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crypto

Sui blockchain halts transactions for second day in a row

The sui blockchain is stalled again on early Friday, with the last transaction occurring more than two hours ago, data from blockchain explorer Suiscan shows.

“The Sui Core team is actively investigating. Updates and incident review will be shared as soon as they are available,” the team wrote on X.

The ongoing pause comes immediately after experiencing a halt the day before “due to a crash bug in the gas charging logic introduced by the 1.72 release,” the team said on Thursday.

SUI, the network’s native cryptocurrency, has dropped around 20% in the past seven days, according to CoinGecko.

markets

Micron and Sandisk rally on new Street-high price targets from Susquehanna

Micron and Sandisk both hit fresh all-time highs in early trading after Susquehanna bestowed new Wall Street-high price targets on the two memory stocks.

Analyst Mehdi Hosseini upped his view on the former to $1,750 from $600, and to $3,250 from $2,000 for the latter.

“Supply is now expected to remain tight through 2027, sustaining elevated margins and thus warranting valuation re-rating,” he wrote, per Bloomberg.

It’s the fifth time in the past year that the average price target on Micron has gone up by more than 10% in a week. UBS’s Tim Arcuri more than tripled his price target on Micron earlier this week, and has already lost the title of “most bullish.”

But even as analysts are tripping over themselves to raise their price targets on these stocks, the ferocity of the rally in Micron has outpaced their best efforts.

The high-bandwidth memory specialist traded at a record premium to the consensus Wall Street price target this week, based on data going back to 2008.

markets

Okta soars on Q1 earnings beat, raised outlook driven by AI security demand

Okta shares are surging in early trading Friday after the identity security provider posted Q1 fiscal 2027 financial results that exceeded Wall Street estimates. The strong results are fueled by accelerating corporate demand for cybersecurity software, as well as the deployment of autonomous AI systems.

Key numbers:

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $0.91 compared to analysts estimate of $0.85.

  • Revenue of $765 million compared to an estimate of $752.7 million.

The company generated subscription revenue of $750 million, up 11% year over year. Okta also has $271 million in free cash flow, up from $238 million in the prior years quarter.

While standard cybersecurity software protects human workers, the latest catalyst sparking Oktas strong corporate performance is the rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents that can access sensitive corporate databases and interact with privileged executive accounts.

“AI agents are rapidly becoming a new workforce inside every organization, creating a wave of identities that must be secured and governed alongside human users,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO and cofounder of Okta. “We’re expanding our opportunity as the world’s leading independent and neutral identity provider and helping customers make identity the unified control plane for their secure agentic enterprise.”

Okta raised its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to between $3.185 billion and $3.205 billion, roughly in line with estimates of $3.18 billion. The company formally dropped its long-term projected non-GAAP tax rate from 26% down to 21%. This adjustment is a direct byproduct of the federal corporate tax frameworks under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Shares of Okta have risen around 9% since the beginning of this year.

crypto

SoFi continues to surge following launch of its stablecoin to 15 million customers

SoFi Technologies announced Wednesday that its 15 million members can now use its stablecoin, SoFiUSD, marking the first time a US national bank-issued stablecoin is available on a banking app, but the markets seem to have really taken notice Friday, sending shares up over 7% in early trading.

Options data as of 9:42 a.m. ET also shows a bullish tilt from traders, with a put/call ratio around 0.16 vs a 20-day average of 0.39.

SoFi’s move is the first step to integrate SoFiUSD into the firm’s broader ecosystem, with plans to allow members to convert the stablecoin into tokenized deposits and roll out SoFiUSD on centralized exchange Bullish.

The stablecoin is currently on ethereum and solana, but the firm aims to add more blockchains to the list.

“We believe we can combine the speed and versatility of the blockchain with the trust of a bank to improve how money moves around the world,” SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in a statement. “People no longer have to choose between blockchain technology and regulated banking products.”

Since President Trump signed stablecoin legislation GENIUS Act in July last year, the market capitalization of stablecoins has increased nearly 24% to $320.8 billion, data from DefiLlama shows.

42

Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s also the number of unsupervised Robotaxis Tesla has on the road in Texas, the only state where it’s operating autonomous service, according to records from a newly required government database in the state.

That’s much lower than CEO Elon Musk had hoped, as the company struggles to ready its camera-only autonomous vehicles for commercial scale. In 2025, Musk said that the service would be available to “half the population of the US by the end of the year.”

