Study after study tells us that stock picking is incredibly difficult, with the lion’s share of active fund managers underperforming the S&P 500.

To that, retail traders say: “What, like it’s hard?”

According to JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain, retail investors’ stock picks are trouncing strategies that would employ dollar cost averaging into the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 and even the best-performing slices of the AI trade so far this year.

Within ETFs holdings specifically, retail’s relative performance is more mixed: besting the S&P 500 year to date, but lagging the Nasdaq 100 (again, assuming dollar-cost averaging strategies).

“In single stocks, retail has unsurprisingly outperformed benchmarks over the past month or so, consistent with a concentrated tilt toward MU, AMD, and NVDA,” Jain wrote.

Of course, as the old saying goes, don’t confuse brains with a bull market.

But there’s another saying that tells us to make hay while the sun shines. And it seems retail traders are making some serious hay.

Ethereum has dropped 4% in the last 24 hours to trade as low as $1,967 on Thursday morning, a mark not seen since March.

Selling pressure is weighing on the token as “traders are actively opening short positions,” CryptoQuant Head of Research Julio Moreno told Sherwood News. “US spot demand for ETH has weakened, as seen by an extremely negative Coinbase price premium approaching levels not seen since February.”

The price action has spurred $237.2 million in liquidations, with the majority of them, $225.1 million, coming from long positions, data from CoinGlass shows. Elsewhere, ethereum ETFs have notched their longest outflow streak this year at 12 days, with Wednesday recording almost $67.2 million in outflows, per SoSoValue.

“ETH’s break below the psychologically important $2,000 level reflects a deterioration in near-term crypto risk sentiment rather than a collapse in Ethereum fundamentals,” according to Coinbridge cofounder and CIO Kelly Ye.

Ye said the drop under $2,000 was amplified by rising volatility and geopolitical tensions amid renewed US-Iran escalation and broader de-risking across high-beta assets.

Sentiment surrounding the cryptocurrency has also softened after David Hoffman, a known ethereum advocate, publicly disclosed offloading his entire ETH position and questioned whether the network’s growth translates to meaningful value accrual to ethereum as an asset, Ye pointed out.

“Still, ETH has continued to hold a broader pattern of higher lows since the April 2025 tariff-driven selloff near $1,500, with the February 2026 low around $1,800 now emerging as the next key level to watch,” Ye told Sherwood News.

“Importantly, on-chain activity has not shown significant deterioration, and Ethereum TVL [total value locked] measured in ETH terms has started trending higher again since May, suggesting underlying network usage remains relatively resilient despite weaker price action,” Ye added.

Some ethereum treasury firms have not stopped their strategy, such as Bit Digital, which announced on Thursday purchasing 8,568 ethereum tokens for $20 million, bringing its total holdings to 158,461.75 tokens.

Meanwhile, other altcoins are also in the red, with solana and dogecoin dropping over 3% in the last 24 hours.

Dell is surging after the company won a five-year $9.7 billion software agreement with the US Department of Defense to consolidate and manage Microsoft software licenses across the American military ecosystem.

It’s a big win for the company ahead of its earnings release after the close on Thursday.

This massive award has also drawn attention to Dell’s relationship with President Donald Trump and his administration. On Giving Tuesday in December, Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, appeared alongside Trump at the White House and announced a $6.25 billion charitable commitment to fund investment accounts for older kids who would not be eligible to receive money through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Trump has also publicly championed the IT firm on multiple occasions. At a Mother’s Day event at the White House earlier this month, Trump publicly endorsed Dell, saying, “Go out and buy a Dell. They’re great.” Filings showed the president’s trust owned Dell shares during Q1.

Dell’s stock has skyrocketed over 145% year to date.

Per CNBC, Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said at a Pentagon press briefing that Dell Federal Systems beat out multiple competitors for this agreement, with the Pentagon expecting this arrangement to provide $422 million in annual savings.

Best Buy is on pace for its best trading day in more than a year in premarket trading Thursday, following Q1 earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations.

In its first quarter, the retailer reported:

• Adjusted earnings of $1.28 per share, compared to estimates of $1.23 per share from analysts polled by FactSet.

• $8.94 billion in sales, versus the $8.82 billion consensus estimate.

