(Luke Kawa/Sherwood News) |
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All that glitters is gold... especially in today’s market. Long considered a safe haven asset, gold bullion surpassed $1,000 per troy ounce during the financial crisis, $2,000 in the pandemic, and this Tuesday passed $4,000 for the first time. These charts showing how gold performed over 1, 5, 10, and 25 years compared to the S&P 500 make it plain why both central banks and individual investors have been piling into the asset. Stocks rebounded from yesterday’s dip to fresh records, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both posted new closing highs. The Russell 2000 also rose, coming just shy of Monday’s record close. The minutes from last month’s Fed meeting hinted that a narrow majority of officials support what traders have been betting on: two more rate cuts by the end of the year. |
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The Roundhill Meme Stock ETF is back, in case you wanted a gut check for how much retail is in the driver’s seat for the market these days. The actively managed ETF started trading under the ticker “MEME” Wednesday. It’s a relaunch of a product from Roundhill that opened in December 2021, the same year as the OG GameStop meme stock craze, before shuttering about two years later. |
- “There still remains a feeling among the Wall Street establishment that retail in aggregate, and especially the connectivity with meme stocks, is a non-serious endeavor,” Roundhill CEO Dave Mazza told Sherwood News. “But what we’ve learned, particularly in the post-Covid period and then into 2025, is that the power of retail investors across the broader market is particularly strong.”
The first iteration of the meme stock ETF used elevated social media activity and high short interest to screen for its components. This time around, Roundhill is aiming to take a more forward-looking approach to selecting companies that have a high potential for big swings. - After screening out the US-listed stocks and ADRs that are not among the top 200 most highly traded securities, Roundhill will then use the options market to zero in on 30 securities from the remaining list that have the highest implied volatility.
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From those 30, through a mix of quantitative and qualitative research, the fund managers will select 13 to 25 stocks that will be held in the ETF. Mazza spotlighted Reddit and X as two of the social media platforms that will be key sources for Roundhill to get a handle on retail sentiment. |
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It’s just yet another sign of how much people want what retail’s having. To Mazza, the approach is about trying to be more adaptive to changing themes and a little closer to the ground floor in identifying and piggybacking names where retail traders see immense upside potential. The prior iteration rebalanced once every two weeks, while this time the meme stock ETF will trade “at least once a week, if not more frequently,” he said. |
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- Not a single brokerage polled by Bloomberg has changed their rating or price target on shares of the hyperscaler in the wake of this news.
- That’s seemingly for good reason: the stock has completely erased Tuesday’s drop!
- Heck, Mizuho Securities called Tuesday’s tumble “a buying opportunity,” while Guggenheim added that early returns may be fairly soft, but “it’s reasonable to expect any deal to be at least 25% gross margin over its life — or Oracle wouldn’t sign it.”
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So, where does Wall Street’s confidence to shrug this one off come from? While profitability challenges in the early stages of a ramp are far from uncommon, competing on price is an old hat for Oracle in particular. Back in 2017, cofounder Larry Ellison detailed plans to grow its cloud business by matching Amazon Web Services’ list prices while offering speedier compute, enticing customers with the assurance that “your bill will drop by half” if they switched over. |
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The profitability metric reported by The Information “isn’t much of a surprise to us as the company has historically looked to undercut competitors’ pricing — as it’s done for its cloud services business,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard wrote. “We don’t expect Oracle to make changes to its pricing strategy near term as this has enabled it to capture share. Oracle can also leverage its higher-margin software and database segments to offset the pressure.” |
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What’s in a name? As Shakespeare (probably) would have posted on Reddit, would not a meme stock called by any other name trade as sweet? While the name of the latest hot stock on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets evokes the Bard, the company seeing record volumes and call activity is focused on optical communication tech that aims to speed data transmission in AI data centers. “The massive growth of AI infrastructure represents an unprecedented opportunity for which POET is well prepared,” the CEO said, and retail traders seem to agree. The picture of call volume does more than 1,000 words could ever. |
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Which fast-food restaurants are least likely to mess up your order? |
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Yesterday’s Big Daily Movers |
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- Earnings expected from Delta, PepsiCo, Tilray, and Levi Strauss
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1 See this article for more information. 2 The account invests in funds that have additional fees. 3 Referring to top five donor-advised fund providers by AUM. See this article for more information. Please consider the charges, risks, expenses and investment objectives carefully before investing. For a prospectus or, if available, a summary prospectus containing this and other information, please call Janus Henderson at 800.525.3713 or download the file from janushenderson.com/reports. Read it carefully before you invest or send money. 4 Intended for US Investors. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal and fluctuation of value. Consult your tax advisor as tax deductions are dependent upon an individual’s tax situation. |
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