The Biology’s Four-Year Test

In June, we wrote “The Biology Won” after the FDA agreed that uniQure () could submit an accelerated-approval application for its Huntington’s disease treatment AMT-130 using three-year clinical data as the primary basis.

uniQure submitted that application on September 2. Tuesday’s four-year update sent QURE down 37%, making the durability of the treatment effect the immediate question.

Researchers measured disease progression with the composite Unified Huntington’s Disease Rating Scale (cUHDRS), which combines assessments of movement, thinking, and the ability to manage daily life.

Among 12 high-dose patients with four-year follow-up, the planned comparison using that combined score showed 44% slower progression than an updated external control, with p=0.144. Total Functional Capacity (TFC), the component focused on everyday functioning, showed 61% slower progression, with a nominal p=0.008. An expanded group of 15 high-dose patients at three years showed 80% slower progression on the combined score, with a nominal p=0.005. Those three-year data are the anchor for the submitted application; the new four-year results were released after the filing.

What the Control Data Leave Open

The external comparison needs close attention. At month 48, 53% of the matched ENROLL-HD control data were missing. uniQure says patients who stopped providing follow-up were progressing faster than those who remained, which could leave a healthier-looking control group and understate AMT-130’s effect. Huntington’s advocate Lauren Holder explains that potential bias clearly.

Patricia Huffman offered a concrete example: her husband contributed ENROLL-HD observations for a decade, but by 2025 could complete fewer than half the assessments.

Those observations illustrate the mechanism; the size of its effect on this comparison remains uncertain.

Several of our Market Watchers who follow uniQure shared their reactions to Tuesday’s update.

Peter Mantas called QURE a “massive buy” after the update.

Mantas bought shares when the stock fell into the teens last winter. Dr. Adam May emphasized that the application rests on the three-year data and that the four-year TFC comparison remained favorable.

The FDA will have to weigh the small treated cohort and the control-data questions. The low-dose group received active treatment and isn’t a placebo group.

Kevin Mak viewed the data as only mildly negative and the selloff as excessive. He says Bloomberg and STAT stories appeared around 7:05 a.m. ET, seven minutes before uniQure’s full release, with Bloomberg initially emphasizing the 44% result’s lack of statistical significance. His argument is that algorithms trading on incomplete headlines could have amplified the early selling and shaped investor sentiment.

Dr. Adam May highlighted Mak’s account.

We already have open QURE trades, and Tuesday’s 37% selloff gives us a reason to add: we think the price fell much further than AMT-130’s prospects weakened.

The FDA application rests on the stronger three-year data. At four years, patients still showed slower loss of everyday functioning, and missing observations from faster-progressing control patients may have made the headline comparison look weaker.

We’ll lead with today’s Top Names trade, then return to QURE for our new trade on it.

New to our trade alerts? Start Here explains how we select trades, set entry limits, and manage exits.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Theme: Apparel retail and brand growth.

RSI: 51; Chartmill Technical Rating: 8; Setup Rating: 7; Fundamental Rating: 7.

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ANF call diagonal

Buy to close one ANF November 20, 2026 $160 call at a $0.20 debit. If the short call remains in the money near November expiration, cancel that order and exit the diagonal as a paired Net Credit order, starting slightly above its then-current Midpoint and lowering the …

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1. Buy to open one QURE January 21, 2028 $45 call.

2. Sell to open one QURE April 16, 2027 $50 call.

3. Sell to open one QURE January 21, 2028 $25 put.

4. Buy to open one QURE January 21, 2028 $20 put.

Maximum Net Debit: $1.35. Time in force: Day.

Maximum loss: $635 before fees, includi…

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1. Buy to open one ANF December 18, 2026 $155 call.

2. Sell to open one ANF November 20, 2026 $160 call.

Maximum Net Debit: $5.20. Time in force: Day.

Maximum loss: $520 before fees.

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Three Trades, Two Directions

Today’s bullish ideas come from different sources. One is a retailer on Portfolio Armor’s Top Names, our ranking of stocks with the highest estimated six-month potential returns, net of hedging cost. The other comes from Multibaggers, our curated X list of investors who follow companies with substantial upside potential. A clinical update later this week gives that second trade a near-term catalyst.

