Moderna stock (NASDAQ: MRNA) rose more than 2% in early premarket trading on Friday after Nasdaq said the biotech company will join the Nasdaq-100 next week, creating new demand from index-tracking funds.
The move follows a spectacular 2026 rally that has pushed Moderna more than 500% higher and transformed it from a post-pandemic recovery story into an oncology bet.
Yet Wall Street remains divided, as Citi downgraded Moderna to Sell this week, arguing that optimism around its personalised cancer vaccine has run too far ahead of the evidence.
Nasdaq-100 entry creates a new buyer
Nasdaq said Moderna will replace Warner Bros. Discovery in the Nasdaq-100 before markets open on October 9.
The benchmark covers 100 large non-financial Nasdaq companies and is tracked by more than 200 investment products with over $800 billion globally.
That creates a mechanical distinction in Moderna’s rally.
Investors buying the stock because of its cancer pipeline are making a fundamental call on future revenue.
Funds that track or benchmark themselves against the Nasdaq-100, however, may need to add Moderna simply because the company is entering the index.
That helps explain Friday’s 2% premarket gain even though the underlying valuation debate has not changed overnight.
Index inclusion can support near-term demand, but it does not settle what the business is ultimately worth once rebalancing flows have passed.
Citi says the cancer story is already priced in
Citi analyst Geoff Meacham downgraded Moderna to Sell from Neutral on September 30 while raising his price target to $80 from $60.
His central objection is valuation. “We struggle to justify the valuation through public-company comparisons or pipeline NPV,” Meacham wrote, according to Investing.com.
Citi said Moderna’s market value had moved close to Regeneron’s despite lower expected revenue and earnings.
Even assuming a 100% probability of success for Intisermin’s leading programmes, Citi supported only about $100 per share.
The bank also estimated that a share price around $200 would require roughly $26 billion in annual oncology sales, with approximately half going to Moderna and the remainder to partner Merck. That is nearly seven times Citi’s own forecast.
The contradiction is unusually sharp. Nasdaq-linked funds may soon have to buy Moderna regardless of valuation, while one of Wall Street’s most bearish analysts believes fundamental investors should be doing the opposite.
Bulls say Moderna is no longer just a Covid company
The bull case starts with the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 study.
Moderna and Merck said intismeran, combined with Keytruda, met its primary recurrence-free-survival endpoint and a key secondary endpoint in high-risk melanoma.
The result gave investors their clearest evidence yet that Moderna’s mRNA technology can create a meaningful commercial franchise beyond infectious-disease vaccines.
William Blair analyst Myles Minter upgraded Moderna to Outperform after the result, saying the company now has “a clear line of sight to revenue diversification from the COVID business”.
That is the strongest answer to Citi’s caution.
But the debate remains unsettled. Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Simon Baker called the Phase 3 result “undoubtedly good” while arguing the share-price reaction was overexuberant because melanoma success does not prove Moderna can reproduce it across other tumour programmes.
That leaves two competing valuation frameworks. One treats intismeran as the beginning of a broad oncology platform, while the other sees one major clinical success being extrapolated too aggressively.
Nasdaq-100 inclusion now adds another layer to that argument. Passive funds may soon have little choice but to own Moderna, while fundamental investors remain split over how much cancer-vaccine success is already embedded in the price.
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