Tax season is here, and this episode is your complete playbook for legally paying less tax in India. Sharan sits down with CA Nitesh Buddhadev, Chartered Accountant and Founder of Nimit Consultancy, a Mumbai-based wealth management and tax planning firm. With over 10 years of experience in tax planning and more than 200 crores under management, Nitesh is a regular guest speaker on CNBC, Zee Business and Money9, and a columnist for Mint, Moneycontrol and Financial Express.
In this conversation, Nitesh breaks down exactly how much income you can earn tax-free under the new Income Tax Act 2025, whether you are salaried, earning rental income, freelancing, or living off capital gains. You will learn how salaried employees can pay zero tax up to 15.75 lakh using EPF, NPS and the new meal coupon allowance, why rental income up to 17 lakh can be completely tax-free, and how freelancers can use presumptive taxation to pay zero tax up to 24 lakh.
The episode also covers everything that has changed for ITR filing in 2026, including new deadlines for ITR 1 to 4, the four new metro cities that improve your HRA claim, and the revised children education and hostel allowances. Nitesh then goes deep into tax-efficient investing: why arbitrage funds beat FDs for short-term goals, how surcharge quietly pushes high earners into 39 to 43 percent tax brackets, the real tax difference between mutual funds and PMS, and how tax harvesting and loss harvesting can save you over 60,000 rupees every single year.
Finally, the two topics every modern professional needs to understand: how ESOPs are actually taxed at exercise and at sale (and how Section 54F can bring that tax to zero), and how an HUF really works, including the myths and clubbing provisions that catch most people off guard. If you want to keep more of your hard-earned money in your bank account this year, this is the episode to study.
CA Nitesh Buddhadev
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Timestamps:
00:00 – Introduction
02:09 – Zero Tax on Salary Up to Rs 15.75 Lakh
06:31 – Zero Tax on Rental Income Up to Rs 17 Lakh
08:40 – Buying Property on Loan and Renting It Out
12:02 – How Freelancers Pay Zero Tax Up to Rs 24 Lakh
15:14 – Zero Tax on Capital Gains Income
17:06 – ITR Filing Deadlines and Which ITR to File
20:15 – Key Changes in Income Tax Act 2025
20:35 – New Metro Cities and Higher HRA Benefits
21:11 – Children Education and Hostel Allowance
22:59 – Old vs New Regime: Rs 30 Lakh CTC Example
26:09 – Saving Taxes on Short-Term Goals with Arbitrage Funds
28:44 – Tax-Efficient Investing for 3 to 5 Year Goals
31:38 – How Surcharge Pushes Your Tax to 39 Percent
33:16 – PMS vs Mutual Funds: The Tax Difference
37:56 – Tax Gain Harvesting Explained
43:53 – Loss Harvesting and Cross Asset Adjustment
48:07 – How ESOPs Are Taxed
53:26 – Saving Capital Gains Tax by Buying a House
54:51 – How to Use HUF to Save Taxes
58:48 – Conclusion
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Sharan Hegde is a personal finance creator & founder of the 1% Club, simplifying money, markets, and mindset for India’s next generation of wealth builders.
Meta has banned TikTok parent ByteDance from advertising on its apps in the US and six other countries.
“We don’t have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps,” Meta said in a statement to Bloomberg.
The ban was first reported by Bloomberg on Thursday (October 8).
According to Bloomberg, Meta began blocking all ads and paid marketing messages from ByteDance across its platforms that day.
The restriction applies in seven markets, according to Meta: the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
It also covers campaigns from third-party advertisers that direct users in those markets to TikTok or to other ByteDance-owned services.
“We don’t have to run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps.”
META (via Bloomberg)
“Declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice across industries,” Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro added in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “We will continue to compete on product quality and user experience.”
Sgro, TikTok, and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment from MBW.
The ban follows changes made by TikTok in September that limit how users can leave its app for other social platforms, according to Bloomberg.
