today was the same thing. 

Myriad Genetics up about 37%. SELLAS Life Sciences up 13.5%. Clene up about 21% intraday. There might be more by the time you read this. 

But, as you’ll see… this is just scratching the surface of gains some investors have seen in this sector. 

And after a strong year, analysts are declaring the industry peaked. We’re taking the other side of the trade. 

Today, let’s talk about what the bearish memos miss… and why we think the story’s just getting started.

89 Stocks… In One Day

Roll back the clock to August 19.

Moderna soared 177% in a single session, the biggest one-day gain for an S&P 500 stock in at least 25 years. That same day, about 89 biotech stocks hit new 52-week highs.

Two days later, Werewolf Therapeutics, a stock trading under a dollar, more than doubled on a merger deal.

September 28: Kodiak Sciences gapped up as much as 178% after its eye drugs went toe-to-toe with Regeneron’s Eylea.

Then there’s Definium Therapeutics. Since June, its lead drug has won three Phase 3 trials.

Something’s shifted.

Biotech’s Milkshake Moment 

For years, money fled biotech. 

The XBI, the main small-biotech index, fell from $168 in early 2021 to $64 three years ago.

Now it’s back.

2026 is on pace to be the second-busiest year for biopharma M&A in recorded history. About $241 billion annualized. 2027 could be even bigger. 

Why? One reason: Big Pharma faces a $400 billion patent cliff over the next five years. 

Its own pipelines can’t fill the hole fast enough. So it’s buying. In July, Vertex paid $10 billion for Crinetics at a premium of more than 100%. Vertex was the only bidder.

No auction. No bidding war. Still double.

In There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis outdrinks his rivals with a very long straw. Big Pharma companies have long straws too. Lately, they’re paying a premium to use them.

And that’s before we even consider what AI is doing to the industry. 

The Biggest Straw (AI) 

Drug discovery has always been slow, expensive and mostly a failure. AI attacks all three. 

Design the molecule. Test it in the (self-driving) lab. Feed the results back to the model. Repeat a thousand times. Faster than a floor full of chemists could do it once.

The market has noticed the potential. 

AbCellera, an AI-driven antibody shop, is up about 300% this year. Absci, which designs drugs with generative AI, is up about 217%. Eli Lilly put $40 million into Absci’s last raise.

Estimates for the AI drug discovery market today run from a couple billion dollars to about $20 billion. The most aggressive forecast puts it at $160 billion by 2035.

Nobody agrees on the size. Everyone agrees on the direction. That’s the setup for a supercycle.

A sector starved of capital for years. Buyers who have to buy. A technology that makes the product cheaper to build.

It all adds up to one thing. 

There Will Be Blood (Tests) 

You’ve already seen one of these up close.

Remember Definium? Subscribers to one of James’ research services had the opportunity to lock in a 530% gain on half their position in under 18 months. The other half of the position is still open. Still up more than 400%.

In fact…

Since 2024, our team has counted more than 230 biotech stocks that doubled or better in a single trading session. And these are stocks, by the way, not options.

James calls them 1-Day Windfalls. And he thinks the next one is close. 

Just this week, in fact, our biotech research arm spotted a tiny company approaching a major announcement. James wants our boldest, most aggressive readers positioned before Friday.

Click here to see exactly where to put your straw… and why waiting until Friday could be a HUGE mistake.

Sort of.

On Thursday, at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, a Tesla Roadster drove up a curved ramp, hung upside down, fired ten thrusters, barrel-rolled and landed.

Then, for good measure, it hopped over a Cybertruck.

Nobody was inside.

Musk said the car drove itself "to make sure we don't kill anyone." The FAA fenced off the sky. The flying version carries a label only a lawyer could love: "not approved for public road use."

The fuel? Compressed air. Six hundred liters of it. Just enough for a few seconds of glory.

The Roadster itself was first promised for 2020. Production is now “planned for 2028.” No price. But of course… you can reserve one.

The flying version? Invite only. And you can't drive it on the road. Even Musk doubts it’ll do much for Tesla’s revenue.

Hall Saw This Coming

In 2018, a nanotech researcher named J. Storrs Hall wrote a book called Where Is My Flying Car?

Silicon Valley's progress crowd treats it as scripture.

Peter Thiel built a slogan around the same complaint: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." Musk told Joe Rogan he built the flying Roadster partly because Thiel wanted one.

Hall's argument is simple: Flying cars worked. Prototypes flew in the 1930s and '50s. Then something broke. For two centuries, the energy America used grew about 7% a year. Hall calls it the Henry Adams curve.

Around 1970, it went flat.

If that date rings a bell, you’ve probably seen the website WTF Happened in 1971? It’s nothing but charts. Wages split from productivity. Housing outruns paychecks. Debt goes vertical. Every line bends at the same spot.

The WTF site blames money. Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971. Hall blames energy.

But maybe it’s one crime.

American oil production peaked in 1970. The dollar went soft in 1971. Inflation followed. By 1980, interest rates were near 20%. A nuclear plant is a ten-year loan on a forty-year machine, and at those rates nobody builds one.

More than 100 reactor orders were cancelled. Private aviation drowned in liability and paperwork. A rich, comfortable culture decided burning energy was a vice.

Soft money, soft energy. And the reverse. A country that can’t grow its power supply can always grow its money supply. We picked the printing press.

The Curve is Twitching

As Hall argued, a flying car only needs two things.

1. Lots of cheap energy.
2. And permission to use it.

Thursday’s Roadster had neither. A tank of air, flown empty, on private land, under federal airspace restrictions. Both of Hall’s walls, hit face first. Upside down.

But here's what didn't get lost in the barrel roll. The Henry Adams curve is twitching.

American electricity demand hit a record in 2025. The EIA expects new records in 2026 and 2027. GE Vernova has 116 gigawatts of gas turbines under contract or reserved, and it's booking slots for 2031.

Washington just lent $4.4 billion to restart three shut-down nuclear reactors. A big transformer now takes over two years to arrive.

The driver is AI. But the trillion-dollar question: will it last?

2001, Again?

Between 1996 and 2000, telecoms spent over half a trillion dollars, mostly borrowed, laying fiber. Then the music stopped. Global Crossing went bankrupt in January 2002. Years later, most of that fiber still sat dark.

The builders lost everything. But the fiber stayed. Cheap. Waiting. It went on to carry YouTube, Netflix and the cloud.

A similar split is forming now. Data centers use about 5% of America’s electricity. But they drove half of last year’s growth in demand.

But compare shelf lives. A GPU is old in five years. A gas turbine runs for thirty. A restarted reactor runs for decades. And only about a fifth of GE Vernova’s turbine orders are tied to data centers. The rest go to ordinary utilities.

If a big AI bust comes, the GPU renters eat it. The power plants will stay. And the rest of us inherit the surplus.

Of course, timing matters. By 2030, data centers could be using up to 17% of America’s power. The later the bust, the more steel is already in the ground. And the bigger the inheritance.

So Where's My Flying Car?

Musk answered that one on Thursday. It's a remote-controlled stunt full of air.

Hall asked the deeper question decades early. Where'd all the power go?

That one is finally getting answered. Quietly. In turbine factories, reactor control rooms and transformer yards nobody films.

The permission wall is cracking, too.

In March, the NRC approved construction of TerraPower’s reactor in Wyoming. It’s the first permit for a new kind of commercial reactor in over forty years.

Washington, which spent decades strangling nuclear, is now lending billions to bring dead plants back. Hall’s walls were built by people. People can take them down.

The flying car comes later.

It always has.