META251017C760000.US

A TON OF THINGS HAPPENED IN THE STOCK MARKET TODAY.

Here's a full recap:

1. Nvidia $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) added roughly $453B in market cap in a single day, the largest one-day market-cap gain ever recorded in the U.S., as Wall Street rushed to reset targets after Q2 earnings. Raymond James raised its price target to $515 from $352 and reiterated Strong Buy, citing Nvidia’s FY28 outlook for approximately 70% revenue growth and saying $1T in annual sales by FY29 now looks possible. The firm highlighted architectural evolutions like NVL racks at 1:1 and agentic Vera CPU racks as growth accelerators, while also expecting non-hyperscale revenue to outgrow hyperscaler revenue. Other target hikes included JPMorgan to $320 from $280, Mizuho to $315 from $300, Melius to $425 from $400, Goldman Sachs to $300 from $285, Bernstein to $400 from $315, Citi to $315 from $300, and Stifel to $315 from $282.

2. Marvell $Marvell Tech(MRVL.US) reported Q2’27 revenue of $2.7B, roughly in line with estimates of $2.71B and up 37% YoY. Adjusted EPS came in at $0.94 versus $0.92 expected, up 40% YoY, while Data Center revenue reached $2.2B, up 46% YoY. Marvell guided Q3 revenue to $3.15B +/- 5%, ahead of the $3.03B estimate, and adjusted EPS to $1.10 +/- $0.05 versus $1.07 expected. The bigger update was the long-term outlook: management now expects FY27 revenue to grow roughly 45% YoY to about $12B, with Data Center up around 60%, and FY28 revenue to reach roughly $18B, up about 50% YoY, with Data Center growing more than 60% and custom chip revenue more than doubling. Marvell also said revenue tied to the Google warrant agreement through FY28 is already included in its prior custom revenue target, while AI-related bookings remain “exceptionally robust.”

3. Wolfe Research named Google $Alphabet(GOOGL.US) a top pick for 2027, reiterated an Outperform rating, and set a $460 price target while raising estimates. The firm now sees $595B of revenue, up 10% versus its prior estimate, and EPS of $15.89, up 6% versus prior. Wolfe estimates Google could generate more than $105B in TPU revenue next year at roughly 30% margins, producing about $32B of TPU operating income. The firm also sees cumulative TPU-related revenue reaching $300B through FY28, Google’s power capacity scaling to 21 GW next year and 28 GW in 2028, and GCP eventually contributing up to 40% of Alphabet’s total operating income.

4. The top 10 most active options today by contracts traded were $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) with 7.4M contracts, $Tesla(TSLA.US) with 1.6M contracts, $Apple(AAPL.US) with 875K contracts, $Strategy(MSTR.US) with 840K contracts, $Micron Tech(MU.US) with 751K contracts, $SpaceX(SPCX.US) with 743K contracts, $Palantir Tech(PLTR.US) with 740K contracts, $Amazon(AMZN.US) with 668K contracts, $Intel(INTC.US) with 660K contracts, and $PG & E(PCG.US) with 633K contracts.

5. The White House is weighing a new round of semiconductor tariffs that could extend beyond chips to products like servers, laptops, and gaming consoles, according to Politico. One proposal would link tariff-free import allowances to how much companies commit to U.S. chip manufacturing, while a phase-in period is also under discussion. No final tariff rate or framework has been set. Tech companies are warning that broader duties could raise AI data center costs and pressure chip designers like Nvidia $NVIDIA(NVDA.US) and AMD $AMD(AMD.US), which still rely heavily on overseas manufacturing.

6. BofA initiated coverage on Amkor $Amkor Tech(AMKR.US) with a Buy rating and $70 price target, calling it an underappreciated beneficiary of rising semiconductor packaging complexity, AI/HPC advanced packaging demand, improving utilization, and U.S. supply-chain regionalization. Advanced Products made up 82% of Q2’26 revenue, with BofA seeing opportunities across 2.5D, HDFO-RDL, HDFO-bridge, co-packaged optics, and test. The firm expects computing to become Amkor’s largest end market by 2028, supported by programs including Nvidia’s Vera CPU, Microsoft’s Cobalt CPU, and AMD’s Venice server CPU. BofA also highlighted the planned Arizona facility, with Phase 1 expected to be fully committed, Apple and Nvidia identified as key customers, a 10-year TSMC agreement, and an expected $1.5B Nvidia prepayment in 2027. The firm forecasts EPS rising from $1.51 in 2025 to $3.41 in 2028, a 31% CAGR, and bases its $70 target on 21x 2028E EPS.