Those changes included removing dedicated Instagram links from TikTok user profiles, the report added.
Links that launch other social media apps, or sign users into them, are not supported on TikTok, according to the platform’s website, Reuters reported separately. Profile links that point to those platforms’ websites are still permitted.
TikTok has rejected ads from Meta that called on it to sign on to child safety commitments similar to Meta’s own, Bloomberg reported.
Bloomberg pointed to what it called “a key imbalance” in the rivalry between Meta and TikTok: TikTok operates in the US, while Meta has been unable to operate in China.
The rivalry has intensified since August, Bloomberg added.
That month, Meta agreed to pay up to USD $18 billion to settle claims brought by US states over the impact of Facebook and Instagram on young users.
Under the settlement, Meta must set a combined two-hour daily limit by default for teenage users across Facebook and Instagram, and block their use of the apps between midnight and 6 a.m., according to Reuters.
Around USD $12.7 billion of the USD $18 billion is guaranteed and will be paid over a decade, the news agency reported. Meta only has to pay the other USD $5 billion or so if its rivals, including Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, introduce comparable safeguards and agree to pay the states similar sums.
Since the settlement, Meta has called on TikTok and Google-owned YouTube to match its teen safety commitments.
Meta ran ads in major newspapers to press the point, and its executives have publicly faulted TikTok for failing to attend a recent Office of the Surgeon General event focused on excessive screen use, according to Bloomberg.
TikTok has not responded publicly to Meta’s campaign, Reuters reported. In September, however, TikTok reached a settlement with Alabama that requires it to impose new usage limits and strengthen age verification for users in that state.
In January, TikTok closed a deal to form TikTok USDS Joint Venture, a majority American-owned entity that allowed the app to keep operating in the US.
Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each hold 15% of the joint venture, while ByteDance retains 19.9%.
Under that structure, TikTok‘s global business, through its US entities, manages “certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing,” according to the joint venture’s announcement.
Bloomberg describes ByteDance as the company that “remains in charge of key parts of TikTok in the US.”
Days before the ban, TikTok opened its global ad network to campaigns targeting the US.
TikTok announced the move at Advertising Week New York on Monday (October 5).
It paired the announcement with Kantar data that named TikTok the No. 1 platform where marketers plan to increase ad spend in 2027, according to TikTok’s summary of the report.
In September, OpenAI stopped accepting ChatGPT ads for image- and audio-generation products that compete with its own tools, according to a report by The Information cited by Bloomberg.
Amazon, meanwhile, began blocking Meta’s personal AI agent, Muse, from its retail site on September 20, after Meta declined a request to exclude Amazon’s store from the agent, according to Bloomberg.
In April, a study commissioned by Meta from Luminate compared music audiences on Instagram and TikTok.
It found that 32% of Instagram’s daily music engagers qualified as superfans, compared with 27% of TikTok’s.
“Partnering with Luminate on this custom study helps to explain what we have long believed to be true: Instagram is the best place to build artist careers,” said Tamara Hrivnak, VP of Music & Product Partnerships at Meta, at the time. “Beyond short-lived moments, we see that Instagram can uniquely connect artists with Superfans and the high-value music audiences that drive their careers, both in terms of off-platform streaming and beyond.”
TikTok, for its part, struck a new multi-year licensing deal with Universal Music Group in May.
Under that agreement, the companies said, UMG‘s artists and songwriters would gain access to expanded marketing and advertising campaigns on TikTok.Music Business Worldwide
Texas public schools lost about 76,000 students in the 2025-26 school year, the first enrollment decline outside the Covid-19 pandemic in nearly four decades, according to a Texas 2036 analysis.
Statewide enrollment fell 1.4%, and independent school district enrollment fell 1.7%. The drop came a year before Texas launched a statewide program that helps families pay for private school and homeschooling, adding to options like 529 plans for private elementary and high school.
