In this clip from The Drift, tastytrade founder Tom Sosnoff breaks down one of Wall Street's most enduring inside jokes and the moment it stopped being funny.
Traders have used the phrase "what did they do, cure cancer?" for decades to describe any stock that makes an inexplicable, outsized move. Silver spikes. A semiconductor doubles overnight. A commodity goes parabolic. The phrase is universal shorthand: the move is so absurd it could only be explained by something truly miraculous.
Sosnoff told Adam Mesh that he'd heard it and used it his entire career. And then Moderna happened.
The company behind one of the most extreme stock moves in market history had actually done something comparably extraordinary. For once, the joke wasn't a joke. But Sosnoff's real observation is more unsettling: traders had been crying wolf with that phrase so many times, for so long, that when a stock finally earned it when the move was actually justified it almost didn't register.
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