Yesterday, Wal Mart stock had its worst day since 2022, down 10%
WalMart reported ugly same store sales, which grew below the lowest Wall Street estimate, a slowdown the company blamed on disappointing sales at its Health & Wellness pharmacy division. As a result, $WMT stock plunged more than 10%, Source: Zerohedge
An experimental personalized cancer vaccine from Merck and Moderna showed positive initial results in its first-ever late-stage trial.
The companies announced it Wednesday, bringing them one step closer to filing for approval of the treatment option. Merck shares climbed more than 12% on Wednesday, while Moderna’s stock soared about 177%. The size of those moves reflect the companies’ relative size entering Wednesday: Merck’s market cap was around $333 billion, while Moderna’s sat near $25 billion. Meanwhile, short sellers betting against Moderna $MRNA are sitting on $5.5 billion paper loss in a single day after the stock jumped 177%. Their total losses on the trade this year now stand at $7.7 billion. Source: Bull Theory CNBC
Moderna's $MRNA 177% gain yesterday was the largest by any S&P 500 stock this century
Source: Barchart
Anthropic just passed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time more than doubling to $11.6B while OpenAI grew 18% to $6.7B.
Anthropic also reached a small operating profit making the gap even more notable as the two leaders scale on very different trajectories. Source: Shay Boloor
Amazon $AMZN just announced plans to grow its Louisiana data center investment from $12B to $18 billion with a third data center campus.
Source: Evan
The Anthropic 20% distressed discount
Source: zerohedge
The AI boom is becoming harder to stop
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft now have $2.4 TRILLION+ in future off-balance-sheet commitments, according to the WSJ. These aren’t hidden debts, but largely long-term commitments for data centers, energy, servers and compute capacity. The key point: a significant part of future AI spending is already locked in. That creates enormous momentum across the AI ecosystem — from Nvidia and Broadcom to memory, data centers, power equipment and utilities. It also accelerates the financialization of AI infrastructure: long-term Big Tech contracts can support debt, private credit and potentially securitization. ✅ Short term: this makes an abrupt AI capex slowdown less likely. ⚠️ Long term: it raises the stakes. If AI revenues fail to justify these massive commitments, overcapacity, falling compute prices and refinancing stress could turn today’s financial accelerator into tomorrow’s vulnerability.
The number of S&P500 stocks that now have negative beta to the market is at the highest level since 2000 / 2001
“The list of “Negative Beta” stocks, names whose day in and day out correlation to the S&P 500 is inverse, has surged to 121 names, far surpassing the only other significant spike, in 2000-01 after the dot com bubble had burst.” -Evercore Source: Negligible Capital ISI evercore
