Healthcare Investing in a More Discerning Market Environment
Written by: David Mandelbaum, Portfolio Manager
As we enter 2026, investors are navigating a market defined less by fear and more by discernment. Strong multi-year returns, concentrated leadership, and elevated valuations have shifted the investment challenge from identifying opportunity to allocating capital with greater precision.
Periods like this rarely reward bold macro calls. Instead, they tend to favor patience, selectivity, and businesses capable of compounding value across a range of economic outcomes. With valuations embedding higher expectations, the margin for error has narrowed, and dispersion between winners and laggards has become more pronounced.
For long-term investors, this places a premium on fundamentals, durability, and evidence rather than momentum or narrative alone.
The market environment is evolving away from broad multiple expansion toward one that increasingly rewards earnings quality, execution, and balance sheet strength. While innovation themes such as artificial intelligence continue to command attention, they have also reinforced concentration risk and heightened sensitivity to disappointment.
In this setting, successful investment outcomes are less about predicting short-term market movements and more about owning businesses that can sustain economic relevance, pricing power, and cash generation over time regardless of where we are in the cycle.
Few sectors reflect this shift more clearly than Healthcare and Life Sciences.
Healthcare and Life Sciences sit at the intersection of powerful secular growth and structural constraint.
On one hand, long-term demand is supported by aging populations, scientific advancement, and rising global healthcare utilization. On the other, the sector operates within explicit policy frameworks, reimbursement systems, and regulatory standards that directly influence profitability, capital allocation, and scalability.
This combination makes healthcare both resilient and complex. Innovation alone is not sufficient. Long-term value creation increasingly depends on demonstrable clinical outcomes, economic justification, reimbursement alignment, and the ability to scale responsibly within policy boundaries.
As a result, the sector has become inherently selective. Broad exposure can obscure meaningful differences between companies with durable advantages and those whose economics remain fragile. In today’s environment, outcomes are increasingly differentiated, often sharply, based on execution, evidence, and discipline.
Throughout much of 2025, healthcare lagged broader equity markets despite largely intact long-term fundamentals. A convergence of factors including heightened policy uncertainty, margin pressure in managed care, delayed spending cycles in life sciences, and a market preference for higher beta growth compressed valuations across multiple subsectors.
As the year progressed, many of these pressure points began to ease. Policy fears moderated relative to worst case scenarios, funding conditions showed early signs of normalization, and valuation disparities became increasingly difficult to ignore. Importantly, fundamentals across several healthcare segments stabilized or improved, setting the stage for renewed differentiation.
In a market now more focused on earnings durability and execution, healthcare’s combination of defensive characteristics and credible growth drivers has become increasingly relevant.
The OnePoint Benestar Strategy was designed for precisely this type of market.
Benestar invests across the global Healthcare and Life Sciences ecosystem, including biopharmaceuticals, medical technology, life science tools and diagnostics, healthcare services, and enabling technology platforms. Rather than seeking broad sector exposure, the strategy concentrates capital in businesses where long-term value creation is supported by evidence, policy alignment, and scalable economic models.
Central to this approach is deep fundamental research combined with policy fluency. Healthcare is one of the few sectors where regulatory and legislative decisions can materially reshape industry economics. Understanding these dynamics before they are reflected in market prices allows for more informed security selection and active risk calibration.
Entering 2026, the portfolio reflects a deliberate balance between innovation driven growth and fundamental durability. Exposure is focused on companies with large addressable markets and improving growth profiles, complemented by businesses with resilient cash flows, pricing power, and clear paths to margin normalization or expansion.
Key areas of focus include confirmation of a sustained recovery in life sciences activity, evidence of margin stabilization in managed care, continued procedure growth and innovation in medical technology, and disciplined capital allocation across biopharma. These are not short-term themes, but long duration assessments of where evidence and economics are beginning to align.
At the same time, the strategy maintains an explicit emphasis on downside awareness, recognizing that capital preservation remains a critical component of long-term compounding.
As markets grow more discerning, so must investors.
The opportunity set within Healthcare and Life Sciences remains substantial, but increasingly demands selectivity, patience, and informed judgment. Businesses that can demonstrate real world outcomes, economic sustainability, and alignment with long term policy realities are likely to be the primary beneficiaries in the years ahead.
The OnePoint Benestar Strategy is positioned with this perspective in mind, focused on evidence over narrative, discipline over momentum, and long-term stewardship of capital across market cycles.
Disclaimers
David Mandelbaum is solely an investment advisor representative and a lead portfolio manager of OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners, a registered investment adviser. Investment advisory and financial planning services offered through Bleakley Financial Group LLC, an SEC registered investment adviser, doing business as OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners.
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. The market and economic data is historical and is no guarantee of future results. All indices are unmanaged and may not be invested into directly. The information in this report has been prepared from data believed to be reliable, but no representation is being made as to its accuracy and completeness.
Nothing in this material should be construed as investment advice offered by OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners or David Mandelbaum. This market commentary is for informational purposes only and is not meant to constitute a recommendation of any particular investment, security, portfolio of securities, transaction or investment strategy. No chart, graph, or other figure provided should be used to determine which securities to buy, sell, or hold. No representation is made concerning the appropriateness of any particular investment, security, portfolio of securities, transaction or investment strategy. You should speak with your own financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Neither OnePoint BFG Wealth Partners nor David Mandelbaum guarantees any specific outcome or profit. These disclosures cannot and do not list every conceivable factor that may affect the results of any investment or investment strategy. Risks will arise, and an investor must be willing and able to accept those risks, including the loss of principal.
Certain statements contained herein are statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements that are based on opinions and assumptions that involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that would cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements.
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