Follow the “Smart Money” With Our Latest Breakthrough

By Michael Salvatore

Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).

In This Digest:

  • AI is getting exponentially more powerful, and we’re helping you stay on the right side of it
  • Moderna surged 170% in a day on its cancer vaccine news – we were eight months ahead
  • How our master trader called bitcoin, gold, and bonds at the perfect time

OpenAI is scared of its latest model…

The company behind ChatGPT just hit pause on its most advanced model, Astra –halting its biggest training run for about two weeks while it shores up safety.

OpenAI’s own testing showed the model getting alarmingly good at hacking. And the company said it “couldn’t rule out” that Astra had crossed a critical line on cybersecurity.

This comes weeks after two major AI security incidents.

During an internal test, OpenAI’s AI agents broke out of their sealed testing environment and got into the systems of another company, Hugging Face.

And Anthropic – the company behind the Claude AI – separately reported that its models gained unauthorized access to the real systems of three organizations during testing.

This may sound like the plot of a sci-fi movie. But it’s very real.

AI is getting more powerful by the day – so powerful that its own creators are struggling to keep up.

And AI isn’t just disrupting the cybersecurity world. It’s already reshaping how money moves through the stock market.

Roughly 7 in 10 stock trades in America now run through automated, often AI-assisted systems. This year, the first hedge funds went further still – letting AI research, decide, and place trades almost entirely on its own.

That’s not a reason to panic or give up on investing. It’s a reason to make sure this technology is working for you, not just for the biggest players on Wall Street.

At TradeSmith, we build tools that put this technology on your side. And today, I want to show you our newest one.

It helps you see through the eyes of “smart money” investors…

One way to figure out where stocks are headed next is to see what wealthy, connected investors with large research budgets are doing with their money.

And one of the best ways to track that isn’t by looking at stock charts or scouring the headlines. It’s by tracking unusual activity in the options market.

For a lot of folks, options trading sounds complicated, even a little dangerous. So they tune it out.

But for our research team here at TradeSmith, it’s a gold mine. It’s one of the clearest windows into what deep-pocketed investors are quietly doing with their cash.

In 2025, more than 15 billion options contracts changed hands in the U.S. – a sixth straight record year. And most of that activity comes from the same sophisticated, well-connected investors we’ve been talking about.

You’re not going to find “tells” in all that data by staring at your computer screen. But we’ve built a way to track that activity using software.

We call it the Smart Money Edge because it tracks unusual activity in the options market across thousands of stocks every day – not just options trading volume, but also how that trading is structured, and how it compares to what’s normal for that stock.

Then we use AI to check whether what it’s seeing is a genuinely useful signal or just noise.

In testing, it’s flagged some big moves before they happened.

  • It flagged Vista Energy (VIST) nine days before a surprise buyout sent shares up 32% – even as the stock had been sliding right up until the news broke.
  • It caught Rocket Lab (RKLB) the day before the stock beat earnings and jumped 50% in a single session.
  • And it flagged GameStop (GME) before a single social media post sent the stock up 70%.

These are the standout hits – plenty of flags produce more modest moves and some are false alerts.

But we’ve found winners using this edge in our backtesting 75% of the time.

And we’ve found that these moves typically happen within 30 days of picking up one of these signals.

That’s the kind of edge that used to be reserved for Wall Street’s biggest trading desks. But our mission is to put elite trading tools in the hands of ordinary investors so they can level the playing field with Wall Street.

And because the Smart Money Edge tracks what the world’s most elite traders are doing it, it’s one of the most powerful ways to do that.

Our CEO, Keith Kaplan, will walk you through how it works during his 30-Day Wealth Accelerator event next Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 10 a.m. ET.

He’s also taking questions live on Sept. 4.

It’s free, and I’d encourage you to grab a seat. Sign up, and you’ll get immediate access to the top stock Smart Money Edge is flagging right now, plus a chance to test drive the software yourself. Just add your name to the interest list here.

Moderna (MRNA) more than doubled on its cancer vaccine news, and our system has been bullish all year…

On Wednesday, the pharma company announced that its experimental mRNA-based vaccine successfully prevented the return and spread of skin cancer in high-risk melanoma patients.

And its stock surged on the news. It closed up more than 170% on the day of the announcement.

That’s no huge surprise. A breakthrough new vaccine technology aimed at one of the deadliest cancers is a huge step in the fight against the disease.

And if you’ve been following TradeSmith’s indicators, you were early to the party.

Below is Moderna’s price chart with its Long-Term Health indicator along the bottom.

Long-Term Health is TradeSmith’s bedrock trend indicator – built for long-term buys rather than short-term trades.

It compares a stock’s recent price action to its historical trading range. When stocks move out of this normal range, it acts as an early sign of a trend shift. Green means the long-term uptrend is intact. Yellow means there’s a shift in momentum. Red means the trend has broken down.

Moderna entered a Green Zone on December 19, 2025. It’s up 416% over that time.

Note also how the same indicator started warning about MRNA with a Yellow Zone signal in late 2021, as the stock began to collapse into a yearslong bear market. It ultimately flashed a red signal on January 17, 2022. Afterward, the stock fell as much as 56%.

It’s a similar story for Merck (MRK) – Moderna’s partner on the vaccine. The shot is designed to work hand in hand with Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug, Keytruda. So Merck shared in the good news, with its stock rising more than 10%. And it entered a Green Zone on August 18, 2025, before an 80% surge.

We’ve been pounding the table on biotech all year long. And we’re still in the early innings of the biotech boom.

Even if you don’t own these two stocks, the iShares Biotechnology ETF (IBB) – which holds a basket of biotech stocks – was up 6.6% yesterday. And it’s been up 68% since its own Long-Term Health buy signal.

Jeff Clark was dead on about all three trades he shared – did you act?

For last Saturday’s TradeSmith Daily video update, I talked with our master trader, Jeff Clark.

Jeff gave the bull case for Bitcoin, gold, and long-term Treasury bonds – three assets that investors had left for dead.

All three are up since Jeff shared his bull case. Bitcoin is up 14%. Gold is up 3.5%. And even the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) is up 1%.

Jeff also just recommended closing a trade on the iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT) for a 100% gain in his Delta Report advisory.

If you missed it, you can catch up here. Jeff also goes into his process for finding unloved trades just before they break back into the mainstream view… and why these three trades may have room to run.

To building wealth beyond measure, 

Michael Salvatore 
Editor, TradeSmith Daily