Even smaller competition has more: Avride has 317 and Nuro has 47. Meanwhile, Tesla’s chief rival, Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, has 577 in operation in the state. Nationwide, Waymo’s fleet currently numbers more than 3,000.

Unfortunately for Tesla, figuring out how to actually scale its robotaxi fleet remains the ultimate question.

markets

HPE, SMCI surge after Dell’s Q1 beat on strong AI server demand

HP Enterprise and Super Micro Computer shares are surging in premarket trading, getting a big boost from rival Dell’s strong Q1 results.

Dell’s $16.1 billion in AI-optimized server sales for the quarter alone proved that enterprise data center demand is accelerating faster than Wall Street had anticipated. The company posted revenue of $43.8 billion, exceeding Street estimates of $35.5 billion. Management now sees full-year sales of about $167 billion, well above the $142 billion expected by analysts.

The read-through is particularly relevant for Super Micro, one of the largest suppliers of Nvidia-powered AI server systems, and HPE, which has been expanding its AI infrastructure and liquid-cooling offerings through its partnership with Nvidia.

The moves suggest investors view AI infrastructure as a broad spending cycle that benefits server makers across the entire ecosystem.

business

The $640,000 Luce makes the average Ferrari look like a bargain

Put aside the shape; put aside the smoothing out of Ferrari’s iconic sharp edges; put aside, even, the calls from former Chairman and President Luca Cordero di Montezemolo to “take the Prancing Horse off.” On the grounds of price alone, Luce detractors might have a point.

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.

Ferrari Luce cost chart
Sherwood News

By now, many of us will have read the criticisms of Ferrari’s first fully electric vehicle, as the Luce — which was unveiled to the world earlier this week and promptly saw the company’s shares crash out in New York and Milan — gets subtly shaded by competitors online and not-so-subtly shaded by basically everyone else.

What makes all of this worse for Ferrari is that, even by the luxury car maker’s notoriously high standards, they’ve slapped a pretty hefty price tag on the Luce, and the company’s CEO, Benedetto Vigna, has already been forced to defend the €550,000 ($640,000) price point, saying yesterday that it’s “fair to pay for innovation,” per Reuters.

While Ferrari’s cars have been getting more expensive of late, as recently as 2022, Ferrari’s average revenue per car sold was around $340,000. At nearly twice that price, this new electric model is obviously proving a little much (visually, conceptually, and financially) for many loyal and long-standing fans of the Prancing Horse to stomach.

Ferrari Luce cost chart
Sherwood News
markets

AST SpaceMobile plummets after Blue Origin rocket explosion

Shares of AST SpaceMobile plunged as much as 15% before the bell on Friday after a Blue Origin rocket exploded yesterday evening on the launchpad.

The New Glenn rocket blew up in what the Jeff Bezos-backed company described on X as “an anomaly” during a hotfire test at the launchpad, only days before it’s due to launch satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper next week. Bezos added via X that “it’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it.” Videos of the explosion circulating on social media show an enormous fireball.

Though AST SpaceMobile’s satellites are not directly affected by the latest explosion, the company partnered with Blue Origin in November 2024 to use its New Glenn rocket to deliver AST’s next-generation Block 2 Bluebird satellites to low-Earth orbit. Citing multiple unidentified employees, the Financial Times reported that an initial assessment of the site showed severe damage to Blue Origin’s equipment, including its only launchpad.

The explosion is a stumbling block for AST’s goals to place at least 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year. The journey to reach that goal already hit a pretty major speed bump in April, after Blue Origin reported that its New Glenn vehicle put AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite at an altitude too low to maintain operations.

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markets

MongoDB sees knee-jerk drubbing then massive gains after impressive Q1 results, boost to full-year guidance

At first, it looked like another case of a software company selling off despite reporting strong results, with traders (or algorithms) sending MongoDB 21% lower in postmarket trading. That drubbing came even as the distributed database platform company beat Wall Street estimates on the top and bottom lines and lifted its full-year fiscal 2027 guidance.

What a difference seven minutes make. Those losses vanished, and then the stock proceeded to trade more than 20% higher.

Here are the Q1 numbers:

  • Revenue of $687.6 million (compared to analyst estimates of $664.5 million).

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $1.32 (estimate: $1.19).

