The main articles for the week have been sent. Over the last five days, subscribers have received a lot:
They got a Hims earnings review, with detailed commentary on the quickly evolving GLP-1 business and how new growth categories could help elongate the runway.
They received a Trade Desk review to check up on this troubled ad-tech company and see if they’re showing any signs of turning the tide.
They read an On Holding earnings review to evaluate how the macro landscape is impacting this company and if structural brand awareness and store growth runways were enough to offset a fragile backdrop.
They enjoyed Sea Limited & Nu earnings reviews to evaluate how global economies are evolving and how market share trends are changing within these lucrative growth opportunities.
They contemplated Starbucks earnings results and how Brian Niccol is impressively turning them around.
And, they reviewed detailed coverage of the ServiceNow Investor Day/Week, with every important product update, partnership, and financial target included alongside implications.
There are also 25 other detailed earnings reviews on Mercado Libre, Axon, AMD, Uber, Datadog, Duolingo and several others to read on the site.
At Stock Market Nerd, we live to serve you… and next week will be more of the same. Nvidia and Cava earnings reviews will be sent alongside Intuit and Workday earnings coverage, as well as a Google IO 2026 review.
In terms of all the other headlines and developments that crossed the tape:
Anthropic debuted an insurance underwriting agent that modestly weighed on Lemonade and the sector. These releases will probably eventually come from every major AI lab, but I still view LMND as the clear leader in AI-enabled insurance. There are licensing, regulatory and capital-intensive aspects of this business that make it unattractive for capital-constrained AI natives to allocate capital toward building an insurance book. They’ll certainly help slow-moving incumbents move a bit more quickly, but they’ll also help Lemonade sprint even faster.
Nice beat and raise for Figma this quarter. Revenue and operating income were both well ahead across the board, while demand meaningfully accelerated and net revenue retention rates set multi-year highs. This company is at the heart of the “Software is Dead" argument and is considered among the most vulnerable to AI's disruption. Considering that, it was great to see such an impressive quarter, and no signs of this technological wave doing anything but amplifying Figma's presence.
Cerebras (CBRS) had its IPO. The company traded well over 200X 2025 revenue at the weekly peak. They are growing quickly with 75% Y/Y revenue growth in 2025. They also have a large backlog, with their market cap around 14x the combined 2026 and 2027 revenue expected to be recognized from that backlog. It trades for over 250 times trailing EPS as well. Let's compare that to NVIDIA. That leader posted 66% Y/Y 2025 revenue growth. While this isn't a perfect comp, NVIDIA also trades for 6X expected 2026 + 2027 revenue generation. They trade for 25X trailing revenue and 45X trailing EPS. If people want incremental exposure to the AI infrastructure super cycle right now, this is my way of saying I don't understand why you'd consider this brand new kid on the block, over the much cheaper and still rapidly growing king.
Yipit published some encouraging data on Zscaler during the week. It pointed to a strong quarter for billings and also healthy uptake of newer products like Branch Security. That was especially good to hear, considering some of the negative notes recently on the company have been based on the pace of platform-wide cross-selling progress.
Robinhood published their April metrics. All of the engagement and monetization trends continue to look very healthy. The user growth trends, however, do not. They posted 6% Y/Y funded account growth for April. That follows a 7% two-year funded account CAGR, while monthly active users have not grown in two years. Competitors like Interactive Brokers don't publish perfectly apples-to-apples user metrics, but the closest disclosures we do have are significantly outgrowing Robinhood right now. HOOD is a growth company. While they still have significant room to raise average revenue per user and lifetime value, they should still be adding users at a much more rapid pace at this point in their growth curve. The expansion they are posting resembles a maturing business and is in line with titans in other industries, like Meta, despite that juggernaut already having half of the planet in its ecosystem. This is why the company is shifting some focus away from monetization and towards improving top-of-funnel. I think they have several levers to pull to improve the trend, and we should expect to see that unfolding over the coming quarters.
SoFi is reportedly acquiring most of PrimaryBid's assets to accelerate UK expansion. PrimaryBid, which was already a SoFi partner, offers retail access to public offerings through a directed share platform. This will tie into the overarching SoFi platform & push it from solely IPO underwriter to providing the actual infrastructure for company equity offerings. There's also a sizable retail user base in the UK that could be ripe for future cross-selling & could mark a more aggressive phase of SoFi's international expansion. They’re not a licensed bank, but a perfectly relevant product for SoFi's existing model. In other SoFi news, CEO Anthony Noto continued to buy shares in the open market, with another $250K purchase registered.
A quick note on 13F season (when funds update holdings). These are very active institutions and the disclosures are backward looking over the previous 90 days. I think it's important not to fixate too much on these transactions, as they could have already easily tweaked things again. I like to use it for inspiration and it is an interesting batch of data. I just don't think it's something to base a portfolio decision on.
- ServiceNow completed a $4B senior unsecured note offering that was nearly 10x oversubscribed. Someone tell the bond investors that equity bros think software is dead. They clearly don’t think so. This was an expected capital structure move to repay the term loan borrowed as part of its Armis purchase.
- Meta is apparently gearing up to lay off another 10% of its employees.
- Amazon expanded its 30-minute delivery service to 12 U.S. cities following success in Philly and Seattle. This should be a compellingly incremental market opportunity for the rest of its giant marketplace to find more frequency and revenue.
And in Macro-land:
Inflation data this week was hot. The CPI and core CPI came in at 0.6% M/M growth and 0.4% M/M growth, respectively. Both were 10 bps hotter than expected. For PPI, M/M growth was 1.4% compared to 0.5% expected, while core PPI came in at 1% M/M for April, compared to 0.3% expected. This was driven by a large jump in margin for trade services (retailer markups on top of wholesale), which is very lumpy from month to month as well as transportation (which is indirectly still related to oil). These metrics led to higher odds for a future rate hike, which added to negative sentiment and pressure on high-beta and growth stocks (outside of AI infrastructure). These weren’t good datapoints, but they’d need to turn into a trend before I grow concerned.
Continuing jobless claims were a tad better than expected, while initial jobless claims were a tad worse than expected.
The New York Empire State Manufacturing Index for May was nearly 20, which was much better than 7.3, and marked a sharp month-over-month improvement compared to 11 in April. Industrial production data was also quite strong, with 0.7% M/M April growth, compared to 0.3% expected.