There’s a biotech stock on Josh Brown’s list that’s ignoring the market noise and pushing higher
(This is The Best Stocks in the Market , brought to you by Josh Brown and Sean Russo of Ritholtz Wealth Management.) Josh — Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this moment of existential threats from advanced AI models and Federal Reserve decisions to bring you a breakout in progress that has absolutely nothing to do with the macro hand-wringing you’re hearing and seeing everywhere else. While everyone else is staring at dot plots and hanging on Jensen Huang’s every utterance, Illumina (ILMN) has been quietly doing what good charts do. It has been going up. The stock is bucking its own sector and ignoring the broader market noise, and that kind of independence is worth paying attention to. When a stock refuses to go down in an environment that is giving it every reason to, you listen. Illumina is a genomics sequencing company that spent years in the penalty box. The stock was a pandemic darling that cratered, went through a messy acquisition saga, had activist investors at the door, and churned sideways while the rest of biotech tried to find its footing. The stock traded above $500 in 2021, then spent the next three years getting cut in half, then cut in half again, as growth slowed, the Grail acquisition blew up under regulatory pressure and the market wanted nothing to do with it. What you are witnessing now is a stock rebuilding from the rubble, and the chart says the work is nearly done. None of that matters now. The chart has been speaking clearly since last fall and the message has not changed. As Sean will lay out below, there is a fundamental story here that is catching up to what the chart has been saying for months. That is often how it works with the names on this list. The price leads and the narrative follows. Sean has the details. I will be back with the technical picture and risk management. Best stock spotlight: Illumina, Inc. (ILMN) Sean — Illumina builds the machines that read DNA, and then sells the parts needed to run them. This machinery goes to hospitals, clinical diagnostic labs, pharma and academic research centers. It’s the razor-and-blade model applied to genomics. You buy a razor (the DNA machine) and then keep buying the blade needed for the razor (the needed parts to run DNA/sequencing tests). The penalty box Josh described was mostly self-inflicted. Illumina founded a startup “Grail” in 2016, spun it out, then agreed to buy it back for $8 billion in 2020 and closed the deal in 2021 before European and U.S. regulators had finished reviewing it. Europe fined them €432 million for jumping the gun, then ordered the deal unwound, and the startup was spun back out in June 2024. Then Carl Icahn ran a proxy contest in the middle of all this that ousted the chairman in 2023 and led to CEO Francis deSouza resigning shortly after. Then China put its hat in the ring to add to the chaos. Beijing put Illumina on its unreliable entities list in February 2025 in response to U.S. tariffs, and barred it from exporting DNA sequencers into the country that March costing roughly $65 million of 2025 revenue. Shares bottomed at $70 in October 2025, more than 80% below the 2021 peak. China announced it was lifting the export ban a few weeks later. From that low, ILMN is up roughly 160%. Year to date the stock has returned 74.5% against 11.2% for the S & P 500, and it’s up about 127% over the past year. It hit a new 52-week high of $236 intraday on Wednesday, and on Monday’s open it gets promoted out of the S & P MidCap 400 and into the S & P 500. The financial turnaround is what’s catching up to the chart. Revenue was $4.34 billion in 2025, essentially flat against $4.33 billion in 2024, and this year’s guide implies about 6.5% growth. Management spent those flat years cutting, including a roughly $100 million cost program in 2025 after the China ban to expand profitability. Top line growth is helping too. Q2 revenue of $1.16 billion grew 9.5% (6.5% organic) with non-GAAP EPS of $1.31, up 10% year over year and $0.08 ahead of the $1.23 consensus, the second straight quarter of beating their own guidance. Sequencing instruments grew 31% to $125 million, which matters more than it looks as every NovaSeq X (the DNA machine, or the razor in my earlier metaphor) pulls consumables revenue (the razors) behind it for years to come. Non-GAAP gross margin came in at 68.2% and operating margin at 22.5%, with $162 million of free cash flow and $122 million of buybacks in the quarter against $1.8 billion remaining on the authorization. Looking forward, guidance went up across the board. Full-year revenue was raised $50 million at the midpoint to $4.60-$4.64 billion, and rest-of-world organic growth guidance went to greater than 5% from a prior range of 2%-4%. Operating margin was held at 23.4%-23.6%, which puts EPS at $5.30-$5.40, an increase of $0.12 at the midpoint and 11% growth year over year. None of that assumes an academic research recovery, which could be another major stepping stone higher. Risk management Josh — Illumina is in the middle of a breakout and it is doing it against the grain. The stock has been climbing while its sector struggles and the broader market churns. That kind of relative strength is a signal on its own. The chart shows a methodical climb from the mid-$70s last fall, with both the 50-day and 200-day rising underneath it the entire way. There was never a sharp shakeout, just a steady grind higher through the winter and spring before the stock found a higher gear heading into summer. It pushed into the $220s and has been consolidating near those highs for the past several weeks. The 50-day is now at $202 and the 200-day at $155, both pointed higher and well below current price. RSI is 63. After a move of this magnitude, that is exactly the kind of reading you want to see. The indicator has not gone euphoric, and the recent cooling off near the highs has kept momentum from getting stretched. This stock has room to run. Traders can use $215 as their line in the sand. That is where the stock has been finding support during this consolidation near the highs, and a close back below it means the breakout is stalling. In essence, you get to find out real fast if you’re wrong. Closing prices only, don’t get whipsawed intraday. Investors can give it more room, with $200 as the relevant floor, just below the rising 50-day. Below that on a weekly close and the character of this advance has changed. 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