UPSIDE SURPRISE: Nvidia Beats

Air taxi maker Joby Aviation reported its fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday. Shares climbed more than 3% in after-hours trading.

The company posted a loss of $0.14 per share, beating estimates of a $0.20 loss.

Joby ended the fourth quarter with $1.41 billion in cash (and cash equivalents), compared to Wall Street expectations of $1.01 billion.

Investors have closely watched Joby’s progress with FAA certification, which will be the determining factor for launching commercial air taxi services in the US. As of the end of Q4, Joby said it is 80% complete with the fourth stage of its five-stage certification process, up from 77% in the third quarter. Joby is 12% complete with the fifth stage, up from 10% in Q3.

Earlier on Wednesday, Joby announced it plans to partner with Uber to offer air taxi rides on the ride-hailing app in Dubai later this year. The companies already partner on Blade helicopter rides.

Joby also said it expects US early operations to begin this year, with the White House’s eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) Integration Pilot Program “set to select at least five sites for mature eVTOL aircraft to begin operating ahead of Type Certification.”

Ad tech platform The Trade Desk offered weak Q1 sales guidance as part of its Q4 earnings numbers, sending the stock down sharply after-hours on Wednesday.

The advertising software company reported:

• Adjusted Q4 earnings per share of $0.59 vs. the $0.58 consensus estimate, per FactSet.

• Q4 revenue of $847 million vs. the $840.6 million expectation.

• Q1 sales guidance of “at least” $678 million vs. Wall Street’s $688.6 million expectation.

The Trade Desk specializes in helping client advertisers shift their ads from traditional linear television toward online streaming services. And the shares posted some impressive gains at times, rising more than 400% over five years starting at the end of 2019.

But the company’s shares have cratered in recent years, in part because of a daunting competitive threat from Amazon’s demand-side advertising platform. Through Wednesday’s close, the stock was down roughly 80% from where it was trading at the end of 2024.

Paramount Skydance reported underwhelming fourth-quarter earnings after the bell on Wednesday, in the midst of its attempt to win the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war.

For the last three months of 2025, Paramount reported:

• An adjusted loss of $0.12 per share, compared to Bloomberg estimates of $0.07 earnings per share.

• Revenue of $8.1 billion, missing Wall Street’s expectations of $8.15 billion.

Looking ahead, the company expects Q1 revenue of between $7.15 billion and $7.35 billion, below the $7.39 billion Wall Street consensus estimate.

Earlier this week, Paramount hiked its offer for Warner Bros. to $31 per share. Warner’s board, which has rejected Paramount’s acquisition attempts several times in recent months, said it’s reviewing the new bid.

If WBD determines the Paramount deal to be a superior offer, Netflix will have four days to match it, beat it, or exit the process. Paramount shares have fallen 24% since it made its initial offer for WBD in December.

One enigma I’m noticing in the AI boom?

The publicly available chatbots, effectively the best universal manifestation of artificial intelligence we have, feel more or less the same to me. That is, commoditized.

Maybe this is a skill issue; I’m not the most high-tech person. That being said, I have experienced substantial performance gaps between paid and free versions, and am aware that more specialized tools offer better tailored results for certain tasks (i.e. Claude Code). But still, I’m Gemini-first, but polyAImorous when it comes to chatbot usage.

Based on how Big Tech companies treat GPUs, the inputs used to train and run many chatbots, those seem to be anything but commoditized.

Two of the AI chip deals reached by Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 in GPUs, have involved the company forking over the rights to potentially massive equity stakes in the company in exchange for securing these buyers. First was OpenAI, then Tuesday’s pact with Meta.

Lisa Su and co. seemingly can’t get customers on normal terms the way Jensen Huang and co. can.

Nvidia, which reports earnings Wednesday after the close, enjoys a dominant market position. Sure, it subsidizes its customers’ acquisitions of chips, but it could be argued that this is just a way in investing in its own success by trying to make sure the company has as many viable future clients as possible. Nvidia and Meta’s “multi-year, multi-generational strategic partnership” that will see the social media giant buy millions of GPUs in the former didn’t involve the chip designer needing to give Mark Zuckerberg any potential equity exposure.

Nvidia’s offerings are able to command a significant premium because its hardware not only comes with a track record, but it’s also attached to the CUDA software system that AI developers are comfortable with.