Our third idea is bearish. Our Earnings Downgrades in a Downtrend v1 screen brought the name to our attention, and its recent results support our independent bearish view. A frontier AI model helped us develop the screen. Backtesting it would be prohibitively expensive, so we haven’t established a historical trading edge. We’ll test selected names with defined-risk options trades. The bearish position may also offset some broader-market weakness.

The paid section has all three complete entry orders, their maximum net debits, model fair values, potential upsides, downside risks, and pre-set exit plans.

New to our trade alerts? Start Here explains how we select trades, set entry limits, and manage exits.

Today’s Top Names Trade

Theme: Apparel retail and brand growth.

RSI: 52; Chartmill Technical Rating: 9; Setup Rating: 7; Fundamental Rating: 7.

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The Race In Anthropic’s Own Words

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote this month that AI companies “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” Reuters reported Monday that Anthropic’s IPO prospectus describes a continuous, overlapping release schedule as essential to staying at the frontier. Customer usage and revenue, the filing says, are driven by new models.

Those statements expose a real tension. A lab can believe its technology needs stronger safeguards while its business depends on producing new versions of it. Anthropic’s proposed stock-market debut puts that tension in front of prospective investors.

Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker posed this question in an open letter to Scott Alexander, a prominent rationalist writer and supporter of effective altruism who has examined the case for slowing AI: “Why are the same people who warn that a technology will kill us all building it as fast as they can?” Anthropic’s prospectus offers part of the answer: new models help bring in the revenue that funds further development.

Whose Values Set The Pace?

Effective altruism’s moral calculus can reach striking conclusions. In 2019, philosopher Peter Singer and researcher Michael Plant questioned the donations pledged to rebuild Notre-Dame, asking how many lives the money might save elsewhere. An EA Forum writer argues that insects’ aggregate suffering dwarfs human suffering. These are moral priorities many people wouldn’t bring to decisions about medical research and technological progress.

An EA exponent also helped finance the AI race. The SEC described Sam Bankman-Fried as a prominent supporter of effective altruism; Anthropic says he led its $580 million Series B in 2022. At FTX and Alameda, his professional and sexual relationships overlapped: he had an on-and-off relationship with Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, and they shared a bedroom in the Bahamas. Ellison later testified against him in his fraud trial.

The social ties are visible around Alexander, too. He wrote that he met his wife at one of Aella’s parties. Aella, a former cam model and OnlyFans creator who uses that one-word pseudonym, documented her 2024 birthday gangbang and said its organizers excluded applicants affiliated with the pro-AI-acceleration movement because, in her view, they were “hastening our doom.” She co-founded an AI-risk creator bootcamp funded by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which Eliezer Yudkowsky co-founded. The public should know whose values and relationships stand behind demands to slow a technology that will affect everyone.

What Amodei Is Asking For

Amodei’s pacing plan calls for three steps. Anthropic says it’ll invite independent evaluators into its development process. It then wants frontier labs in democratic countries to coordinate on safety standards and limits on unchecked capability gains, with some forms of coordination requiring government support. A third step would seek international coordination, including with geopolitical rivals.

He explicitly says pacing won’t halt model training or technical progress. Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 after his essay and said outside groups had tested it before release. That kind of testing is consistent with the plan, though Amodei’s proposed evaluators would have ongoing access inside the lab. A meaningful industry-wide slowdown still depends on competitors and governments.

That’s the hard part. Amodei argues that a coordinated slowdown could buy safety researchers time without costing American labs their commercial position or the United States its lead. Until such coordination exists, each lab faces the same incentive to keep improving and shipping its models.

The Prospectus Puts A Price On Time

The economics make the dilemma sharper. According to the prospectus reviewed by Reuters, Anthropic generated nearly $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 and recorded an $8.06 billion operating loss. It spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure that year and disclosed $518 billion in cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations over the coming years.

Anthropic also warns in its filing that advanced AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks. Reuters says risk factors occupy roughly 80 pages of the 261-page prospectus, compared with 48 pages describing the business. The company is telling investors that its product can be dangerous and that remaining competitive requires a steady stream of new versions of it.

