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Matt Phillips6/13/25

Adobe posts solid quarter, but market doubts its AI optimism

Adobe’s fiscal Q2 profit and revenue were both better than expected and the company lifted its full-year sales and earnings guidance, but the stock is still down a fairly gnarly 7% in early trading.

Wall Street clearly wants to know if Adobe’s efforts to embed generative-AI offerings into its software packages can actually generate additional sales and profits. But the takeaway from Adobe’s numbers — released yesterday after the close — is essentially TBD.

On the bright side, today’s tumble in Adobe shares is only half the roughly 14% plunge that the company experienced after its two previous quarterly reports in December and March. So I guess that’s progress?

Adobe Keeps Pivoting as AI Transforms Customer Needs

Adobe Keeps Pivoting as AI Transforms Customer Needs

On the bright side, today’s tumble in Adobe shares is only half the roughly 14% plunge that the company experienced after its two previous quarterly reports in December and March. So I guess that’s progress?

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Matt Phillips1h

Analysts applaud Intel’s massive Q1

Intel’s massive Q1 numbers and mega Q2 guidance shocked Wall Street and sent shares across the semiconductor industry higher Friday morning.

Here’s how Wall Street analysts are characterizing the far better-than-expected results:

DA Davidson (rating: “neutral,” price target: $77): “Strong 1Q26 earnings that were highlighted by a significant beat on top and bottom-line expectations. Results in the quarter reflect the growing importance of CPUs and advanced packing. We view the recent Terafab announcement as a proof point that Intel is likely to see continued customer acquisition as the United States demands more domestic semiconductor manufacturing.”

Barclays (rating: “equal weight,” price target: $65): “The sizable top-line and gross margin beat caught us by surprise as our expectation was for tight supply in Q1. Mgmt expects the supply situation to improve through the year and for yields to improve, which should support growth in server.”

HSBC (rating: “buy,” price target: $100): “The market has been
underestimating Intel’s CPU average selling price upside as well as its ability to re-allocate its own foundry capacity to unlock further CPU unit growth, considering a CPU shortage environment that we expect to persist until 2027e.”

Bernstein: (rating: “market perform,” price target: $65): “Server strength seems demonstrably real, client seems to be holding up for now, commentary around 18A/14A was positive, and there remains hopes for forthcoming packaging announcements. That being said, there were quite a few nuggets for the bears as well; namely while 18A yields are seemingly running better than expected they apparently remain underwhelming, and ASP increases are being met by cost inflation.”

JPMorgan (rating: “underweight,” price target: $45): “EPS quality issues, 2H gross margin headwinds, structural OpEx creep, and a Foundry breakeven timeline that is likely to push beyond YE CY27 keep us at UW even as we raise estimates.”

Intel crushes Q1 earnings expectations, forecasts strong Q2 revenue, shares soar

Intel crushes Q1 earnings expectations, forecasts strong Q2 revenue, shares soar

DA Davidson (rating: “neutral,” price target: $77): “Strong 1Q26 earnings that were highlighted by a significant beat on top and bottom-line expectations. Results in the quarter reflect the growing importance of CPUs and advanced packing. We view the recent Terafab announcement as a proof point that Intel is likely to see continued customer acquisition as the United States demands more domestic semiconductor manufacturing.”

Barclays (rating: “equal weight,” price target: $65): “The sizable top-line and gross margin beat caught us by surprise as our expectation was for tight supply in Q1. Mgmt expects the supply situation to improve through the year and for yields to improve, which should support growth in server.”

HSBC (rating: “buy,” price target: $100): “The market has been
underestimating Intel’s CPU average selling price upside as well as its ability to re-allocate its own foundry capacity to unlock further CPU unit growth, considering a CPU shortage environment that we expect to persist until 2027e.”

Bernstein: (rating: “market perform,” price target: $65): “Server strength seems demonstrably real, client seems to be holding up for now, commentary around 18A/14A was positive, and there remains hopes for forthcoming packaging announcements. That being said, there were quite a few nuggets for the bears as well; namely while 18A yields are seemingly running better than expected they apparently remain underwhelming, and ASP increases are being met by cost inflation.”

