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Moderna stock led the index after melanoma vaccine data, while a hedge fund's forced unwind turbocharged a rebound in enterprise software
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Moderna $MRNA led the S&P 500 in August after reporting promising results from a late-stage trial of a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine it co-developed with Merck $MRK, according to CNBC. The data challenged years of skepticism about whether the company's mRNA technology could produce another major breakthrough following the decline of its Covid-19 vaccine business. "This is miraculous, so it got a miraculous welcome," CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday.
Enterprise software stocks accounted for many of the index's other top performers. Palantir $PLTR, Veeva Systems, Salesforce $CRM, and ServiceNow $NOW had each come under sustained selling pressure as investors grew skeptical that traditional software models could remain competitive against the backdrop of accelerating AI development, according to the outlet. Those declines were compounded by large short positions held by Situational Awareness, a leveraged hedge fund that had bet against software companies based on that thesis. When the fund was forced to unwind its trades in late July, those shorts became a tailwind for the stocks it had targeted. "As August comes to a grinding end, it's hard to believe that the reverberations of a hedge fund implosion could color so much of the month's action," Cramer said.