Why It Matters
Nearly 60% of the losses came in grades K-5, according to Texas 2036. Smaller elementary classes move up through middle and high school for years, and they eventually reach colleges, where missed enrollment targets are already producing budget deficits.
Hispanic students accounted for about 81% of the losses. Mary Lynn Pruneda, director of education and workforce policy at Texas 2036, told KXAN the decline “is spread out across all types of students…so that makes it really hard to point to one particular thing.”
State-level reports like this one carry more weight now that the Education Department has stopped updating key school data.
What’s Driving The Decline
Texas 2036 and the experts KXAN interviewed point to several factors, including falling birth rates, the same demographic shift colleges are bracing for as closures pile up in 2026:
Birth rates: The U.S. birth rate is now below 1.6 children per woman, under the 2.1 replacement rate
Competition: Charter schools and private schools gained market share from traditional districts
Geography: 18 of 20 Education Service Center regions lost students, with the sharpest drops in the Rio Grande Valley, Amarillo and Midland
Population mismatch: Statewide population growth hasn’t translated into public school enrollment gains
How This Connects
Texas Education Freedom Accounts, the state’s new education savings account program, are now adding pressure. A total of 85,344 students confirmed enrollment for 2026-27, with awards of $10,474 per student for private school and up to $2,000 for homeschooling, Community Impact reported.
About 43% of selected students previously attended a Texas public school. A federal option arrives next, as the Education Freedom Tax Credit launches in 2027.
What’s Next
Texas 2036 projects roughly 100,000 fewer K-12 public school students by 2030.
The Texas Education Agency’s next annual enrollment count will be the first to reflect a full year of education savings accounts. More than half of states have already opted into the new federal scholarship tax credit, so Texas may not be the last state to post a decline like this.
Editor: Colin Graves
The post Texas Public Schools Lost 76,000 Students In One Year appeared first on The College Investor.
The latest attack on the international airport in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh killed 12 people and injured over 300 others, civil aviation authorities said early Sunday, with some in critical condition.
The attack was the deadliest in any Gulf Arab country since the start of the Iran war, whose fronts have expanded to include the recent surge in fighting between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and Saudi-backed government forces there.
The statement, which did not assign blame for the attack, said the dead included four Saudi citizens as well as two Bangladeshi nationals, a Palestinian, a U.S. citizen, an Egyptian, a Jordanian, a Syrian and a Sudanese. It said the injured were being treated at several hospitals.
The attack — the latest of several in the past week on King Khalid International Airport that killed four people — is expected to increase Saudi pressure on allies including the United States to provide military support for the kingdom.
Shortly after the attack on Saturday afternoon, President Donald Trump said he was evaluating whether the U.S. should join Saudi strikes against the Houthis. “We may. We’re going to look at it,” Trump said. “We just found out about the recent attack. So we’ll make a decision. We move very quickly.”
A missile struck an airport complex housing terminals 3 and 4 for domestic flights, a regional official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media.
The surge in attacks, including against other Saudi airports, military facilities and oil infrastructure, has come in the week since a Saudi-led coalition launched a major military offensive against the Houthis. There was no immediate statement from the rebels, who earlier Saturday accused Saudi Arabia of striking Sanaa International Airport in the Houthi-held Yemeni capital. The rebels at times take days to claim responsibility.
Riyadh airport operations were suspended
Saudi civil aviation authorities earlier said airport operations were suspended. An official notice to aviators said the suspension was through midnight. The airport had a heavy police presence, with all entrances blocked, and lights around the complex were dimmed.
Flights diverted elsewhere, the Flightradar24 tracker said. Countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, Australia and Canada warned citizens to avoid the airport. Statements later turned to condolences.
Later on Saturday, the Saudi-led coalition said a projectile had fallen near King Fahd International Airport in Dammam and a Houthi-launched ballistic missile had been intercepted in Al-Kharj governorate, southeast of Riyadh.