Management hiked its full-year adjusted EPS guidance to a range of $5.95 to $6.14, up from a previous view of $5.75 to $5.93 and north of the $5.88 that analysts are anticipating. The annual sales outlook was also lifted to a range of $2.92 billion to $2.96 billion, up $600 million from its prior guidance and above the $2.9 billion consensus estimate.

The Q2 outlook provided by the company also bettered what the Street had penciled in for the top and bottom lines.

So for those keeping score at home, that’s a $5.6 billion drop in market cap as a knee-jerk reaction, followed by a $12.6 billion surge in value off the lows. Price discovery; it’s truly a beautiful thing.

Shares are still down year to date even after today’s volatility, but hey, the way things have been going, just give it a few minutes.

markets

Costco misses out on the retailer rally after mixed Q3 report

Wall Street is giving it less than five big booms.

Costco’s shares were effectively flat in after-hours trading Thursday immediately following the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings report. The retailer managed to outperform Wall Street estimates on earnings per share and membership fees, but missed on revenue overall as budget-conscious consumers looking for bulk discounts spent less than analysts had expected.

Here are the numbers:

  • Revenue of $69.2 billion (estimate: $69.6 billion).

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $4.93 (estimate: $4.91).

  • Membership fees of $1.37 billion (estimate: $1.35 billion).

At least some of the company’s revenue in Q3 was likely boosted by rising gas prices — especially because drivers often flock to Costco’s pumps looking for relatively cheaper fuel when prices elsewhere spike.

Other retailers had rosier earnings today. Kohl’s, Best Buy, and Dollar Tree all put up double-digit gains on Thursday and surpassed estimates, surprising some investors who expected to see shoppers pulling back given weakened consumer confidence.

Costco’s stock is up 17% since the beginning of the year. One buyer is President Donald Trump, who bought millions in Costco in the first calendar quarter of the year.

markets

Dell soars after delivering blowout quarterly results and boosting full-year guidance

Dell is holding onto its eye-watering gains, up nearly 40% in the early trading action on Friday, after delivering blockbuster quarterly results and significantly raising its full-year guidance yesterday afternoon.

For its fiscal 2027 Q1, the PC and server company reported:

  • Net revenue of $43.8 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $35.5 billion and guidance for $35.2 billion, plus or minus $500 million).

  • Adjusted earnings per share of $4.86 (estimate: $2.99, guidance for $2.90).

Management now sees full-year sales of about $167 billion (plus or minus $2 billion), up significantly from its prior $140 billion outlook. That’s well above the $142 billion anticipated by analysts.

The bottom-line boost is even bigger, with the midpoint of its adjusted EPS guidance at $17.90, up from $12.90 previously (estimate: $13.14 billion).

Dell’s undergone a major transformation under the hood thanks to the AI boom. AI server sales, the biggest unit within its Infrastructure Solutions Group, didn’t exist until late 2023. That segment now contributes more to Dell’s top line than the entire Client Solutions Group, its mature PC-focused business. The company expects to book roughly $60 billion in AI server sales this year, up from prior guidance of about $50 billion.

The company got a big win ahead of this earnings report, receiving a $9.7 billion contract from the Pentagon to manage Microsoft software licenses across different swaths of the military.

Dell's rosy outlook for its AI-powering servers has given a leg up to HP Enterprise, which is also up 18% this morning.

INDIA-TECHNOLOGY-AI-DIPLOMACY

Anthropic raises $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, releases a more “honest” Claude Opus 4.8

Anthropic’s monster $965 billion valuation puts it firmly ahead of OpenAI’s $850 billion valuation as the rivals head toward expected IPOs later this year.

markets

Super Micro soars on heavy call volume as management trumpets its work with Taiwan to avoid chip smuggling into China

Super Micro Computer is spiking on elevated call demand amid the company’s push to show it’s part of the chip-smuggling solution, rather than the problem.

Call volumes are running at 392,857 as of 12:16 p.m. ET, already well north of the 214,893 average over the past 20 sessions. The put/call ratio of 0.16 is also well below the 20-day average of 0.29, underscoring the bullish tilt in options.

This morning, management put out a statement saying that the company had “worked closely with Taiwanese authorities” to help prevent its servers (which contain Nvidia’s AI chips) from making their way into China in violation of export controls, and that this collaboration “resulted in the arrest of three suspects and the seizure of 50 servers that had been deceptively acquired after being sold by Supermicro to an authorized reseller.”

The company also aimed to emphasize that none of this was its fault.

