Forget Ozempic. Wall Street's next obsession is your hairline.
Five stocks are riding a sudden boom in hair-loss drugs, and one of them is up roughly 500% since February. We sat down with Jason Tan of Aperture Wealth Management, who has been researching the theme for the Next-Gen Tech Portfolio, to ask what is real, what is hype, and how a sensible investor should treat it.
Hair loss is not an obvious place to find a hot stock theme. What caught your attention?
The size of the problem against the age of the solutions. Around 80 million Americans have pattern hair loss, and the last genuinely new drug for it was approved in the 1990s. Since then the choice has been a foam that irritates your scalp or a daily pill that can affect your libido. That is a huge, under-served market that nobody has moved in thirty years.
Then in 2026 three different companies posted late-stage trial wins within a few months of each other. Investors looked at that and decided hair might be the next GLP-1 story, the way Ozempic turned obesity from a lifestyle category into a pharmaceutical one. Money moved fast.
Is the GLP-1 comparison fair?
Partly. The similarity is a very large population that will pay out of pocket for something that changes how they feel about themselves. The difference is that obesity drugs had insurance coverage and a medical rationale that hair loss does not. Nobody's insurer pays for hair. So the addressable market is real, but every single sale is a consumer choosing to spend their own money, which makes it more like cosmetics than medicine when it comes to pricing power.
Why look at it now rather than after the trial results?
Because by then the easy money is gone. The job of a portfolio manager is to understand the theme before the binary events, decide which names are worth owning through them, and size positions so that a bad readout hurts but does not wreck the year. That is very different from buying because a chart went vertical.
The five names
Let's go through them. Who is the leader?
Veradermics, listed on the NYSE as MANE. It has an oral minoxidil pill that grew more than 30 hairs per square centimetre in men in trials, and it could become the first approved pill for women's hair loss, which is a market with almost nothing in it. The stock is up about six times since its IPO in February and the company is sitting on roughly US$820 million of cash, so it is funded through the next readout.
The catch is what you would expect. It has no revenue, one drug, and a valuation of about US$4.9 billion. The Phase 3 readout is due before year-end and it has to work. If it does not, there is no second product to fall back on.
And the wildcard?
Absci, Nasdaq ABSI. Their approach is completely different: an AI-designed antibody injected two or three times every six months instead of a daily pill or foam. Eli Lilly just put US$40 million in, which is the sort of validation a small biotech dreams of, and the stock has more than doubled this year.
But there is no human hair-growth data yet. None. The efficacy readout is due any week, and the company's own analyst describes it as "zero or hero". I would take him at his word.
Is there anyone in the group that actually makes money?
Cosmo Pharmaceuticals, listed in Zurich as COPN. I think of it as the grown-up. It has two completed Phase 3 trials showing up to a 539% relative improvement versus placebo, it plans to file with the FDA in the first quarter of 2027, and it already earns revenue from acne and gastrointestinal drugs. So a failure in hair loss would hurt, not kill.
The issues are practical. It is a Swiss listing, which is harder for Singapore investors to access, it needs a US commercial partner, and the product is a twice-daily topical that will sit on the shelf next to US$10 generic minoxidil. Efficacy has to be visibly better for people to pay up.
You included Hims & Hers, which is not a drug developer at all.
Right, that is the picks-and-shovels play. Hims has around three million subscribers already buying finasteride and minoxidil online, and revenue grew 38% last quarter. Whichever drug wins the science race, Hims owns the customer relationship and the delivery channel. That is a very different risk from a trial readout.
It has its own problems though. The stock is down roughly 55% from its high, there is an FTC lawsuit and shareholder suits hanging over it, and a lot of the recent growth came from compounded GLP-1s rather than hair. You are buying a consumer business with regulatory overhang, not a clean way to play the theme.
And the long shot?
Kintor Pharmaceutical in Hong Kong, ticker 9939. Its topical anti-androgen KX-826 passed a Chinese pivotal trial in March, and because China's approval path is separate it could be the first of these to reach any market at all.
But look at the balance sheet. Market cap of about US$120 million, the auditor has raised going-concern doubts, and the CFO just resigned. I would call that a lottery ticket rather than an investment. If someone wants exposure to it, the position size should reflect that it can go to zero.
The reality check
You have given every one of these a serious caveat. Is this a theme you actually want to own?
It is a theme I want to own carefully, which is different. Here is the honest picture. None of the US names has an approved product yet. Hair loss is not covered by insurance, so every dollar of revenue has to come out of a consumer's pocket. And people forget that before GLP-1s finally worked, a whole generation of obesity drugs flopped or were withdrawn. The market being enormous does not mean the first drugs into it succeed.
On top of that, these are binary events. A failed readout can halve a stock overnight, and a good one can double it. That is not a reason to avoid the theme, but it is a reason not to treat any single name as a conviction position.
So how do you size it?
Like a theme, not a conviction. In practice that means a basket rather than one stock, a total allocation small enough that the worst case is a bad quarter rather than a bad year, and position sizes that reflect each company's balance sheet. Cosmo and Hims can survive a setback; Veradermics and Absci are one readout away from a very different valuation; Kintor may not survive at all. They should not be sized the same.
It also means deciding in advance what you will do on the news. If Absci's readout is negative, do you add or exit? If Veradermics' Phase 3 succeeds and the stock gaps up 40%, do you trim? Writing that down before the event is the difference between managing a theme and being managed by it.
What would make you walk away from the whole idea?
Two of the three lead drugs failing. At that point the "next GLP-1" narrative is dead, the money leaves, and the survivors get repriced as ordinary small-cap biotechs. Until then, the shape of the trade is a handful of small, deliberately sized positions in the names with the best odds, and a willingness to be wrong on some of them.
Last question. Should readers buy any of these?
Not on the strength of an interview. Every one of these companies has a research write-up behind it before it goes anywhere near a client portfolio, and the sizing depends entirely on the client's situation. If the theme interests you, the right first step is a conversation about your own portfolio, not a trade.
About Jason Tan
Jason Tan Shiu Beng is a wealth manager with Phillip Securities and the founder of Aperture Wealth Management, where he runs the Next-Gen Tech and Steady Income model portfolios for private clients in Singapore. Every client holds the same stocks at the same weights, custodied in their own Phillip Securities account, with a monthly statement in SGD showing returns net of fees against a named benchmark.
To talk about your own portfolio, book a 30-minute call at aperturewealth.com.sg/get-started or WhatsApp +65 8882 0912.
Jason Tan Shiu Beng is a representative of Phillip Securities Pte Ltd. This article is for general information only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Figures are as at 27 September 2026 and may have changed. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investments carry risk, including the possible loss of principal. Company names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners and are used for identification only.