PM Playbook: Letting Healthcare Share the Stage with AI

Session: 2025-11-26 PM — news_trading speculative swing book

Market context: still an AI show, with a quieter risk backdrop

This afternoon’s tape stayed squarely in the familiar regime: risk-on, Fed-cut, AI-led.

• Indexes: The major U.S. averages leaned higher, with growth and tech benchmarks continuing to outpace broader value indexes. The tone was more grind than melt-up, but leadership stayed the same: AI, semis, and mega-cap tech.
• Sectors: AI-adjacent tech and semiconductors led, while health care showed quiet, steady strength (as captured by XLV). Discretionary was mixed, and energy continued to lag, reflecting softer crude and a lack of sponsorship in the big integrated names. Uranium and other niche commodities chopped sideways.
• Macro backdrop: Fed funds futures continued to price a high probability of additional cuts over the coming months, while longer-dated yields eased off recent highs. Implied volatility stayed muted and credit spreads calm, consistent with a low immediate systemic-risk read even as positioning remains crowded in AI and growth.

In other words: the market is still rewarding risk, especially AI beta, but the tape is no longer straight-line euphoria.

Portfolio stance: AI-heavy barbell with a new health care sleeve

The book remains heavily tilted toward AI and growth, with roughly ~80% of equity exposure clustered in QQQ, AAPL, MU, and NVDA. That’s intentional: this is a speculative swing-trading mandate in an AI-led regime, and the strategy is designed to stay fully invested rather than time the market in or out.

Around that core, there are smaller sleeves in:

• WMT – defensive, high-quality retail exposure.
• XOM – energy leg in the barbell, even as the sector underperforms.
• CCJ – uranium/energy-transition thematic exposure.
• UVXY – convex volatility hedge, sized off total equity rather than price.
• XLV – new starter position in quality health care/defensive growth.

The idea is a barbell: concentrated AI/growth on one side, balanced by defensive quality, energy/uranium, and a small but meaningful convex hedge on the other. The edges are there to soften the path of returns without diluting the speculative mandate.

Today’s only trade: a small XLV add instead of more AI beta

The sole adjustment this PM session was a small starter long in XLV (health care), on the order of a token allocation rather than a core bet. Call it roughly “coffee-money” sizing in the context of the total book.

Why XLV, and why now?

• Relative strength: Health care has been quietly outperforming on down or flat days, acting like a classic defensive-growth sector.
• Diversification: With AI and semis already dominating risk exposure, adding more of the same would increase concentration without improving the payoff profile. XLV offers idiosyncratic earnings and regulatory drivers, less tied to the AI exuberance cycle.
• Mandate fit: The strategy must stay fully invested and speculative, but that doesn’t require maximum correlation. A modest health-care sleeve keeps capital working while nudging the barbell toward a healthier balance.

Instead of pressing higher in QQQ or adding another semiconductor, the trade channels incremental risk into quality balance sheets, stable cash flows, and longer-duration innovation pipelines — still growth, but of a steadier variety.

Risk management: floors first, stories second

Risk controls remain as important as the narrative:

• Manual raise-only floors: Each position runs with a discretionary “floor” — a soft stop level that only moves up as price trends in our favor. None of the names are currently sitting near those lines, so there are no active close-below-floor exit orders pending tonight.
• UVXY hedge sizing: The UVXY tail hedge is intentionally small (roughly low-single-digit percent of equity, around 2.5–3.5%). It is sized off portfolio equity, not off UVXY’s price, to avoid overreacting to the ETN’s inherent decay. The purpose is convexity on gap risk, not P&L heroics.
• New XLV floor: The XLV starter does not yet have a hard trigger set; the plan is to anchor a raise-only floor roughly 3–4% below entry during the next session, then trail it upwards if the position works.

The philosophy: respect predefined exits more than post-hoc narratives. When floors break, capital gets recycled; the only debate is where it goes next, not whether to honor the stop.

Forward plan: watching AI, yields, and health care follow-through

Into the next few sessions, the focus list is straightforward:

• Fed cut odds & yields: If the market walks back its dovish expectations, higher long-end yields could pressure the AI complex and other long-duration growth names.
• AI/QQQ momentum vs. reversal: The plan is to ride the existing trend while floors hold, but not to “average down” in the same tickers if they break. A decisive failure in QQQ or the marquee AI names would trigger exits, not martingale behavior.
• Health-care follow-through: If XLV continues to act as a steady relative-strength leader on choppy days, that sleeve can be carefully scaled, maintaining respect for the overall growth-heavy tilt.
• Energy and uranium: Persistent weakness in XOM or renewed strength in CCJ would both be information — the goal is to keep energy exposure intentional rather than sentimental.

Playbook if floors break: any AI or growth exposure taken out by its floor will not be immediately recycled into the same ticker. Instead, capital is more likely to rotate toward:

• Other defensive or health-care names, if their relative strength persists.
• Alternative growth themes with cleaner technicals.
• Existing diversifiers like CCJ, if the uranium theme reasserts leadership.

The objective is consistent: stay fully invested, stay speculative, but keep the risk asymmetry pointing in our favor by diversifying where the market’s leadership broadens, rather than endlessly doubling down on the current winners.

Data sources: index and sector performance, volatility measures, and Fed expectations are based on same-day public market data and Fed funds futures pricing from widely available sources such as CME FedWatch and major index-provider dashboards.