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Pfizer reports earnings beat and boosts guidance as Metsera bid-off heats up

Pfizer reported earnings on Tuesday.

Pfizer rose in early trading after it reported earnings results on Tuesday that beat Wall Street estimates as the company is embroiled in the middle of a bid-off for obesity biotech Metsera.

The pharmaceutical giant reported adjusted earnings per share of $0.87, compared to the $0.63 analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. The company also narrowed its full-year adjusted profit per share guidance to between $3.00 and $3.15, from between $2.90 and $3.10, which equates to a mild boost to the expected midpoint.

It also reported $16.6 billion in revenue for the quarter, just above the $16.5 billion the Street was penciling in.

The company is down about 7% since the start of the year amid industry-wide headwinds like tariffs as well as its own struggle to secure its next source of revenue growth.

Meanwhile, Pfizer launched a legal battle this week against Novo Nordisk — its Danish competitor and maker of Ozempic — for seeking to intercept its acquisition bid for Metsera, an obesity biotech working on a next-generation GLP-1 drug.

Metsera said on Monday that both Novo and Pfizer upped their bids for the company, but Novo's was still superior to Pfizer’s.

The spat underscores just how much the weight-loss medication race is heating up. Earlier this year, Pfizer scrapped a GLP-1 pill it was developing after data from clinical trails fell short. Novo, while first to the GLP-1 market, is watching Eli Lilly’s drugs eat its lunch.

Palantir tumbles after delivering spectacular results

Palantir’s exceptional earnings receive ugly reaction

The valuation agita hitting high-flying stocks overshadowed the AI and intelligence software company’s blowout quarterly update.

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Luke Kawa4h

Fermi secures preliminary approval for a low-emissions natural gas plant to meet AI power demands

Power provider Fermi said it has received preliminary approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for the planned 6 gigawatts of natural gas generation that’s part of its “Project Matador” to meet the ever-growing power demands of the AI boom.

“At Fermi, our private grid model ensures that the growing demand for AI is met privately,” Fermi America CEO and cofounder Toby Neugebauer said.

Final approval is still subject to a formal meeting and public comment.

The initial gas generators are already en route to the campus, with plans to have these installed and online in 2026, Fermi said.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently remarked that “the ability to get the builds done fast enough close to power” is the biggest constraint he faces, just ahead of an announced deal with IREN to purchase power-secured cloud computing capacity.

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The negative reaction after Palantir’s earnings is spreading to other volatile retail favorites

Palantir is the poster child for a richly valued, retail darling, megacap momentum stock. It’s going down on largely good news, and that’s cascading to hit smaller, volatile segments of the market also beloved by the retail community.

Fuel cell company Bloom Energy and no-revenues nuclear company Oklo are both off about 5% or more in early trading.
Neoclouds Nebius and CoreWeave are facing significant selling pressure.
The quantum space is getting rocked, with D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti, IonQ, and Quantum Computing all down between 3% and 5% as of 9:42 a.m. ET.
Other story stocks deep in the red include SoundHound AI, Rocket Lab, and Opendoor Technologies.

Goldman Sachs baskets that track retail favorites and nonprofitable tech stocks are down more than 2% and 3% as of 9:43 a.m. ET, respectively, while the Invesco S&P 500 High Beta ETF is also off more than 2%.

Long Island highway patrol officer using radar to check speed

Stocks are getting speed checked

A retail favorite failing to build momentum even when it “deserves” to, the most important part of the stock market being told it’s overheating, and the heads of banks warning of a broader pullback.

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Spotify notches another quarter of strong active user growth and improved profitability

Spotify shares are up 3.25% as of 6:45 a.m. ET as investors digest the streaming giant’s Q3 earnings, in which the company reported that it added more than 70 million monthly active users, posted revenues that were up 7% from last year, and improved profitability.

Total revenues climbed to €4.27 billion, or around $4.91 billion, for the quarter, while net income came in at €899 million ($1.03 billion), which translated into adjusted earnings per share of €3.28 — ahead of the ~€1.96 that analysts had expected, per FactSet figures cited by The Wall Street Journal. Spotify now counts a whopping 713 million monthly active users, including 281 million premium subscribers, compared to 640 million and 252 million, respectively, on the same quarter last year.

The boosted figures come on the back of a host of new features that the streaming platform’s introduced, such as “lossless listening,” playlist mixing controls, and direct messages. The company is now forecasting that its total monthly active users will climb to 745 million by the end of the fourth quarter.

With the latest gains today, Spotify is now up ~48% year to date, even as cofounder Daniel Ek announced in September that he’d be stepping down as CEO at the end of the year, almost 20 years on from the company’s inception.