Victoria’s Secret just posted its best quarter in years — and the stock exploded 47% after-market.
Just four years ago, the company looked dead. Its entire brand was built around fantasy-driven marketing and supermodel runway shows — a formula that dominated for decades but eventually lost touch with what women actually wanted. Sales collapsed from $7.51B in 2020 to $6.18B in 2023. The annual fashion show was scrapped. Wall Street had completely written the company off. The turnaround ultimately came down to one thing: bras. CEO Hillary Super rebuilt the business around new bra launches, focusing on the category that drives the highest repeat purchases and the strongest customer lifetime value. When customers buy bras, they come back more often — and spend more across every other category. The results have been dramatic. Q1 2026 revenue reached $1.56B, up 15% YoY. The company swung from a $2M loss to a $48M profit in just 12 months. Management also raised full-year revenue guidance from $6.85B to $7.13B. Two years ago, investors thought Victoria’s Secret was finished. Today, the stock hit an all-time high. Source: Bull Theory
Beware of the increase in equity supply... It’s not just the IPOs. It’s the coming wave of lockup expirations too
Source: Goldman Sachs, zerohedge
ALPHABET $GOOGL MANDATORY CONVERTIBLE STOCK SALE IS SAID TO BE OVERSUBSCRIBED
ALPHABET $GOOGL MANDATORY CONVERTIBLE STOCK SALE IS SAID TO BE OVERSUBSCRIBED Source: Wall St Engine
Nice chart of how big SpaceX and Anthropic are at IPO vs the mega studs that have been public for years.
Source: Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg
Berkshire Hathaway buys another $10 billion in Alphabet $GOOG to raise its stake to $26 billion.
Warren Buffett never would have guessed that Berkshire's 4th-largest holding would be a $4.5 trillion AI company just one year after he retires. Source: Phil Rosen @philrosenn
Yesterday, $377 BILLION of Market Cap were added to AI infrastructure stocks in a single session.
NVDA +6.19% MU +6.51% DELL +10.79% SNDK +3.72% WDC +3.70% STX +4.71% Every single one of these companies directly supplies the hardware that runs AI, chips, memory, servers, and storage. Demand from data centers is outpacing supply across the board. Dell booked $24.4 billion in new AI server orders in a single quarter. Micron is sold out through 2026. SanDisk and Western Digital are one of the two biggest suppliers of NAND flash memory used in AI storage. Seagate supplies the hard drives filling new data center being built. The market is repricing every company in the AI hardware supply chain at the same time. Source: Bull Theory
One of the most striking charts out there: the SOX index has risen sixfold since 2020, while SOX earnings per share have climbed fivefold.
In other words, most of the rally has been backed by real earnings growth, not just higher valuations. The key question now is whether these profits will actually come through and whether they can keep rising. (HT Goldman Sachs) Source: HolgerZ, Bloomberg
The pullback in CEO confidence hasn't shown up in capex intentions though.
“Planned business investment stayed the course in Q2, as most CEOs cited no revisions to capital investment plans. However, the share anticipating increases to capital spending plans in the next 12 months rose further, while fewer CEOs expect to reduce capex compared to Q1." Source: Neil Sethi
