🏛️ MFN drug-pricing EO compresses pharma profits and pushes R&D offshore
Trump's most-favored-nation / international-reference-pricing executive order, if implemented with a required like-for-like comparison and US bargaining leverage, cuts pharma profits by roughly 20% to 27.5% (the NBER reference-pricing modelling Chamath cites; a single-country reference is only about -2% and a basket could even raise profits). That lands on an industry whose average ROI is already about 1.5% as of 2022 and whose average trial cost has gone from ~$250M in the early 1990s to ~$2.3B in 2025 under a regulatory burden that grew from 1,000 to 150,000 rules, while Chinese clinical-trial volume has already drawn level with the US. So the marginal effect is to push drug R&D offshore rather than to lower the true cost of care, and Ben Shapiro adds that squeezing Medicaid prices inflates the private-insurance side of the balloon. Bearish the listed US/Western pharma complex.
⚖ Why this result
fully deterministic — computed from daily closes on the scoring date; nothing below is editable or hand-set
- Window: 2025-05-17 → 2026-05-17 — first mention + 12-month horizon, then the window locks.
- The call: ▼ SHORT XPH (primary play). XPH rose 40.2% over the window → return (sign flipped for a SHORT) = -40.2% (the call lost money).
- Benchmark: holding SPY over the same window returned +25.7%
→ vs SPY = -40.2 − (+25.7) = -65.9%
— what this call made or lost against just owning the index. This is the number the result uses.
Direction-only read: -14.6% — did XPH move the predicted way relative to the market. The two only differ on a SHORT: this call was right about direction relative to the index but still cost money versus holding it.
- Rule fired:
· RIGHT — return ≥ +10% AND beat SPY by 5+· HALF — return ≥ +5% OR beat SPY at all▶ WRONG — everything else
- Credit: supporters of a WRONG earn 0 each, opposers the opposite — this feeds the scoreboard. supported: Ben Shapiro, Chamath
Conviction timeline
bands: green ≥ 65 · watch ≥ 45 · ember ≥ 15
Plays vs SPY · % since first mention (2025-05-17)
Plays
| expression | symbol | kind | relevance | rationale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ▼ SHORT | XPH | etf | PRIMARY | direct US pharmaceuticals basket — the profit pool the EO targets |
| ▼ SHORT | LLY | stock | adjacent | largest US/ex-US list-price gap, so most exposed to reference pricing |
| ▼ SHORT | MRK | stock | adjacent | big-pharma R&D economics levered to US price realization |
Mention log newest first
“So if you are talking about just artificially lowering prices by basically clocking Pharma, the reality is if you want to kill R&D, this is a great way to kill R&D.”
“You'll make 10 million bucks, which is not enough to fight this R&D battle. So if you then further affect the profitability scale of pharma, the impact is probably that we push R&D to different places.”
Who built this conviction
each voice's total push on the score, in conviction points across every mention — supports and opposes · share = % of all mention-driven movement
⏳ decay drained -45.9 over the idea's life — that's time passing, attributed to no one
Score events
| episode | kind | Δ | after | note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E228 2025-05-17 | init | +42.0 | 42.0 | E228 born by Chamath (explicit_prediction x3) |
| E228 2025-05-17 | reinforce | +13.1 | 55.0 | E228 Ben Shapiro support x2 (new voice) |
| E229 2025-05-24 | decay | -2.2 | 52.8 | E229 silent |
| E231 2025-06-13 | decay | -2.1 | 50.7 | E231 silent |
| E232 2025-06-21 | decay | -2.0 | 48.7 | E232 silent |
| E233 2025-06-28 | decay | -1.9 | 46.8 | E233 silent |
| E234 2025-07-04 | decay | -1.9 | 44.9 | E234 silent |
| E235 2025-07-11 | decay | -1.8 | 43.1 | E235 silent |
| E236 2025-07-19 | decay | -1.7 | 41.4 | E236 silent |
| E237 2025-08-01 | decay | -1.7 | 39.7 | E237 silent |
| E238 2025-08-09 | decay | -1.6 | 38.1 | E238 silent |
| E239 2025-08-15 | decay | -1.5 | 36.6 | E239 silent |
| E240 2025-08-22 | decay | -1.5 | 35.1 | E240 silent |
| E241 2025-08-29 | decay | -1.4 | 33.7 | E241 silent |
| E242 2025-09-07 | decay | -1.3 | 32.4 | E242 silent |
| E243 2025-09-19 | decay | -1.3 | 31.1 | E243 silent |
| E244 2025-09-27 | decay | -1.2 | 29.8 | E244 silent |
| E245 2025-10-03 | decay | -1.2 | 28.6 | E245 silent |
| E246 2025-10-10 | decay | -1.1 | 27.5 | E246 silent |
| E247 2025-10-17 | decay | -1.1 | 26.4 | E247 silent |
| E248 2025-10-24 | decay | -1.1 | 25.3 | E248 silent |
| E249 2025-10-31 | decay | -1.0 | 24.3 | E249 silent |
| E250 2025-11-07 | decay | -1.0 | 23.4 | E250 silent |
| E251 2025-11-14 | decay | -0.9 | 22.4 | E251 silent |
| E252 2025-11-22 | decay | -0.9 | 21.5 | E252 silent |
| E253 2025-12-06 | decay | -0.9 | 20.7 | E253 silent |
| E254 2025-12-13 | decay | -0.8 | 19.8 | E254 silent |
| E255 2025-12-19 | decay | -0.8 | 19.0 | E255 silent |
| E256 2025-12-31 | decay | -0.8 | 18.3 | E256 silent |
| E257 2026-01-10 | decay | -0.7 | 17.6 | E257 silent |
| E258 2026-01-17 | decay | -0.7 | 16.9 | E258 silent |
| E259 2026-01-30 | decay | -0.7 | 16.2 | E259 silent |
| E260 2026-02-07 | decay | -0.6 | 15.5 | E260 silent |
| E261 2026-02-13 | decay | -0.6 | 14.9 | E261 silent |
| E262 2026-02-28 | decay | -0.6 | 14.3 | E262 silent |
| E263 2026-03-06 | decay | -0.6 | 13.7 | E263 silent |
| E264 2026-03-13 | decay | -0.5 | 13.2 | E264 silent |
| E265 2026-03-19 | decay | -0.5 | 12.7 | E265 silent |
| E266 2026-03-27 | decay | -0.5 | 12.2 | E266 silent |
| E267 2026-04-03 | decay | -0.5 | 11.7 | E267 silent |
| E268 2026-04-10 | decay | -0.5 | 11.2 | E268 silent |
| E269 2026-04-17 | decay | -0.4 | 10.8 | E269 silent |
| E270 2026-04-24 | decay | -0.4 | 10.3 | E270 silent |
| E271 2026-05-01 | decay | -0.4 | 9.9 | E271 silent |
| E272 2026-05-08 | decay | -0.4 | 9.5 | E272 silent |
| E273 2026-05-15 | decay | -0.4 | 9.1 | E273 silent |