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GRAIL closed at $125.21 on Thursday, up 15% on the day and about 60% higher than a week ago, after an FDA advisory panel voted that the benefits of its Galleri blood test outweigh the risks. Stitch Fix lost a fifth of its value on a single guidance number. And Viking Therapeutics gave back 12% after raising more than $400 million the morning after a 36% rally.

The 10-year Treasury yield reached about 5.19% late Thursday, its highest since 2007, and the 30-year touched a level last seen in 2004. The S&P 500 finished flat at 7,704 while the Russell 2000 slipped 0.11% to 2,836.

Here's what's inside today:

💸 Why the raise comes right after the rally
🩸 The cancer blood test that just won its FDA panel
🏛️ What Congress traded this month, in one place
📈 Top gainers (and biggest losers) from Thursday's session

This is not financial advice. Always do your own research. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results.

Viking Therapeutics reported maintenance-dosing data for its obesity drug on Tuesday, rallied 36% over two sessions, then announced a $400 million stock and convertible note offering after Wednesday's close. The deal was upsized, priced at a discount, and the stock fell 12% on Thursday. Greenland Mines ran the same play on a smaller scale, pricing a $38.4 million registered direct offering at $12 a share after a 400% week.

This is how small caps fund themselves. A higher share price means each dollar of runway costs fewer shares, so a company that plans to raise money will usually do it while the stock is up, and the announcement tends to land within days of the good news.

Three things to read in any offering:

Then check what the money funds. Viking has two Phase 3 trials running and had $502 million in cash at June 30, so this raise buys time for a known plan. A raise that covers next quarter's payroll is the kind to be wary of.

GRAIL sells a $949 blood test called Galleri that looks for a shared signal from more than 50 cancers at once. On Wednesday an FDA advisory committee voted on it for the first time, and on Thursday the stock closed at $125.21, up 15.4%, at a new 52-week high.

The news: The panel voted 10-0 that Galleri is safe, 6-4 that it is effective, and 7-2 with one abstention that its benefits outweigh its risks for adults 50 and older. GRAIL filed its premarket approval application in January and expects a decision in the coming months. The FDA is not bound by the vote but usually follows it, and no multi-cancer detection test has been approved before.

Why it matters: Galleri is already a business. GRAIL sold more than 61,000 tests in the second quarter, and revenue grew 26% to $44.7 million. Almost all of that is paid out of pocket, since Medicare and most insurers don't cover it yet. A law signed in February lets Medicare cover FDA-approved multi-cancer tests starting January 1, 2028, so approval is the gate to a much larger buyer. Samsung invested $110 million in the second quarter to take the test to Asia, and GRAIL ended June with $861.6 million in cash.

The honest risk: The effectiveness vote was 6-4. The NHS-Galleri trial in England did not show a significant reduction in combined Stage III and IV cancers, its main goal, though it did cut Stage IV diagnoses of 12 aggressive cancers by about a quarter. GRAIL lost $110.2 million last quarter, so the cash lasts roughly two years at that pace. At about $5.6 billion, the company trades near 30 times its current revenue run rate, the average analyst target sits well below the share price after this week's run, and insider filings over the past year show sales and no purchases. A negative surprise from the FDA would take back most of the last two weeks. Keep the position small and treat the approval decision as the event that matters.

Members of Congress have to disclose their stock trades within 45 days under the STOCK Act. Our partners at AltIndex pull every filing into a Congress Trading tracker and update it daily. Over the past 30 days it shows 381 disclosed trades worth about $10.6 million, split almost evenly between 187 buys and 194 sells, with industrial products and semiconductors the most-traded sectors.

The small-cap trades are the ones we watch. Rep. Gilbert Cisneros bought AtriCure on August 20, and the stock is up 26% since. Each row shows the trade size, the filing lag, and how the stock has moved since the trade, and AltIndex folds Congress buying into its AI Score alongside hiring, web traffic and Reddit mentions.

We treat these filings as one signal among several, since many trades are placed by advisors rather than the member. AltIndex is a partner; Invested Inc. may earn a commission on referrals.

See what Congress is trading →

Here's where Thursday's biggest moves landed. Genomics and AI drug-discovery names filled the gainers list, while a guidance cut, a CEO change and a share sale filled the losers side.

Ginkgo Bioworks rose 19% and extended a run that began with its September 16 agreement to supply lab data to Lilly's TuneLab AI platform, the same program that has lifted Twist Bioscience. GRAIL was the headline, above. Quantum Corp hit a 12-month high as data-storage peer Everpure jumped 16% after reaffirming its guidance, and CareDx and PacBio moved with the genomics group without company news we could find. Greenland Mines, which we kept out of the table because its share count is changing by the day, closed up 33% at $14.89 one day after pricing that $12 offering.

On the loser side, Stitch Fix guided its current quarter to $323 million to $328 million in revenue against a $355 million consensus and set fiscal 2027 adjusted EBITDA at $27 million to $42 million, down from $53.4 million last year. Similarweb fell after naming Michael Akkerman of Digital Turbine as its next CEO, replacing founder Or Offer on November 2. Gildan dropped to a 52-week low after TD Cowen cut its target to $54, citing softer activewear demand as yields and gas prices climb. Viking's decline was the offering, above, and uniQure slid as holders trimmed ahead of four-year data on its Huntington's gene therapy, due by September 30.

Three of the five losers fell on a company decision rather than a bad quarter: a guidance reset, a founder handing over the keys, and a share sale. In a week when the 10-year yield sits above 5%, the market is charging more for each of them.

(Data: Yahoo Finance.)

Thursday brought a cancer blood test that won three FDA panel votes and a $5.6 billion valuation on roughly $180 million of annual revenue, an obesity-drug developer that paid for its Phase 3 trials with a 12% drop, and a styling service that lost a fifth of its value on one quarter's outlook. Small caps got more expensive to fund this week, and the ones that raised anyway told us which management teams think their stock price won't last. We'll keep showing you both sides.

We'll be back soon. Watching a name we should cover? Hit reply and tell us.

Cheers,
— Brandon & Blake of Invested Inc.