The attacks on Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, have rattled markets and the region. And yet the Saudi energy ministry hours after the latest one was still promoting a major international energy conference set to begin in Riyadh on Sunday.
Fighting between the Houthis and Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces has escalated, with the Saudi-led coalition providing air support for government forces attempting to reverse recent Houthi gains along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Those gains gave the rebels better surveillance of shipping on a corridor that is a crucial alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has been attacking ships.
Though the Houthis have told the AP and others they are only targeting Saudi shipping as part of a blockade in retaliation for one imposed on them, concerns about wider attacks persist. The Houthis previously attacked other ships after the war in Gaza began, calling it solidarity with Palestinians. A U.S. bombing campaign sharply limited that.
Saudi Arabia has run low on interceptors, officials say
Saudi Arabia is running low on missile interceptors and has asked France, Britain, Pakistan and Egypt to deploy air defense support to the region, regional officials told the AP last month, with one noting that the U.S. has seen its own stock dwindle during the war with Iran.
Officials have said U.S. assistance has included intelligence sharing, target identification and planning for the latest offensive against the Houthis.
Earlier Saturday, Saudi Arabia said its foreign minister and Omani counterpart spoke by phone about the importance of “supporting diplomatic solutions to de-escalate tensions” in the region. Oman, which lies across the Strait of Hormuz from Iran, has played a mediator role at times in the region.
Flight disruptions are growing
The Houthis this week warned global airlines “for the last time” about the potential consequences of operating in Saudi airspace, which they described as a theater for their military operations.
Before the latest attack, Air India, FlyDubai, Lufthansa Group and Pakistan International Airlines were among airlines suspending flights to and from Riyadh and other Saudi airports for varying periods.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency had expanded its guidance on Saudi airspace, noting the Houthis’ ability to strike targets deeper inside the kingdom, including Riyadh, and a “greater focus on aviation infrastructure.”
The missile and drone attacks and interception efforts “create an increased risk of misidentification of civil aircraft,” it said.
Two regional officials said Houthi attacks on the Riyadh airport on Thursday damaged three planes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief the media. The Saudi national carrier said one of its aircraft was damaged while it was on the ground, with no passengers on board.
Meanwhile, Saudi authorities warned the public this week that “filming, publishing or sharing information related to countering missiles and drones and their impact sites exposes you to legal liability.”
Chase is offering business checking customers a $30 bonus when they make 5 invoices.
Our Verdict
Doesn’t look like the invoices need to be paid, just created. Hopefully this is like the Bill Pay and Zelle promotion where you can call/secure message in and get it added to your account. Chase is also offering new business checking customers a bonus of up to $1,500 currently.
Rocket Mortgage appointed Nicole Beattie as its chief servicing officer to lead the company’s servicing operations, which had a total portfolio of $2 trillion in unpaid principal balance and 9.1 million loans as of June 30, following its 2025 acquisition of Mr. Cooper. Beattie started at Rocket 22 years ago as a mortgage banker. Most recently, she served as CEO of Rocket Close, a title insurance, property valuation and settlement services provider, after leading Rocket Mortgage’s servicing team for more than four years.
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UWM taps Vandad Fartaj as first chief investment officer
United Wholesale Mortgage appointed Vandad Fartaj as its first-ever chief investment officer. In the newly created role, he will lead capital markets initiatives and investment strategies while helping shape the company’s capital strategy and portfolio management efforts. Fartaj brings three decades of experience across mortgage banking, capital markets, investing and finance. He joins from PennyMac, where he spent 15 years and served as chief investment officer, playing a key role in developing investment strategies and driving long-term value.
NEXA taps leader of business development program expansion
NEXA Lending welcomed Andrew Deyo as a key producer and leader of its Business Development Marketing program, which is designed to create additional avenues for participants to build business relationships. Deyo joined the company along with a team representing approximately $100 million in annual mortgage production, including roughly $60 million of his own expected production this year. Prior to entering mortgage, Deyo served 13 years in the United States Army, where he completed two deployments and became one of the Army’s top recruiters.