There is a counterweight to the pressure from public shareholders. Reuters reports that Anthropic’s seven co-founders plan to control 50.1% of voting power through a Founder LLC, while the company will remain a public-benefit corporation. That gives its leaders room to make safety decisions that hurt near-term financial results. It doesn’t make the cost of falling behind Google, OpenAI or other rivals disappear.

Pinker takes risks such as cyberattacks and unconstrained agents seriously. In a follow-up to Alexander, he argued that power-seeking and self-preservation are design-contingent behavior, not automatic consequences of intelligence. His question lands because even people who assign extreme stakes to AI safety continue to lead the race. Amodei’s answer is that stopping one lab could hand the field to a less cautious rival. The prospectus shows how expensive it would be for Anthropic to test that proposition alone.

What This Means For The Buildout

For investors, the immediate signal is continued competition for model capability, customers and compute. Safety work may change how models are tested and released. A broad cap on the pace of advancement would require coordination that Amodei himself says Anthropic can’t accomplish unilaterally. We’ll watch whether policy turns that proposal into enforceable limits, and whether demand for chips, power and data centers changes before it does.

We also have indirect exposure to Anthropic’s prospective IPO through options on Zoom Communications () and SK Telecom (), two publicly traded companies with pre-IPO equity stakes in Anthropic. We explained those positions last week. A successful listing at a higher valuation could prompt investors to assign more value to both stakes.

Our view has been that the AI buildout will continue, and we’ve positioned our trades accordingly. So far, that’s been the right way to bet. These are three examples from our record of exited trades.

Credo Technology Group () makes high-speed interconnect products for AI data centers. This is how our first completed trade in Credo turned out:

Micron Technology () supplies high-bandwidth memory for AI training and inference. Here is the result from the trade we opened in March:

Advanced Micro Devices () supplies AI accelerators. Our December trade in it delivered the strongest return on maximum risk of these three:

We’ll keep screening the AI stack for compelling trade setups. For a heads-up on our next AI-related trade, subscribe or upgrade below.

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New to Portfolio Armor? Our Start Here page explains how we select trades, size their maximum risk, and manage exits:

I just repriced one of our trades from this morning, using intraday share prices and IVs.

At the intraday share price of $105.025, with Cboe implied volatilities of 44% on the March 2027 $120 call, 40% on the January 2027 $125 call, 47% on the March 2027 $85 put, and 48% on the March 2027 $80 put, Black–Scholes values the Haemonetics (HAE) hybrid combo a…

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1. Buy to open one HAE March 19, 2027 $120 call,

2. Sell to open one HAE January 15, 2027 $125 call,

3. Sell to open one HAE March 19, 2027 $85 put,

4. Buy to open one HAE March 19, 2027 $80 put.

Maximum net debit: $3.55. Maximum loss on one spread: $855 before fees, including the $5-wide put spread. Place all four legs tog…

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Three Signals, Two Directions

Two of Friday’s Portfolio Armor Top Names caught our attention for different operating reasons. One reported a stronger quarter; the other raised its annual revenue outlook. Each had an estimated six-month potential return of 23% on Friday. Their shares also closed above rising 50-day exponential moving averages, with RSI inside our preferred range.

The third idea points the other way. Our new Earnings Downgrades in a Downtrend v1 screen surfaced a large retailer. A frontier AI model helped us develop this screen. We haven’t established a backtested edge for it; the expense of testing was prohibitive. We’re using it to find specific businesses we’re independently bearish on. A bearish trade with defined risk can also offset some exposure if the broader market falls.

The options markets are wide, especially for the two bullish names. Friday’s stock prices and Cboe implied volatilities anchor the limits below; we’ll revisit the orders if Monday’s market changes materially. Paid subscribers will find each company, its complete order, three-model valuation, maximum entry debit, and initial exit plan below.

New to our trade alerts? Start Here explains how we select trades, set entry limits, and manage exits.

Today’s First Top Names Trade

Theme: Specialty colors and flavors.

RSI: 47; Chartmill Technical Rating: 6; Setup Rating: 7; Fundamental Rating: 6.

