Government shutdowns typically aren’t a big deal for the stock market as a whole.

But for Cava, which was founded in Maryland and is headquartered in Washington, DC, there’s the prospect of forgone sales in the event that government employees suddenly have no cause to frequent the fast-casual Mediterranean chain, which means emptier tills as bellies get filled elsewhere.

At the end of Q2, Cava had 398 locations. It currently boasts seven in the district proper, at least 14 a close drive away in Virginia, and 25 in Maryland.

Cava’s annual report singled out the Washington, DC/Maryland/Virginia metropolitan area as having “a high concentration of restaurants,” in discussing risk factors for the company. And it may be a particularly bad time to be a slop bowl seller around the nation’s capital.

The potential shutdown would be the latest challenge for Cava amid struggles to stand out amid a myriad of lunch options for working professionals and the recently announced departure of COO Jennifer Somers.

For what it’s worth, this is not the first time this year Cava has faced concerns about potential weakness in DC. During its Q1 earnings call, Bank of America analyst Sara Senatore questioned Cava’s leadership about a potential impact from DOGE given its “fairly big footprint” in the metro area, and CFO Tricia Tolivar said the company hadn’t really seen evidence of metro-specific softness.

Snap jumped as high as 5% Monday after the social media company announced that it would be charging users for its Memories features after they reach 5 gigabytes of storage. Snapchat, which has clocked more than 1 trillion saved Memories on its platform, told TechCrunch the Memory Storage plans would range from $1.99 a month for 100 gigabytes of storage to $15.99 for 5-terabyte plans. The fees will be a new revenue stream for the company, whose ad revenue isn’t growing as fast as its peers’.

Snap rose more than 20% this month amid positive r/WallStreetBets chatter, buyout speculation, and increased investment by Saudi investor Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud. And the US spin-off of TikTok doesn’t seem to be taking the wind out of Snap’s sales.

Robinhood jumped to an all-time intraday record of more than $132 late Monday morning on growing optimism about the brokerage’s prediction markets business both on Wall Street and within the company’s own executive suite.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. I own stock as part of my compensation.)

Earlier in the day, Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev posted this tweet spotlighting that more than 4 billion event contracts have been traded on the platform since they began to be offered in February.

Analysts have also been focusing on the uptick in activity in the events contract business as a potential boon for the shares.

Piper Sandler analyst Patrick Moley published a note on Monday highlighting how trading volumes at prediction market company Kalshi soared to new records over the weekend as traders took positions on the outcomes of college and pro football games using event contracts.

Moley estimates that users at Robinhood — which partnered with Kalshi to offer contracts on games — account for between 25% and 35% of Kalshi’s daily event contract activity.

“We continue to expect HOOD will report ~2.5B of event contracts traded in 3Q25 which, at $0.01/contract, translates to ~$25M in revenue,” Moley wrote.

Nvidia is off to a great start this week, buoyed by Jefferies analyst Blayne Curtis hiking his price target on the $4 trillion chip designer to $220 from $205 thanks to the recent announcement of its $100 million investment in OpenAI to enhance and accelerate the build-out of data centers.

Curtis wrote:

“Management made clear the strategic partnership represents incremental demand for NVDA and does not overlap with existing OAI plans with ORCL or MSFT. Raising estimates based on the new partnership. Raising revenue for C26/C27 to $282B/$334B (vs St. $279B/$328B) from $269B/$300B, respectively. Raising EPS for C26/C27 to $6.55/$7.72 (vs St. $6.49/$7.57) from $6.09/$6.71.”

Western Digital and Seagate Technology Holdings — makers of the affordable data storage devices known as hard disk drives — surged Monday amid a general upswing in the AI data center trade and after a specific shout-out to the sector by Morgan Stanley IT analysts.

The analysts ratcheted up their price targets — to $171 from $99 for WDC, and to $265 from $168 for Seagate — and earnings estimates for both stocks, both of which they rate “overweight” (essentially a “buy”).

They wrote:

“While we’ve been hard disk drive (HDD) bulls for the better part of two years, HDD demand has recently inflected — the result of strengthening cloud infrastructure spending ($3T through 2028), accelerating investments in data-enabling technologies, and AI inferencing — both agentic and multi-modal — emerging as an incremental tailwind to data-rich media generation and data retention needs.

At the same time, the market remains up to 10% undersupplied per our recent checks, and as a result, nearline HDD prices are firming and visibility has recently extended into [the first half of calender 2027], an unprecedented 18+ months from now.”