Flyhomes adds three members to leadership team
Flyhomes, a buy-before-sell platform, appointed Tyler Moynihan as vice president of business development, where he will focus on expanding strategic distribution partnerships with mortgage lenders, homebuilders, brokerages and technology platforms. Moynihan spent 12 years at Zillow, where he served as vice president of partnerships and corporate development and helped lead the $500 million acquisition of ShowingTime. He joins from Opendoor, where he held a leadership role.
The company also tapped Nihit Nirmal as vice president of product Wendy Tieu as director of partner enablement. Nirmal served as group chief product officer at Funding Societies, one of Southeast Asia’s largest SME lenders, and previously held roles including senior vice president of product and growth at Lendingkart. Tieu will support the company’s loan officer network as it expands its platform.
STRATMOR Group taps Coby Hakalir as managing director
STRATMOR Group, a mortgage industry advisory firm, announced that Coby Hakalir joined the firm as managing director. Hakalir will advise lenders and real estate professionals on business strategies and technology solutions. His career spans leadership roles across multiple lending channels and extensive advisory experience serving mortgage lenders, investors, real estate companies and affiliate businesses. He joins from T3 Sixty, where he served as managing director.
MBA elevates five employees to associate vice president positions
The Mortgage Bankers Association promoted five employees to associate vice president positions. Julie Kind was elevated to associate vice president of program development, Lisa Leonard to associate vice president of commercial real estate finance marketing, Amanda Lodato to associate vice president of residential marketing, Alisha Sears to associate vice president and regulatory counsel and Dina Shahin to associate vice president of contracts and procurement.
Kind joined the MBA in 2022 from Freddie Mac’s Single-Family division, where she served as senior director of marketing and customer outreach. Leonard has been with MBA since 2013, while Lodato has been at the MBA for 10 years.
Long & Foster appoints Daniel Dennis as president and CEO
Daniel Dennis, Long & Foster president and CEO
HomeServices of America and Long & Foster Companies announced that Daniel Dennis has been named president and CEO, leading the residential real estate brokerage and its affiliated businesses serving the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Dennis most recently served as senior vice president of sales and service at RE/MAX, where he worked with brokerage leaders across the country and led teams focused on recruiting, agent support and expansion.
Earlier in his career, he spent more than a decade leading Roberts Brothers, a HomeServices of America brokerage in Alabama, and later served as president of Illustrated Properties in South Florida. Dennis succeeds Patrick Bain, who stepped down following a 16-year career with Long & Foster, including more than three years as president and CEO.
Floify names Bryan Traeger general manager
Bryan Traeger, Floify general manager
Floify, a mortgage point-of-sale platform and subsidiary of Porch Group, named Bryan Traeger as general manager, effective Oct. 12. Traeger most recently served in corporate development at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota and spent nearly six years at Maxwell, where he led acquisitions including LenderSelect Mortgage Group and point-of-sale platform Revvin. Prior to joining Maxwell, he was vice president of corporate development, information technology and marketing at HomeServices Lending, a Berkshire Hathaway company.
TrustEngine announces VP of adoption and partnerships
TrustEngine, a mortgage technology solutions company, appointed Brandon Durham as vice president of adoption and partnerships. Durham will oversee customer adoption strategy, expand strategic partnerships and help lenders maximize the value of TrustEngine’s technology. He most recently spent 11 years at Homeowners Financial Group, where he rose from production support manager to director of training and business technology, overseeing a 15-platform technology ecosystem supporting more than 300 employees and 125 sales professionals.
Prior to joining Homeowners Financial Group, Durham held roles at Stonegate Mortgage Corporation, National Residential Mortgage and Caliber Funding.