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Our Weekly Runner Review

Our weekly Runner Reviews revisit open positions when their exit targets warrant a change. Until now, our monthly OpEx reviews haven’t evaluated calendars and diagonals whose short calls expire at that OpEx. We’ll add that check going forward. This week, we’re reviewing one at a subscriber’s request.

October 16th: Initial Target

Al…

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Oil Eased; The 10-Year Stayed Above 5%

Oil gave stocks some relief on Friday. Brent crude dipped below $98 a barrel, and the S&P 500 ended its three-day losing streak. For the full week, the Nasdaq gained 2.1%, the S&P 500 rose 1.2%, and the Dow added 0.3%. The Russell 2000 lost 0.8%.

Bond yields told a tougher story. The 10-year Treasury yield finished Friday at 5.17%, up from 5.01% a week earlier. Lower oil helped at week’s end, but the higher yield still raises the financing hurdle for capital-intensive projects.

Technology Led A Split Market

Chip stocks helped power Monday’s rally, and the Nasdaq’s weekly gain showed how much demand for technology can matter even when borrowing costs rise. The small-cap decline showed that the strength wasn’t evenly distributed. We’ll keep watching oil and yields alongside company results and the prices available in the options market.

How We Traded It

Monday’s alert paired a managed-care margin recovery with a bioprocessing supplier. The bioprocessing calendar filled; the managed-care order expired unfilled.

Tuesday brought a repriced managed-care order and an AI-powered software turnaround. The managed-care structure filled; the software order expired unfilled.

Wednesday’s ideas were an embodied-AI trade and a payroll-software trade. The software diagonal filled; the embodied-AI order expired unfilled.

Thursday, we revisited the embodied-AI trade and added ideas in AI-powered software and life-sciences tools. All three structures filled at their published limits.

Friday’s two ideas paired supply-chain software with gene editing. Neither filled at the morning limits. We published higher limits after repricing them intraday, and both structures filled below those revised limits.

Across the five days, eight of our eleven day-order attempts filled. The three unfilled orders expired; we revisited all three ideas later in the week and filled them.

This Week’s Exits

Four of the five completed trades in Friday’s Exits post were winners. Rocket Lab’s October call spread was the lone completed loser, closing at a 23% loss on original maximum risk. Ouster’s four-leg hybrid led them, returning 224% on original maximum risk when we completed the exit. Eight other cards record partial exits from positions that remain open; their final results haven’t entered the year-to-date tally yet.

The full exit record and options commentary are here:

The Hurdle For Next Week

This week’s gains held despite a rise in the 10-year yield. Another oil surge could renew inflation pressure, while a further yield rise would make long-duration growth harder to finance. We’ll keep looking for names with strong potential returns and options structures whose prices justify the risk.

New to Portfolio Armor? “Start Here” explains how we select trades, size their maximum risk and manage the exits.

Portfolio Armor pairs security selection with asymmetric options strategies, backed by a public record of our exits. Subscribe for free to receive our free posts, or become a paid subscriber to get our actionable trade alerts before we enter our trades.

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This Week’s Trade Exits

As soon as I exit a trade, I note that in the comments of the post where I first mentioned the trade; at the end of the week, I try to track them all in one post. Starting in July, 2024, I have also been tracking them in a spreadsheet. These are the trades I exited this week.

Our year-to-date trade performance through September 25 appears below.

Clicking on one of the exit cards should take you to the original alert where we mentioned the trade; exits will be documented in the comments on the dates they occurred.

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

None.

Options

ATAI’s accelerated-expiration settlement occurred September 18. Fidelity notified us this week, so we’re recording the exit here.

Comments

Stocks or Exchange Traded Products

No exits this week, as I’ve focused on options instead of our basic strategy, which involves buying stocks and ETFs. Nevertheless, the performance of our Top Names remains strong, as you can see here.

Options

Rocket Lab was the only losing full trade among the five completed exits recorded here. We exited its October $85/$105 call spread for a $0.85 net credit, locking in a 23% loss on the original maximum risk. The other four full exits were winners; Ouster’s four-leg hybrid was the standout, returning 224% on maximum risk. The remaining eight cards document partial exits from positions that are still open. Their final returns will enter the year-to-date record when those trades are fully exited.

New to Portfolio Armor? “Start Here” explains how we select trades, size their maximum risk and manage the exits.