IBM is sinking as Anthropic touts Claude Code’s ability to modernize COBOL codebases.

COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language, is a programming language for business functions. Code written in this language has been developed and altered over decades, getting increasingly clunky and cluttered on mainframes, and the number of experts who know this language well is dwindling.

Anthropic said in a blog post that Claude Code can automate COBOL modernization, and, with the help of human judgment, migrate this code incrementally into modern languages, where it can be hosted across various cloud providers.

That is a potential threat to the likes of IBM, an architect of the COBOL system that uses the language on its mainframes for enterprises. IBM is also offering AI tools (like watsonx) to modernize COBOL code, but crucially, wants to keep the outputs running on its hardware and software.

“The strength of our Z placement fuels our flywheel for growth with its attractive 3x to 4x stack multiplier across IBM,” said CFO James Kavanaugh after its latest earnings report. “Z” refers to IBM’s mainframe offerings. As such, getting and keeping customers on IBM’s mainframe is a key way the company drives revenue growth for other software and services.

COBOL is standard in many financial operations (like ATMs), as well as in government and airline systems, as Anthropic notes, so users may want to keep this code tied to one mainframe architecture for security, reliability, and speed (it’s the devil they know!) rather than migrating to a different platform.

Bloomberg reports that PayPal is the subject of takeover interest, with shares down nearly 90% from their 2021 closing high.

Per the report, management “has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors,” citing people familiar with the matter.

After being briefly halted for volatility, shares jumped 8%.

There’s reportedly appetite from “one large rival” to buy the entire company, while other potential purchasers want only certain parts.

Shares of the payments company recently closed at their lowest level since 2016, having lost ground to the likes of Apple and Google in the digital realm.

Earlier this month, shares cratered after the company posted weaker-than-anticipated Q4 results and 2026 profit guidance while announcing its CEO would soon be leaving the company.

The price of ethereum remains under pressure as ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin selling a tranche of his holdings and sustained spot ETF outflows act as headwinds for the second-largest cryptocurrency. 

Buterin sold $5.9 million worth of ethereum over the past several days after withdrawing 3,500 tokens from lending protocol Aave, on-chain data from blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence shows. Since the beginning of the month, Buterin has reportedly sold 8,000 tokens.

“Historically, his sales have funded ecosystem development or philanthropy rather than signaling reduced conviction,” per Kelly Ye, deputy chief investment officer of Avenir Group. “It may create short-term sentiment pressure, but it’s not necessarily a structural negative — especially given his continued active role in building ethereum,” Ye told Sherwood News.

Meanwhile, spot ethereum ETFs recorded $123.4 million in outflows last week, marking the fifth consecutive week of outflows. In total, nearly $1.4 billion has exited from the funds during the stretch, data from SoSoValue shows. “ETF outflows reflect positioning and liquidity conditions more than protocol fundamentals. ETH is still being treated tactically by many allocators rather than as a core allocation,” Ye added.

The longest outflow streak for the investment vehicles is eight weeks, occurring between February and April 2025, when the cryptocurrency dropped from $2,200 to under $1,600. 

Still, pockets of demand persist. BitMine Immersion Technologies, the leading ethereum treasury firm, acquired roughly $100 million worth of tokens last week, according to a press release. 

“In the midst of this ‘mini crypto winter,’ our focus continues to be on methodically executing our treasury strategy and steadily acquiring ETH and in turn, optimizing the yield on our ETH holdings,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement.

Sandisk continued to shake off a slump that hit the shares last week after it priced a secondary offering of almost 6 million shares owned by its former parent, Western Digital.

Tomorrow marks a year since Sandisk started trading on its own, after its spin-off from WDC. The stock soared amid a global shortage of memory chips that seemed to catch even experts completely off guard. The stock is up almost 1,300% since it began trading independently.

The company appeared to tease an event or product launch for tomorrow, February 24, in an X post on Friday, but the specifics were not entirely clear.

Sandisk’s gain over that period is the largest of any constituent of the S&P Total Market Index with a market cap of $4 billion or more — and the third-largest increase overall, out of its roughly 3,800 constituents.

Year to date, Sandisk is among the best performers in the Russell 1000 Technology Index and a key driver of the trend that has seen small clutch of hardware manufacturers trounce software shares.