Best Buy reaffirmed its full-year guidance and said it expects comparable sales growth of 1% in Q2. (The same quarter last year saw the launch of Nintendo’s Switch 2.)

The company will replace CEO Corie Barry with company veteran Jason Bonfig in October of this year.

Dollar Tree is surging in premarket trading after the discount retailer reported Q1 earnings that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations, prompting management to boost its full-year earnings outlook.

The key Q1 figures:

• Adjusted earnings per share of $1.74 (compared to analyst estimates of $1.55).

• Comparable-store net sales growth of 3.5% (estimate: 3.27%).

• Net sales of $4.97 billion (estimate: $4.96 billion).

The big strength, obviously, was in the bottom line. The company’s gross profit margin expanded by 120 basis points, largely thanks to lower freight costs, higher mark-ons, and reduced product shrink.

Dollar Tree raised its fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to a range of $6.70 to $7.10 (up from its prior forecast of $6.50 to $6.90). The $6.90 midpoint sits ahead of the $6.69 consensus estimate, per Bloomberg.

Guggenheim analyst John Heinbockel noted that sentiment on Dollar Tree was sour heading into this report, with estimates weakening “on a combination of low-income household health, elevated freight expense, and even the helium shortage,” which helps explain why there’s such an “outsized reaction” to these results.

While traffic was down, the consumers that did frequent Dollar Tree were spending more: average ticket sizes were up 4.5%.

“We continued advancing our strategic plan — a more relevant assortment, agile cost management, a stronger customer connection, and new store growth coupled with improved store conditions — all driving operating margin expansion and delivering a strong bottom-line performance,” CEO Mike Creedon said in a press release.

The retailer expects to open approximately 400 new store locations while converting roughly 630 existing venues into its more profitable multi-price format.

To further lower frictions for convenience-seeking shoppers, Dollar Tree officially launched a partnership with DoorDash alongside its earnings release. The distribution agreement brings more than 9,000 stores across 48 states onto the app, allowing users to order over 10,000 products on-demand. The partnership will add to existing delivery agreements with Instacart and Uber Eats as Dollar Tree increasingly competes on convenience as well as price.

Nebius jumped 12% in premarket trading Thursday after Situational Awareness, the hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, disclosed a major stake in the AI cloud company.

According to its 13G filed Wednesday, the fund reported owning 12.4 million Class A shares of Nebius, representing a 5.6% stake worth ~$2.6 billion as of Wednesday’s closing price. The position didn’t appear in the fund’s most recent 13F filing — which covered holdings as of March 31 and included other neocloud companies such as CoreWeave and IREN — suggesting the Nebius stake was added sometime after the first quarter.

The disclosure puts Situational Awareness among Nebius’ largest disclosed institutional shareholders, at least based on the latest available ownership filings, which show BlackRock as the largest institutional holder as of March 31, with 4.5% of shares outstanding.

One of the “neocloud” stocks, Nebius has gained traction recently after securing large cloud contracts with Microsoft and Meta, as well as an equity investment from Nvidia and an energy partnership with Bloom. Shares are up 165% this year and a whopping 475% over the past 12 months.

Founded in 2024 by Aschenbrenner — and named after his widely read essay on artificial superintelligence — Situational Awareness has built its portfolio around the physical infrastructure AI runs on, from chips and data centers to power and compute. Per its 13F filings, the fund’s reported portfolio value climbed to $13.7 billion as of the first quarter, up nearly 2.5x from $5.5 billion at the end of 2025.

Shares of Snowflake are surging after the company beat Wall Street’s projections in its latest earnings report, delivering on its AI thesis, with Q1 revenue up 33%.

It also announced an acquisition of an AI agent platform.

Snowflake stock soared 30% in after-hours trading. If that move were to hold on Thursday, it would more than erase Snowflake’s nearly 20% decline so far this year.

Here are the numbers:

• Revenue of $1.39 billion in the first quarter (compared to analyst estimates of $1.32 billion).

• Adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 (estimate: $0.32).

• Full-year product revenue guidance for 2027 of $5.84 billion, up from previous guidance of $5.66 billion (estimate: $5.67 billion).

Snowflake is a cloud-based database company — essentially allowing businesses to mine their data for insights, charging for compute and storage along the way.