Title Resources Group appoints chief technology officer
Brian Ruzycki, Title Resources Group chief technology officer
Title Resources Group appointed Brian Ruzycki as chief technology officer. In this new position, Ruzycki will oversee the company’s technology organization. He brings more than 20 years of technology leadership experience spanning mortgage lending, servicing, capital markets, fintech, subscription software and real estate technology.
Ruzycki joins from MAXEX, where he served as chief technology officer and led the company’s technology platform, cloud infrastructure strategy and artificial intelligence initiatives. Prior to MAXEX, he held senior technology leadership roles with RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing, Homeowners Financial Group, Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, Carrington Mortgage Holdings and Xome.
Westcor Land Title elevates residential division manager
Westcor Land Title Insurance Company announced the promotion of Mandy Bacco to senior vice president, residential division manager. In this role, she is responsible for developing governance frameworks, optimizing processes, leading change management efforts and ensuring alignment between business strategy and operational execution. Throughout her tenure with Westcor, Bacco has played an instrumental role in advancing strategic priorities, improving operational effectiveness and supporting sustainable growth.
Homes for Heroes names Amit Kulkarni CEO
Homes for Heroes, a network dedicated to helping firefighters, EMS, law enforcement, military members, healthcare professionals and teachers save money when buying or selling a home, appointed Amit Kulkarni as CEO. Kulkarni had served as interim CEO since April, following his appointment to the company’s advisory board in November 2025.
ORSNN adds two members to c-suite
ORSNN, an electronic trading platform for institutional whole loan markets, announced it appointed Aaron Khoo as chief product officer and Werner Koepf as chief technology officer. Khoo will lead product strategy with a focus on digitizing traditional loan sale workflows and building security, compliance and data fidelity into product requirements. He joins from Amazon Web Services, where he most recently served as general manager of the control tower and service catalog, leading product and engineering for cloud governance and management services.
Koepf will focus on technology strategy and engineering execution, including platform architecture, infrastructure, security and reliability. He previously served as chief product and technology officer at LILT AI and senior vice president of engineering at Karat and Conversica.
ORSNN also welcomed Ken Plank as senior advisor, credit unions. He will advise on the lending and portfolio needs of credit unions, drawing on experience across commercial, mortgage and consumer lending, credit administration and credit risk management. Plank previously served as executive vice president of lending and chief lending officer at Numerica Credit Union, following earlier banking roles at Washington Trust Bank, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank.
Hrutik Mohite is not a financial adviser. The information provided in this video is for general information only and should not be taken as professional advice. There are risks involved with stock market investing and consumers should not act upon the content or information found here without first seeking advice from an accountant, financial planner, lawyer or other professional. Consumers should always research companies individually and define a strategy before making decisions. Hrutik Mohite is not liable for any loss incurred, arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information provided by this video.
Investment professionals are familiar with this problem. A backtest may show a pattern. A factor may appear significant. A model may identify structure in returns. Yet once turnover, trading costs, slippage, market impact, regime shifts and operational constraints are included, the apparent opportunity may disappear.
AI does not eliminate this problem. In some cases, it can intensify it.
A reinforcement learning agent is trained to act. If it detects weak signals, it may try to exploit them through frequent position changes. But when those signals are close to noise, trading activity can become costly. The agent may overfit short-lived fluctuations, engage in excessive trading and erode returns through costs.
Alternatively, the agent may learn the opposite lesson. If the environment is noisy and transaction costs are meaningful, the most rational policy may be to do nothing. In this case, the AI system does not become a superior trader. It becomes inactive.
Both outcomes are important. They show that failure is not random. It is informative.
If an AI agent cannot transform a detectable pattern into positive net performance, that may tell us something about the market environment. The signal may be too weak. The cost structure may be too high. The observation space may be insufficient. The model may be too constrained. Or the pattern may be statistically real but economically untradable.
This is the essence of the Learnability Threshold.
