History suggests that BlackBerry does extremely well when 1) it’s considered to be pioneering a transformative technology, or 2) there’s widespread retail enthusiasm for stocks.

If you squint (or dream), you could argue that both are going on right now.

Shares of the once-upon-a-time smartphone giant are up more than 160% over the past three months. The only times the shares have had a hotter run of form than this are at the tail end of the dot-com bubble, and in early 2021 when was it part of the meme stock craze headlined by GameStop.

Let’s start with the easy part first — here’s Scott Rubner, head of equity and equity derivatives strategy at Citadel, on retail’s significant footprint in the shares’ rally:

“Retail traders are the new price setters in the market. May volumes across our retail cash equities and options platforms are currently tracking at record levels. Daily volumes on our cash platform are setting new highs and are on pace to finish nearly ~10% above the previous record established during the January 2021 meme-stock era.”

And then there’s the harder part, part of the story that the traders bidding up BlackBerry now are dreaming about: the QNX division, which offers software that the company is positioning as an operating system for robots.

QNX’s software has early uptake in the field of autonomous driving, with BlackBerry eyeing a much more widespread role: in April, it announced a partnership to deploy this technology on Nvidia’s robotics platform. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, for his part, has long been calling for agentic AI adoption to be followed by physical AI (i.e., robots).

In a QNX press release unveiling a report this week, the company argued that software, not hardware, is the real problem in terms of making sure robotics works.

I supposed it would be poetic, in a way, if the company at the leading edge of the smartphone revolution also plays a big role in the proliferation of robotics.

Micron and Sandisk both hit fresh all-time highs in early trading after Susquehanna bestowed new Wall Street-high price targets on the two memory stocks.

Analyst Mehdi Hosseini upped his view on the former to $1,750 from $600, and to $3,250 from $2,000 for the latter.

“Supply is now expected to remain tight through 2027, sustaining elevated margins and thus warranting valuation re-rating,” he wrote, per Bloomberg.

It’s the fifth time in the past year that the average price target on Micron has gone up by more than 10% in a week. UBS’s Tim Arcuri more than tripled his price target on Micron earlier this week, and has already lost the title of “most bullish.”

But even as analysts are tripping over themselves to raise their price targets on these stocks, the ferocity of the rally in Micron has outpaced their best efforts.

The high-bandwidth memory specialist traded at a record premium to the consensus Wall Street price target this week, based on data going back to 2008.

Okta shares are surging in early trading Friday after the identity security provider posted Q1 fiscal 2027 financial results that exceeded Wall Street estimates. The strong results are fueled by accelerating corporate demand for cybersecurity software, as well as the deployment of autonomous AI systems.

Key numbers:

• Adjusted earnings per share of $0.91 compared to analysts’ estimate of $0.85.

• Revenue of $765 million compared to an estimate of $752.7 million.

The company generated subscription revenue of $750 million, up 11% year over year. Okta also has $271 million in free cash flow, up from $238 million in the prior year’s quarter.

While standard cybersecurity software protects human workers, the latest catalyst sparking Okta’s strong corporate performance is the rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents that can access sensitive corporate databases and interact with privileged executive accounts.

“AI agents are rapidly becoming a new workforce inside every organization, creating a wave of identities that must be secured and governed alongside human users,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO and cofounder of Okta. “We’re expanding our opportunity as the world’s leading independent and neutral identity provider and helping customers make identity the unified control plane for their secure agentic enterprise.”

Okta raised its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to between $3.185 billion and $3.205 billion, roughly in line with estimates of $3.18 billion. The company formally dropped its long-term projected non-GAAP tax rate from 26% down to 21%. This adjustment is a direct byproduct of the federal corporate tax frameworks under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Shares of Okta have risen around 9% since the beginning of this year.

HP Enterprise and Super Micro Computer shares are surging in premarket trading, getting a big boost from rival Dell’s strong Q1 results.

Dell’s $16.1 billion in AI-optimized server sales for the quarter alone proved that enterprise data center demand is accelerating faster than Wall Street had anticipated. The company posted revenue of $43.8 billion, exceeding Street estimates of $35.5 billion. Management now sees full-year sales of about $167 billion, well above the $142 billion expected by analysts.

The read-through is particularly relevant for Super Micro, one of the largest suppliers of Nvidia-powered AI server systems, and HPE, which has been expanding its AI infrastructure and liquid-cooling offerings through its partnership with Nvidia.

The moves suggest investors view AI infrastructure as a broad spending cycle that benefits server makers across the entire ecosystem.

Shares of AST SpaceMobile plunged as much as 15% before the bell on Friday after a Blue Origin rocket exploded yesterday evening on the launchpad.