The company’s stock has fallen this year as the company manages competition from hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services as well as the high cost of AI-related build-outs as they double down on AI tools.

On Wednesday, Snowflake announced an eye-popping $6 billion multiyear deal with AWS to “to accelerate enterprise agentic AI adoption.”

Last year, Snowflake — which now calls itself “the AI Data Cloud company” — announced a $200 million deal to power its agentic AI with Anthropic’s Claude.

Alongside its Q1 earnings, Snowflake also announced it has signed an agreement to purchase Natoma, a platform for securely integrating AI agents with data, like Snowflake’s. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“AI agents will only become enterprise-ready if organizations can govern how they operate across systems, applications and tools,” said Pratyus Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of Natoma. “Together with Snowflake, we’re building the governance and connectivity layer that enables enterprises to securely operationalize AI at scale.”

Synopsys is falling in postmarket trading despite delivering better-than-expected quarterly results and boosting full-year guidance by more than analysts had anticipated.

For its fiscal Q2, the electronic design automation firm (which helps chipmakers make chips) reported:

• Revenue of $2.28 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $2.25 billion and guidance for $2.25 billion, plus or minus $25 million).

• Adjusted earnings per share of $3.35 (estimate: $3.14, guidance for $3.14 plus or minus $0.03).

Management boosted its full-year sales outlook to a range of $9.63 billion to $9.71 billion; the consensus estimate matches the low end of that range. On the bottom line, Synopsys now expects adjusted earnings per share between $14.72 and $14.80, which is well about the consensus call for $14.45.

The company has received two high-profile backers since December: Nvidia unveiled a stake in the company that month as part of a partnership to “design, simulate and verify intelligent products.” More recently, Elliott Investment Management took an activist position in the company, reportedly pushing for higher sales and margins closer to its peer Cadence Design Systems.

Along with these results, management announced that the company entered into a cooperation pact with Elliott, and is adding Elliot managing partner Jesse Cohn to the board.

Marvell Technology gave back most of its big knee-jerk gains after the custom chip and networking company released results in line with estimates while continuing to offer an increasingly optimistic view on future sales.

Shares peaked during the conference call as management formalized Marvell’s sales outlook.

The company lifted its revenue guidance for this fiscal year to $11.5 billion, up $500 million from the outlook delivered last quarter. The following year, Marvell anticipates sales of $16.5 billion, a $1.5 billion boost in the view versus three months ago. That fiscal 2028 guidance is well ahead of Wall Street’s call for $15.3 billion.

“We are seeing exceptional AI-related bookings, and as a result, we are significantly raising Marvell’s revenue outlook for both fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2028 compared with the guidance we provided last quarter,” said Chairman and CEO Matt Murphy in the press release, attributing this to “strong demand across a broad set of Marvell solutions.”

Taking a step back, here were the key numbers for Marvell’s opening quarter in fiscal 2027:

• Net revenue: $2.42 billion (estimate: $2.41 billion, guidance for $2.4 billion plus or minus 5%).

• Adjusted net income per share: $0.80 (estimate: $0.80, guidance for $0.79 plus or minus $0.05).

For the current quarter, management expects sales between $2.57 billion and $2.84 billion, the midpoint of which is higher than the $2.61 billion consensus estimate. The outlook for adjusted net income per share is $0.93, plus or minus $0.05, which is above the $0.90 call from the Street.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Marvell had set a high bar for itself coming into this report. The stock surged even after its Q4 results came in broadly in line with estimates in early March, as management issued rosy Q1 guidance and an upgrade to their sales forecast through 2027 (its fiscal 2028).

That bar is just getting even higher. To borrow a line from Creative Strategies CEO and Principal Analyst Ben Bajarin, “All viable compute will be used.”

That sentiment is the loose reason why the stock has more than doubled year to date heading into this release, riding the wave of heavy demand for both compute and connectivity solutions.

Marvell already counts Microsoft and Amazon as major customers (and is reportedly in talks with Google about custom chips). At the end of March, the company got the Jensen Huang seal of approval, receiving a $2 billion investment from Nvidia as part of a partnership to ensure custom chips work seamlessly within Nvidia’s data center architecture.