Some people collect stamps, coins, or baseball cards. 

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.