(For those unfamiliar with the stock market, it’s rather like being trapped in a room where everyone else speaks fluent Esperanto while you’re armed only with a phrasebook for Klingon. You can sort of follow along but never quite grasp why certain decisions are made.)
Powell’s business is a patchwork of gears and grease-power systems for oil rigs, data centers, rail yards. The kind of work that smells like burnt coffee and overtime. Their Q3? A 1% revenue slump, a 3% quarterly nod upward. EPS? $3.96, a 4% rise, propped up by margins that tightened like a noose.
Those investors who had fancied themselves as Carvana’s long-lost cousins, expecting Opendoor to follow in the tire tracks of that beleaguered car-flipper, were met with a rather dispiriting sight. While the numbers themselves were not entirely calamitous-indeed, they matched expectations-the company’s third-quarter guidance was a bit of a damp squib, leaving shareholders ashen-faced and clutching their portfolios like a man clutching a sinking lifeboat.
Yesterday’s earnings report, delivered after the market’s slumber, revealed a paradox: revenue surged to $130.92 million, a 9% ascent from the past year’s shadow, yet adjusted earnings per share lingered at $0.05, $0.03 shy of the mark. The company, in a gesture of hope, raised its full-year forecast, but the market, a fickle librarian, dismissed the gesture as mere rearrangement of ink in the Library of Babel.
Cleveland-Cliffs, now a vertically integrated steelmaker, owns its own inputs-iron ore, the lifeblood of its furnaces. Its operations, however, are bound to the ancient rites of blast furnaces, where fire and iron yield profit only when the market’s tides are favorable. Steel prices, those fickle winds, dictate the company’s fate. Prosperity flows in cycles, but so too does ruin, a pendulum of molten iron and red ink.
One might guess the market’s skittishness comes from the fact that Upstart’s loan book grew a quarter from the previous bottomless pit of silliness – over a billion dollars now, no small change. But even that doesn’t fully explain the sudden nosedive, no sir. If anything, it hints at a creeping concern that maybe loan defaults aren’t just bad luck but baked into the cake. Still, that’s a detail compared to what really tickles my fancy: the bright spots buried deep within these numbers, which whisper promises of a future brighter than a barn full of lanterns.
AMD released its Q2 results after hours, and here’s the breakdown: earnings matched Wall Street’s guess, revenue beat it by $260 million, and forward guidance was… polite. But the real drama? AI GPU sales growth slowed. Investors are now acting like someone spilled coffee on their forecast, but it was just a lukewarm latte.
The reason for this bullishness appears to hinge on a report from Bloomberg-an organization renowned for its uncanny ability to predict calamities and fortunes with equal enthusiasm-which states that Apple is about to make a very large, very public statement. In the grand tradition of tech giants mediating on the geopolitical chessboard, Apple will ostensibly announce at the White House that it is approximately one hundred billion dollars richer in its ambition to confront the tyranny of tariffs, the whims of political tides, and the curious phenomenon of Chinese manufacturing relying heavily on robots and, presumably, the panicked hopes of investors.
By 10:17 a.m. Eastern Time-right around the time most people are contemplating whether to pour another cup of coffee or pour themselves into an existential crisis-Lucid shares had plunged by 7.5%. That’s after an earlier, more energetic tumble of 10.7%. For those keeping score at home, that’s a downward trajectory so steep it could make a rollercoaster designer blush.
Heading into the latest quarter, Wall Street pundits confidently predicted a modest $0.65 per share, adjusting to smooth out any one-time hiccups. Arista, however, decided to RSVP to that with a raucous “Hold my beer” and delivered a hefty $0.73 per share, alongside a tidy $2.2 billion in revenue-another reminder that, sometimes, being slightly better than ‘good enough’ can turn heads faster than a viral TikTok trend.