Cybersecurity stocks continued to slide Monday, after Anthropic unveiled a new security feature for its AI model Friday. The company’s AI advancements have been wreaking havoc across software firms, and its latest foray appears to be doing the same to cybersecurity leaders, including CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Cloudflare.

But similar to Dan Ives’ broader thesis on the software sell-off — which he has called “overblown,” arguing that the companies getting hit may ultimately become “core participants in the AI Revolution” — the Wedbush Securities analyst says AI is actually a positive for cybersecurity stocks.

“Anthropic going after this market with an initial tool validates our thesis that cyber security is the next frontier for the AI Revolution,” Ives wrote Monday morning, arguing that AI is elevating the risk environment — and the need for cybersecurity firms in the first place.

“AI will be a major tailwind to the cyber security sector over the coming years as protection of use cases, data, and endpoints expand markedly,” he said, adding that companies including CrowdStrike and Zscaler are well positioned to capitalize on the shift by incorporating AI into their strategies.

Surprisingly strong labor market data has the Federal Reserve’s standout doves more willing to stand down from advocating for additional rate cuts.

Governor Christopher Waller said his decision on whether he would be in favor of a rate cut at the Fed’s upcoming meeting in March would be “a coin flip” depending on the jobs market data for February.

“If the labor market data for February are consistent with the stronger job creation and low unemployment rate initially reported in January, indicating that downside risks to the labor market have diminished, it may be appropriate to hold the FOMC's policy rate at current levels and watch for continued progress on inflation and strength in the labor market,” he said in a speech on Monday.

In January, nonfarm payrolls growth of 130,000 came in well above estimates, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dipped to 4.3%. The unemployment rate had edged down to 4.4% in December.

Prediction markets indicate that the Federal Reserve is seen as a near lock to keep its policy rate unchanged at the March meeting. The prediction market-implied odds of a rate cut in June are a little over 60%.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

OpenAI has a new sales force to market its enterprise AI tools to big corporations.

In a press release, the ChatGPT maker unveiled a number of “Frontier Alliances” with consulting companies Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey.

“Frontier” refers to OpenAI’s platform introduced earlier this month that “helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work.”

These alliances come amid an industrywide love affair with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which has juiced the startup’s revenue projections.

Companies may want to introduce AI tools, but do not have a good strategy around how to get started. That’s where consulting companies come in.

For companies in that situation, going to one of these consulting firms for AI-related help might now be like going to a financial adviser who gets an extra commission from having you invest in a specific fund offered by the investment arm of their firm.

The consulting industry was a forerunner to software in terms of facing AI disruption and, in the case of Accenture, seeing its share price slump as the market rallied. Employment in the sector peaked right around the time that ChatGPT was launched.

For Accenture, this marks the latest in a series of AI collaborations and builds off its prior partnership with OpenAI. The positive spin on this strategy from Accenture's perspective is that management is accepting that the consulting business will be fundamentally transformed by AI, and wants to be among the first movers in adapting to survive that transition. Uncharitably, as we’ve said, this is “training your replacements.”

The performance gap between the tech sector’s winners and losers has reached the 100th percentile, widening to levels not seen since 2000.

That’s according to Jeff deGraaf, head of technical research at Renaissance Macro Research, who flagged in a note to clients the magnitude of this divergence in fortunes within the industry.

The story of the technology trade in 2026 was made clear on the first trading day of the year, with a record outperformance of semiconductor stocks versus their software counterparts.

Since then, software has continued to flounder as new AI tools pull the timetable for potential disruption forward and threaten to undermine the perceived safety of the software industry’s recurring revenue streams and margins. Within the hardware space, the list of winners have become even narrower, with investors focused on data center capex beneficiaries, particularly in memory and semicap equipment.

“To see similar levels of performance differential between winners and losers requires a trip back to 2000 as the dot-com bubble was bursting and the semis were holding up relative to the speculative internet related names,” deGraaf wrote. “Beware chasing good charts in technology, and at the margin, reduce exposure.”

Year to date, the best performers in the Russell 1000 Technology Index (and presumably, the best charts) include Sandisk, Western Digital, Corning, Vertiv Holdings, Micron, and Applied Materials.