Markets
markets
Claire Yubin Oh

Confluent soars on IBM’s $11 billion all-cash acquisition

Confluent went vertical in premarket trading on Monday before trading was halted as IBM announced that it’s acquiring the data infrastructure company for $11 billion to create a “Smart Data Platform for Enterprise Generative AI.”

IBM will acquire Confluent for $31 per share in cash for all issued and outstanding common shares of the company, representing a ~35% premium to Confluent’s Friday close, which pegged the company at a $8.14 billion market cap. The transaction is expected to close by the middle of 2026.

“With the acquisition of Confluent, IBM will provide the smart data platform for enterprise IT, purpose-built for AI,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in the press release. The deal builds on IBM’s hybrid cloud and AI strategy, bullish that global data will more than double and over 1 billion new applications will emerge by 2028 from the continued adoption of AI. Confluent is a open-source platform that processes real-time data often used for big AI models.

IBM is down 1% on the news, though the latest acquisition marks the biggest deal for the tech giant in recent years, as the company works to increase spending on cloud and AI-related services after growth slowed down in its core cloud software business last quarter.

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markets
Max Knoblauch

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 dump the stock ahead of its “Autonomy and AI Day” amid a broader AI trade sell-off.

Heading into the event that begins at noon ET, Rivian shares are down 5%, following a strongly negative reaction to Oracle’s earnings results.

A year flush with tariffs and the end of the EV tax credit has pushed Rivian to pitch a techier version of its future.

Wall Street appears skeptical, with Morgan Stanley this week downgrading the stock to “underweight” and dropping its price target to $12. Rivian’s rival 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

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

A year flush with tariffs and the end of the EV tax credit has pushed Rivian to pitch a techier version of its future.

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

markets
Luke Kawa

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.

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markets
Luke Kawa

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:

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.

markets
J. Edward Moreno

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.

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