The two disk drive makers are the second- and third-best performers in the S&P 500 this year, with Seagate up roughly 170% and Western Digital up about 160%.

Carnival beat earnings expectations and raised its outlook for the third time this year, as the cruise operator also posted record revenue.

Shares were slightly lower in early trading Monday. The stock has been hot recently, having climbed about 57% over the past six months, though it has cooled off in September.

Earnings per share came in at $1.43, just ahead of estimates of $1.32 from analysts polled by FactSet. Revenue hit $8.2 billion, also topping expectations, fueled by resilient travel demand and higher onboard spending.

Looking ahead: Carnival now expects adjusted net income to climb nearly 55% from 2024, better than its June guidance of 44% better. Adjusted EBITDA is projected at $7.05 billion, up 15% year over year and also topping prior guidance of $6.9 billion.

Alibaba is up about 4% this morning after Macquarie analyst Ellie Jiang raised her price target on the stock to a Street high of $235.60, up from $177.90, and Jefferies analyst Thomas Chong upped his price target to $230 from $178, based on a strong cloud outlook and synergies in its rapid-delivery model of e-commerce. The duo is among a string of analysts lately, including those at Morgan Stanley, Baird, and Bank of America, to raise their price targets on the stock.

The Jefferies analyst cited the company’s “remarkable progress made in multiple areas,” including foundation models, AI infrastructure, and agents. Alibaba also jumped up last week on news of an AI spending hike, a new model launch, and a partnership with Nvidia.

Separately, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Robert Lea and Jasmine Lyu highlighted the e-commerce and cloud giant as a key beneficiary of Huawei’s reported plan to double output of its top AI chip next year.

“The doubling of production of Huawei’s marque AI accelerator chip in 2026 could help ease the semiconductor bottleneck at Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu,” they wrote.

Danish biotech Genmab announced on Monday that it will acquire cancer startup Merus in an all-cash deal worth about $8 billion.

Genmab is buying Merus for $97 per share, a roughly 40% premium over its closing price as of Friday. The deal was approved unanimously by both companies’ boards, Genmab said.

Merus’ experimental drug, petosemtamab, has shown encouraging results in mid-stage trials for metastatic head and neck cancer. The stock jumped more than 30% in premarket trading once the acquisition was announced.

Trendy nuclear power stock Oklo received a bullish review from Wall Street on Monday, with Barclays analysts starting coverage of the stock at “overweight” — basically a “buy” rating — alongside a price target of $146, a more than 30% premium to Friday’s close.

The underlying rationale is, of course, the AI data center boom, which is already boosting electricity demand — and raising utility bills — and is projected to do so for years to come.

Shares were up 5.8% premarket. Before today, the stock had soared more than 50% over the past month, but that includes a bit of a retrenchment over the past few sessions.

As a maker of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), Oklo and similar companies like Nuscale are seen as providing a possible technology that can bridge the growing gap between supply and projected demand.

But this is all very speculative, as these companies are not actually producing much of anything at the moment besides outstanding stock market returns.

Barclays analysts note that Oklo’s business currently encompasses a series of “non-binding agreements with various customers, such as data centers, military outposts, etc,” and Wall Street forecasts annual losses for the company through 2028.

Barclays analysts write of the shares:

Weed stocks are roaring out of the gate on Monday morning after President Donald Trump reposted a video from The Commonwealth Project detailing the benefits of hemp-derived CBD products for seniors as the “most important senior health initiative of the century.”

Canopy Growth, Tilray, SNDL Inc., and Cronos Group are all up between 10% and 20% as of 7 a.m. ET.

The clip says that hemp-derived CBD products offer relief from pain, inflammation, and cognitive decline faster than “dangerous and addictive” pharmaceuticals or tweaks to diet and lifestyle. This can “add years to your life,” per The Commonwealth Project, which bills itself as “working to prioritize the 65+ population by integrating medical cannabis into mainstream health care for seniors.”

The roughly three-minute-long video focuses on hemp-derived CBD products, but it also includes a clip from Fox News that claims annual cost savings to the US of nearly $64 billion per year if cannabis is fully integrated into the healthcare system.

Over the past couple of months, marijuana stocks have been powered by the potential for the Trump administration to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, which news reports and the president himself have suggested is under consideration.

The Commonwealth Project’s video hails the 2018 Farm Bill signed by Trump in his first term (which legalized hemp production at the federal level) as a “first step,” but also calls for Medicare coverage for CBD to “give millions of seniors the support they deserve.”