JPMorgan (rating: “underweight,” price target: $45): “EPS quality issues, 2H gross margin headwinds, structural OpEx creep, and a Foundry breakeven timeline that is likely to push beyond YE CY27 keep us at UW even as we raise estimates.”

Hundreds of advocates for marijuana legalization rally and smoke pot outside the White House.

It seems like the US weed industry finally got what it wanted. Why did pot stocks plunge?

The DOJ’s order to reclassify marijuana could be a boon for US cannabis companies. But the devil is in the details.

J. Edward Moreno1h

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Claire Yubin Oh4h

TSMC surges as Taiwan eases single-stock investment limits for funds

TSMC’s ADRs jumped 3% in premarket trading on Friday after the island’s financial regulator announced plans to ease limits on funds’ allocations to single funds.

Previously, active fund managers were limited to allocating up to a maximum of 10% of their net assets into any one company. Under the revised framework, local equity funds and active exchange-traded funds that solely invest in Taiwanese stocks can allocate up to 25% of their assets in any listed company if it has a weighting above 10% in the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

The new rule, announced Thursday, will come into effect after the regulator issues an order on Friday. Relaxing the long-standing rule will mean fewer restrictions on local money managers taking full advantage of TSMC’s skyrocketing share price. TSMC, now Asia’s largest company by market cap, has seen its share price surge 150% in the past year — adding more to its gains in the last few days after crushing estimates in its first-quarter results.

TSMC is currently the only company that meets that 10% criterion, holding some 44% weight in Taiwan’s benchmark index, though the latest change also moved other large-cap Taiwanese stocks higher on Friday.

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Intel’s earnings send fellow CPU sellers Arm and AMD higher

A strong set of Q1 results and Q2 guidance from Intel is sending shares of fellow CPU sellers Arm Holdings and Advanced Micro Devices about 6% and 4% higher in postmarket trading, respectively.

Intel’s robust report is seemingly a rising tide that lifts all boats in the industry, not just a company-specific dynamic.

Arm recently pivoted to designing and selling CPUs for data center customers (like Meta!) in addition to its long-standing business of licensing out the design architecture.

And AMD, of course, has been a well-established giant in the space before it ever started offering GPUs.

It’s the latest reminder that the AI boom isn’t just juicing demand for the most advanced chips, but also memory, older-school units, and a wide array of hardware.

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Matt Phillips18h

Intel crushes Q1 earnings expectations, forecasts strong Q2 revenue, shares soar

Intel shares surged in after-hours trading Thursday after the semiconductor giant reported much better-than-expected Q1 earnings and sales numbers, as well as robust guidance for Q2.

Intel reported:

Q1 revenue of $13.6 billion vs. a consensus expectation for $12.42 billion.
Adjusted earnings per share of $0.29 vs. the $0.02 consensus estimate from FactSet.
A forecast for Q2 sales of between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion vs. analysts’ $13.11 billion expectation.
A forecast for adjusted Q2 EPS of $0.20 vs. Wall Street expectations for $0.10.

“The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in the company’s earnings release.

The quarterly result was clearly a surprise to both analysts and investors. Shares were up 15% shortly after the report in after-hours trading — despite having risen roughly 50% already in the month of April before the results were released.

Intel’s results could not be more different from the previous quarter. In its Q4 report, Intel issued lackluster guidance for Q1, which it blamed on a dearth of available silicon wafers it could use to make finished chips. The stock plunged 17% the next day.

“Intel was explicit on the Q4 call that they were living hand-to-mouth on wafers,” Cody Acree, a senior semiconductor analyst at brokerage firm Benchmark/StoneX, said in a brief phone interview with Sherwood News Thursday. “If this kind of upside was possible, than why the ultraconservative guidance?”

The Q1 results are a significant coda to what has been one of the best periods of share price performance for the company in decades. The stock has more than tripled over the last 12 months.

That run-up, however, had seemed to far outpace Intel’s actual business results, resulting in a nosebleed-inducing forward price-to-earnings valuation nearly 100x expected earnings over the next 12 months, dwarfing even the valuations the company was receiving during the peak of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. But the Q1 numbers suggest the market was picking up good vibrations that seem to have been borne out.

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