7. Meta $Meta Platforms(META.US) could spend up to $10B a year on Anthropic AI, according to NYT. Meta has reportedly become one of Anthropic’s largest customers and is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars per month on its tools. The company has used Anthropic models to help power and test its upcoming personal AI agent, Hatch, even as it builds competing products internally. Meanwhile, employees are increasingly shifting to Meta’s Muse Code, while its new frontier model, Watermelon, has reportedly been delayed until at least October.

8. IREN $IREN(IREN.US) reported Q4 FY26 revenue of $137.2M, roughly in line with estimates, while adjusted EBITDA came in at $19.2M versus $41.1M expected. AI Cloud revenue rose to $70.5M in Q4 from $33.6M, while FY26 AI Cloud revenue reached $128.8M, up roughly 8x YoY. Full-year revenue was $707.0M, below the $740M estimate, and net loss was $702.6M, including $638.8M of impairments tied largely to decommissioning Bitcoin mining hardware as sites are converted for AI Cloud growth. The bigger story is the AI infrastructure pipeline: IREN says operating ARR is $1B today, contracted ARR for 2026 capacity is $4B, 2026 capacity is largely sold out, and capacity delivery is expected to reach 0.3 GW in 2026 and 0.8 GW in 2027. The company also secured $2.8B of new GPU financing, has $14B of cash and committed financing, and says recent 3-year contract pricing has increased 125%, with active discussions around $25M of revenue per IT MW.

9. Hedge funds bought the most global energy stocks in nearly 4 years last week, marking their 12th weekly purchase over the last 13 weeks. As a result, hedge funds are now the most overweight energy relative to global stocks since June 2024. That is a sharp reversal from February 2026, when they were the most underweight energy since 2021. The only period with materially higher energy exposure relative to global equities was during the 2022 energy bull market.

10. U.S. corporate profits surged 22.8% YoY in Q2 2026 to a record $4.8T, the largest annual increase since Q4 2021. Excluding the pandemic recovery and the post-2008 Financial Crisis rebound, this was the strongest YoY profit growth in 21 years. Since Q2 2020, corporate profits have climbed $2.7T, or 131%. As a percentage of GDP, corporate profits jumped 1.0 percentage point in Q2 to 14.9%, an all-time high.

11. Citadel Securities posted a record Q2, with trading revenue reaching $7.3B, more than 3x YoY, and net income rising more than 250% YoY to $3.3B. The firm now handles more than one-third of U.S. retail stock trades, with high-touch equities helping drive the quarter’s results. Citadel Securities was also profitable in July and expects to remain profitable in August.

12. Trump praised Micron $Micron Tech(MU.US) after the company announced a $10B investment in new U.S. research labs focused on AI and advanced computing. He said the new investment comes on top of Micron’s previous $250B U.S. commitment and will help create tens of thousands of American jobs. Trump framed the announcement as part of a broader push to bring critical technologies back to the U.S., saying companies are investing trillions under his administration because America is the best place to build, invent, and grow.

WALL STREET IS THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH.

Source: amit

BREAKING NEWS: AMD middle managers are wasting over 20+ engineers’ time trying to grow their fiefdoms & get promotions on a useless side project called their “ATOM Inference Engine,” instead of spending that effort on inference engines that actual customers like Meta/xAI actually use, such as SGLang/vLLM.

Dozens of AMD engineers, including principal engineers and AMD Fellows, have reached out to us privately about how, due to office politics and backing from a subset of middle managers at AMD, they are prevented from talking internally about their concerns over middle management wasting 20+ full-time engineers’ time on a side project with basically no customers. The engineers on this side project are 10x engineers and instead should be working on customer engines like vLLM/SGLang.

The middle managers will try to cope by referencing the singular customer that uses it in prod, Alibaba on Qwen, but when digging deeper, it is just a side-business enterprise unit deploying ATOM in a limited capacity instead of the main Qwen business unit.

It is incredibly disrespectful to AMD engineers for AMD management to pull resources & limited internal GPU R&D dev clusters away from engineers supporting customers on production engines like vLLM/SGLang to spend them on growing their fiefdoms & playing office politics.