Sherwood News

Apple is the world’s most valuable company again, after gaining $400 billion yesterday

The iPhone maker rose more than 15% on its best day since 1998.

4/10/25 9:41AM

Apple just added nearly $400 billion to its market cap, with shares soaring more than 15% on Wednesday — the company’s biggest single-day gain since 1998, per CNBC.

To put that jaw-dropping ~$400 billion surge into perspective, it’s nearly as much as the market cap of Netflix ($404 billion) and just shy of a slew of consumer giants like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Adidas, and Domino’s combined.

Obviously, the rally was only really possible on the back of Apple’s worst four-day slide since 2000, which wiped out nearly a year’s worth of market gains, triggered by fears around President Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs.

Yesterday’s surprise announcement of a 90-day pause on those tariffs seriously flipped Apple investors’ collective mood, though how long that will last is unclear. The proposed levies would still slam Apple’s sprawling overseas supply chain, which stretches across Vietnam, India, Malaysia, and Ireland, if they land in July.

On the face of it, Apple fans imitated the wider market yesterday by acting like China — where 90% of iPhones are produced — didn’t just get hit by a fresh 125% reciprocal tariff, up from the previous 104%, amid the wider reprieve. The company itself doesn’t have the luxury of operating under the same illusions, having ramped up production in India before being forced to hurriedly ship 600 tons of iPhones back earlier this week.

Despite Wednesday’s surge, Apple shares are still down 5% over the past week, though it has at least reclaimed i ts crown from Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company... for now.

Max Knoblauch2h

Rivian sure picked a bad time for its AI Day as investors dump tech stocks

The event coordination team at Rivian is probably having a bad one, as investors dumped the stock ahead of its “Autonomy and AI Day” amid a broader AI trade sell-off.

Heading into the event that began at noon ET, Rivian shares were down 5%, following a strongly negative reaction to Oracle’s earnings results. The stock began climbing as Rivian’s event started, but remains in the red on the day.

A year flush with tariffs and the end of the EV tax credit has pushed Rivian to pitch a techier version of its future. During Thursday’s event, Rivian said its forthcoming vehicles would ditch Nvidia chips for its own AI chips produced by Taiwan Semiconductor.

The vehicles will feature lidar sensors, enabling “level 4” autonomous driving (similar to Google’s Waymo), the company said. According to CEO RJ Scaringe, the updates will allow Rivian to “pursue opportunities in the rideshare space,” hinting at future robotaxi plans, which rivals Tesla and Lucid have already begun.

Wall Street appears skeptical of Rivian, with Morgan Stanley this week downgrading the stock to “underweight” and dropping its price target to $12. Lucid, which in October announced it’s planning a privately owned autonomous car built with Nvidia tech, also received a downgrade.

Rivian turns to AI, autonomy to woo investors as EV sales stall

Luke Kawa2h

Robinhood tumbles after November trading volumes post monthly drop across equities, options, and crypto

Robinhood Markets is getting crushed today, and not just because it’s the place where people go to buy AI stocks (which are under big pressure after Oracle’s earnings report). As stocks retreated in November, activity on the platform did, too.

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

The brokerage reported that November trading volumes fell across equities, options, and crypto compared to October. Equity notional volumes were down 37% month on month, options contracts traded were off 28%, and crypto notional volumes fell double digits. The bright spot: its prediction markets business is still in boom mode, with 3 billion contracts traded, up 20% versus the prior month.

Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brett Knoblauch trimmed his price target on the shares to $152 from $155 following this release, noting that this monthly decline was somewhat expected.

After a quarter century, Cisco surpasses dot-com bubble closing high

Matt Phillips2h

Luke Kawa3h

Oracle’s underwhelming results are kneecapping the AI trade

The nasty reception to Oracle’s quarterly results, which included a small revenue miss along with much more capex and cash burn than analysts had anticipated, is cascading through the rest of the AI trade.

Among the names getting hit hard:

AI chip behemoths Nvidia, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices.
Neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, and Cipher Mining.
Infrastructure providers GE Vernova and Vertiv Holdings.
Server companies Super Micro Computer, Dell, and HP Enterprise.

While stocks have recovered strongly since their November 20 intermediate low, that’s been more about bullishness on Google and its partners as well as global growth than the AI trade broadly.

Only one member of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF is negative during this time: Nvidia. The second-worst performer of the bunch over this stretch is AMD, another AI GPU provider.

J. Edward Moreno4h

PetMed soars after disclosing $4-per-share buyout offer from investment firm

PetMed Express soared after disclosing that it had received a take-private buyout offer from Singapore investment firm SilverCape Investments, valuing the company at a significant premium.

SilverCape would pay $4 per share, a 125% premium from the $1.77 the stock closed at on Wednesday. Shares soared 50% in early trading to $2.65.

PetMed said its board would evaluate the offer.

The company, which has been public sine 1997, has reported stagnating sales and slipped into unprofitability in 2024. The online pet pharmacy is down 60% this year and down 96% since its peak in 2018.