“This case highlights the challenges that can arise when products are resold through multiple downstream parties beyond direct manufacturer control,” per the statement.

Back in March, Super Micro’s cofounder was among those charged by US prosecutors for allegedly attempting to sell $2.5 billion in servers with Nvidia GPUs to China. The stock had swooned on the news and lifted fellow server companies that weren’t tainted by this association. One analyst even suggested that Super Micro lost a billion-dollar contract with Oracle in part because of these allegations.

Shares have since recovered all those losses, and then some.

On the conference call following Super Micro’s big Q3 earnings beat, CEO Charles Liang said he didn’t “feel a negative feeling” from customers at the time despite these charges.

CFO David Weigand added that the company also hasn’t seen a decrease in its allocation of chips from Nvidia in the wake of this news.

tech
Jon Keegan

Report: Microsoft tries to get back in the AI coding game with new model

Microsoft wants to fight its way back into the AI coding field by releasing a new model next week at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference, The Information reports.

The company is expected to announce a new family of models as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman seeks to shore up the company’s own AI offerings and gradually wean it off OpenAI’s technology over the remainder of their $13 billion partnership.

Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.

But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.

markets
Luke Kawa

Retail traders are making stock picking look easy

Study after study tells us that stock picking is incredibly difficult, with the lion’s share of active fund managers underperforming the S&P 500.

To that, retail traders say: “What, like it’s hard?

According to JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain, retail investors’ stock picks are trouncing strategies that would employ dollar-cost averaging into the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 and even the best-performing slices of the AI trade so far this year.

Within ETFs holdings specifically, retail’s relative performance is more mixed: besting the S&P 500 year to date, but lagging the Nasdaq 100 (again, assuming dollar-cost averaging strategies).

“In single stocks, retail has unsurprisingly outperformed benchmarks over the past month or so, consistent with a concentrated tilt toward MU, AMD, and NVDA,” Jain wrote.

JPM Retail PnL

Of course, as the old saying goes, don’t confuse brains with a bull market.

But there’s another saying that tells us to make hay while the sun shines. And it seems retail traders are making some serious hay.

crypto

Ethereum drops to a 2-month low under $2,000

Ethereum has dropped 4% in the last 24 hours to trade as low as $1,967 on Thursday morning, a mark not seen since March.

Selling pressure is weighing on the token as “traders are actively opening short positions,” CryptoQuant Head of Research Julio Moreno told Sherwood News. “US spot demand for ETH has weakened, as seen by an extremely negative Coinbase price premium approaching levels not seen since February.”

The price action has spurred $237.2 million in liquidations, with the majority of them, $225.1 million, coming from long positions, data from CoinGlass shows. Elsewhere, ethereum ETFs have notched their longest outflow streak this year at 12 days, with Wednesday recording almost $67.2 million in outflows, per SoSoValue.

“ETH’s break below the psychologically important $2,000 level reflects a deterioration in near-term crypto risk sentiment rather than a collapse in Ethereum fundamentals,” according to Coinbridge cofounder and CIO Kelly Ye.

Ye said the drop under $2,000 was amplified by rising volatility and geopolitical tensions amid renewed US-Iran escalation and broader de-risking across high-beta assets.

Sentiment surrounding the cryptocurrency has also softened after David Hoffman, a known ethereum advocate, publicly disclosed offloading his entire ETH position and questioned whether the network’s growth translates to meaningful value accrual to ethereum as an asset, Ye pointed out.

“Still, ETH has continued to hold a broader pattern of higher lows since the April 2025 tariff-driven selloff near $1,500, with the February 2026 low around $1,800 now emerging as the next key level to watch,” Ye told Sherwood News.

“Importantly, on-chain activity has not shown significant deterioration, and Ethereum TVL [total value locked] measured in ETH terms has started trending higher again since May, suggesting underlying network usage remains relatively resilient despite weaker price action,” Ye added.

Some ethereum treasury firms have not stopped their strategy, such as Bit Digital, which announced on Thursday purchasing 8,568 ethereum tokens for $20 million, bringing its total holdings to 158,461.75 tokens.

Meanwhile, other altcoins are also in the red, with solana and dogecoin dropping over 3% in the last 24 hours.

Ojai outside

Waymo to launch free robotaxi rides in its new Ojai vans

The new vehicles are less expensive — which is important for the service to really scale.

Rani Molla5/28/26