In a sense, some of the best industry comps here are found in energy (something AI data centers chock-full of GPUs need a lot of!).

Different forms of crude can be refined into the same kind of gasoline; your car won’t know the difference. Similarly, hydropower, solar power, or natural gas can all be used to generate electricity, and as long as the lights are on, people won’t be able to tell which one it was.

Crypto assets and crypto-adjacent companies are catching a bid and rebounding off recent lows, with stablecoin issuer Circle soaring after reporting strong earnings before the bell. The company beat on revenue and reported that USDC in circulation has grown to $75.3 billion, up 72% year over year.

The total market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies has increased 4.5% in the last 24 hours, and both tokens and companies close to crypto are enjoying a boost:

• Altcoins ethereum, XRP, solana, dogecoin, hype, chainlink, and avalanche are all in the green.

• Bitcoin treasury firms Strategy and Strive Inc. are rising along with bitcoin.

• Bitcoin miner Hut 8, which reported Q4 earnings that beat on earnings per share while missing on revenue, is up in early trading, as are miners MARA Holdings and Riot Platforms.

• Ethereum treasury firms BitMine Immersion Technologies, SharpLink Gaming, and Bit Digital are up.

• Solana treasury firms Upexi and DeFi Development Corp. are also both rising.

• Crypto trading platform Coinbase and Robinhood are both enjoying a boost from the rise in crypto sentiment.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

Despite the relief bounce, some are still uneasy. “The whole market still seems very heavy to me,” Glenn Rosenberg, managing partner at Persistent Trading, told Sherwood News. “Jokingly, BTC feels like it’s now 100% correlated to any asset or news that’s negative! I think we test 60,000 — that’s a big long-term channel and could push lower from there,” he said. “The whole [space] looks risky right now.”

Lithium miners Albemarle Corp., Lithium Argentina, Lithium Americas, Mineral Resourcesand Sociedad Quimica y Minera are all rising in early trading on Wednesday after Zimbabwe suspended its export of all raw minerals and lithium concentrates.

The latest move accelerates a ban that was reportedly expected to come into effect starting January 2027, and will remain in place until further notice. As the top African producer of the metal, Zimbabwe exported some 1.13 million metric tons, or $514 million worth, of lithium-bearing spodumene concentrate in 2025.

Zimbabwe’s mines minister said the ban would remain in effect until companies comply with government requirements, per Bloomberg.

The ban adds further supply pressure into a market that’s already seen prices squeeze higher, with benchmark lithium futures roughly doubling since the end of October 2025. That’s spurred the shares of companies like Albemarle, which has gained more than 90% over the same time frame — a rare bright spot in an EV supply chain that’s generally been pretty depressed recently.

Some Wall Street analysts have gotten more bullish on the sector, too. Albemarle scored an upgrade from Bank of America analysts earlier this month, who cited the lithium market’s improvement in structural fundamentals, as Chinese supply restrictions combined with growing demand for utility-scale battery storage applications provide further support for lithium prices. Futures prices for lithium carbonate remain above $18 per kilogram, having been as high as $21 per kilogram in January.

Much like the US men’s hockey team as they walked into the House Chamber during President Trump’s address, there would have been plenty of “mention” traders celebrating at least a few of the president’s ~10,600 words on Tuesday evening, including “hottest,” “egg,” and “alien.”

Lasting almost 108 minutes, Trump’s speech yesterday officially became the longest State of the Union address of the television age, per Bloomberg, surpassing the previous record of 89 minutes set by President Bill Clinton in 2000.

According to data compiled by The American Presidency Project, the president’s address was almost double the average length of all recorded SOTU speeches since 1964, which works out as 55 minutes.

The speech also marked what could be a new personal best in terms of length for Trump, beating his remarks to Congress in March 2025 by 8 minutes, though this was not included in the average as, according to the APP, it was not an official “State of the Union” speech.

The APP also calculated a preliminary figure for 2026 in terms of word count, and the current president trumped all other spoken-word SOTU addresses. Some addresses, however, haven’t been verbally delivered, and a couple of the written versions have racked up considerably greater tallies — most notably Jimmy Carter’s 1981 written address, which came in at 33,667 words in total.