The “kidulting” economy is still booming as more grown-ups yearn for playtime. Beyond the growing trend for nostalgic tchotchkes and collectibles, it seems that adults are just craving some lighthearted fun. Whether it be through theme parks, ball pits, or building bears in workshops, the latest form of grown-up self-care is some carefree growing down. One stock in particular has outpaced many tech giants. A theoretical $100 invested into which company’s stock at the start of 2021 would be worth ~$1,600 today, about $200 more than the theoretical value of the same amount of Nvidia stock? |
- Build-A-Bear
- Disney
- Hasbro
- Mattel
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Check your answer. US stocks opened higher before quickly falling into the red on Wednesday, where they stayed for most of the session. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 each gave back 0.3%, while the Russell 2000 underperformed with a 0.9% drop. |
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RedCloud Holdings, which operates a business-to-business platform for retailers, finished the day up 63% on Wednesday after revealing that “it has joined the NVIDIA Connect program as part of its mission to deliver a new operating system for global trade.” RedCloud is fairly small, with a market cap under $70 million heading into yesterday’s session. So what is the Nvidia Connect program, you might ask? Sounds fancy. And official. Right? |
- The chip designer’s website describes it as “a free program that helps software development companies and service providers shorten time to market through tailored development resources, technical training and guidance, and preferred pricing on NVIDIA technologies.”
- In other words, companies learn how to be more effective users (read: customers!) of Nvidia’s products and technology. That’s it!
- RedCloud is hardly the first company to see a massive spike upon revealing its membership in this club; Firefly Neuroscience, PainReform, Stereotaxis, and Ekso Bionics all enjoyed huge jumps the day they announced that they joined, again, a free program that teaches companies how to spend more money on Nvidia.
- However, the vast majority of these jumps were short-lived, as this brutal chart shows.
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Still, Jorge Guerrero, assistant vice president of product at RedCloud, made it sound like a pretty big deal in the company’s press release: “This program provides us with access to NVIDIA’s ecosystem of AI tools and expertise, which we expect to be instrumental in building powerful AI-native infrastructure to enable intelligent trade of FMCG products across global supply chains.” |
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A cynic might argue that the requirements of joining the Nvidia Connect program are only slightly more onerous than securing a Discover credit card: the applying organization “must provide at least two contacts with corporate emails, maintain a working website, be officially incorporated, and accept the program’s terms and conditions” to be eligible, per Nvidia. For a thing with no application or membership fees, at the very least it’s a pretty obvious way to borrow some (brief) valor from Nvidia. |
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A Day in the Life of the Nasdaq-100® |
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Micron announced phenomenal fourth-quarter results: a top- and bottom-line beat along with guidance on earnings and profitability for the current quarter that exceeded every Wall Street analyst’s expectations. And yet the stock was lower yesterday, even as the sell side was largely singing the memory chip specialist’s praises. The problem seems to be that Wall Street has been in catch-up mode on the company, leading to a bit of a “sell the news” event. |
- On August 11, Micron told investors that the results it just reported would be better than management previously expected.
- In September, the stock went on an absolute tear, with a record 12-session winning streak that pushed the price above the average target from the sell side.
- That move occurred amid a bevy of positive news on the persistence of the AI build-out, headlined by purchase commitments from OpenAI that range from $10 billion (with Broadcom) to the hundreds of billions (with Oracle).
- Micron’s memory chips are slated to play a supporting role in this continued aggressive development of AI infrastructure.
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It’s much easier to say with hindsight that these fantastic results and outlook were priced in. But even a cursory look at this chart would suggest that Micron needed to be an Olympic-level hurdler to clear the bar the market had set for this quarter. Even with yesterday’s drop, shares of Micron are still up more than 30% this month. |
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All in all, about a dozen analysts hiked their price target on Micron in the wake of these results. “The company indicated its high bandwidth memory customer base has now increased to six customers and expects to sell out the remainder of its 2026 HBM supply within the next few months,” Needham & Co. analyst N. Quinn Bolton wrote, lifting his price target to $200 from $150 and maintaining a “buy” rating. Bank of America kept its “neutral” rating on the shares, but lifted its price target to $180 from $140. |
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