Moderna(MRNA +14.21%) has been one of the market’s hottest stocks this year, surging more than 500% so far. The biotech stock has delivered these kinds of gains before, soaring more than 2,000% from the start of 2020 through early August of 2021, as its coronavirus vaccine delivered blockbuster revenue. Moderna was one of the stars of early pandemic days, bringing a vaccine to market in a matter of months — a vaccine that would become one of the world’s top-selling pharmaceutical products.
In the years to follow, though, Moderna’s earnings picture and stock performance fell into the doldrums. Demand for the vaccine, its only product at the time, slid in later pandemic days, and Moderna found itself cutting costs to account for this shift. Meanwhile, the company gained other product approvals and advanced its pipeline, but investors didn’t immediately jump on board. In fact, the stock slid in recent years.
This year, however, investors have gotten excited about Moderna again, particularly in response to the progress of its personalized cancer vaccine candidate. That’s supercharged Moderna’s stock performance, and as a result, Moderna now trades 61% above Wall Street’s average price target. Is it time to sell? Let’s find out.
Image source: Getty Images.
Moderna’s mRNA expertise
Moderna, as mentioned, experienced tremendous growth thanks to its first commercialized product, the coronavirus vaccine. At its peak in 2022, it generated more than $18 billion in product revenue. And, importantly, it proved the efficacy of Moderna’s messenger RNA technology, which the company uses across its pipeline. Moderna uses mRNA to teach the body to make certain proteins that protect against or fight certain diseases.
The biotech company has broadened its product portfolio and advanced its pipeline since early pandemic days. Today, it has four commercialized products in the U.S. — two coronavirus vaccines, a flu vaccine, and a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). And it recently won approval in Europe for a combined flu/coronavirus vaccine.
Still, investors didn’t immediately recognize the potential of Moderna beyond its early coronavirus days successes, and the stock slid 83% over the past three years.
This year, however, has marked a clear turnaround. Investors have cheered the progress of Moderna’s personalized cancer vaccine and rushed to get in on the stock. Moderna is investigating the candidate in about 10 clinical trials, with the most advanced in phase 3. And just recently, Moderna said that its candidate, intismeran autogene, paired with Merck‘s Keytruda, met endpoints for recurrence-free survival and survival without cancer spreading to distant organs in a melanoma trial. Based on data from this phase 3 trial, Moderna says it will speak with regulators about filing submissions.
Moderna’s tremendous gain
Much of Moderna’s gain for this year came after the release of that data.
Today’s Change
(14.21%) $28.00
Current Price
$225.00
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$90BMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.
Day’s Range
$197.17 – $225.00
52wk Range
$22.28 – $225.00
Volume
28.9M
Avg Vol
18.1M
Gross Margin
12.57%
Now, let’s return to our question: With Moderna now trading significantly above Wall Street’s average price target, is it time to sell the stock? Considering Moderna’s massive gain so far this year, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the stock stagnate or pull back at a certain point. It may have climbed too far, too fast.
That said, Moderna’s long-term story remains bright. While some of the good news may be priced in at today’s levels, this biotech company is in the early days of its growth. The company’s personalized vaccine is being studied across various types of cancer, so it could eventually be used for a broad range of patients. It is important to keep in mind, however, that personalized vaccines aren’t as easy to produce at scale as a treatment that isn’t personalized. So even product approval here may not drive rapid growth.
Moderna’s pipeline is strong, however, and could progressively transform this company into a biotech giant, with a wide range of products across treatment areas and a strong earnings picture. So the stock holds growth potential over time.
What should you do now? If you’ve held Moderna shares for a while and aim to lock in some gains, potentially to expand into other stocks or sectors, now may be a good time to do so. As I mentioned above, the stock could take a pause after its tremendous gain this year. But over time, as Moderna launches new products and advances its pipeline, the stock should have plenty of room to run — so overall, it is still a fantastic biotech player to own.