The New Glenn rocket blew up in what the Jeff Bezos-backed company described on X as “an anomaly” during a hotfire test at the launchpad, only days before it’s due to launch satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper next week. Bezos added via X that “it’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it.” Videos of the explosion circulating on social media show an enormous fireball.

Though AST SpaceMobile’s satellites are not directly affected by the latest explosion, the company partnered with Blue Origin in November 2024 to use its New Glenn rocket to deliver AST’s next-generation Block 2 Bluebird satellites to low-Earth orbit. Citing multiple unidentified employees, the Financial Times reported that an initial assessment of the site showed severe damage to Blue Origin’s equipment, including its only launchpad.

The explosion is a stumbling block for AST’s goals to place at least 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year. The journey to reach that goal already hit a pretty major speed bump in April, after Blue Origin reported that its New Glenn vehicle put AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite at an altitude too low to maintain operations.

At first, it looked like another case of a software company selling off despite reporting strong results, with traders (or algorithms) sending MongoDB 21% lower in postmarket trading. That drubbing came even as the distributed database platform company beat Wall Street estimates on the top and bottom lines and lifted its full-year fiscal 2027 guidance.

What a difference seven minutes make. Those losses vanished, and then the stock proceeded to trade more than 20% higher.

Here are the Q1 numbers:

• Revenue of $687.6 million (compared to analyst estimates of $664.5 million).

• Adjusted earnings per share of $1.32 (estimate: $1.19).

Management hiked its full-year adjusted EPS guidance to a range of $5.95 to $6.14, up from a previous view of $5.75 to $5.93 and north of the $5.88 that analysts are anticipating. The annual sales outlook was also lifted to a range of $2.92 billion to $2.96 billion, up $600 million from its prior guidance and above the $2.9 billion consensus estimate.

The Q2 outlook provided by the company also bettered what the Street had penciled in for the top and bottom lines.

So for those keeping score at home, that’s a $5.6 billion drop in market cap as a knee-jerk reaction, followed by a $12.6 billion surge in value off the lows. Price discovery; it’s truly a beautiful thing.

Shares are still down year to date even after today’s volatility, but hey, the way things have been going, just give it a few minutes.

Wall Street is giving it less than five big booms.

Costco’s shares were effectively flat in after-hours trading Thursday immediately following the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings report. The retailer managed to outperform Wall Street estimates on earnings per share and membership fees, but missed on revenue overall as budget-conscious consumers looking for bulk discounts spent less than analysts had expected.

Here are the numbers:

• Revenue of $69.2 billion (estimate: $69.6 billion).

• Adjusted earnings per share of $4.93 (estimate: $4.91).

• Membership fees of $1.37 billion (estimate: $1.35 billion).

At least some of the company’s revenue in Q3 was likely boosted by rising gas prices — especially because drivers often flock to Costco’s pumps looking for relatively cheaper fuel when prices elsewhere spike.

Other retailers had rosier earnings today. Kohl’s, Best Buy, and Dollar Tree all put up double-digit gains on Thursday and surpassed estimates, surprising some investors who expected to see shoppers pulling back given weakened consumer confidence.

Costco’s stock is up 17% since the beginning of the year. One buyer is President Donald Trump, who bought millions in Costco in the first calendar quarter of the year.

Dell is holding onto its eye-watering gains, up nearly 40% in the early trading action on Friday, after delivering blockbuster quarterly results and significantly raising its full-year guidance yesterday afternoon.

For its fiscal 2027 Q1, the PC and server company reported:

• Net revenue of $43.8 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $35.5 billion and guidance for $35.2 billion, plus or minus $500 million).

• Adjusted earnings per share of $4.86 (estimate: $2.99, guidance for $2.90).

Management now sees full-year sales of about $167 billion (plus or minus $2 billion), up significantly from its prior $140 billion outlook. That’s well above the $142 billion anticipated by analysts.

The bottom-line boost is even bigger, with the midpoint of its adjusted EPS guidance at $17.90, up from $12.90 previously (estimate: $13.14 billion).

Dell’s undergone a major transformation under the hood thanks to the AI boom. AI server sales, the biggest unit within its Infrastructure Solutions Group, didn’t exist until late 2023. That segment now contributes more to Dell’s top line than the entire Client Solutions Group, its mature PC-focused business. The company expects to book roughly $60 billion in AI server sales this year, up from prior guidance of about $50 billion.

The company got a big win ahead of this earnings report, receiving a $9.7 billion contract from the Pentagon to manage Microsoft software licenses across different swaths of the military.

Dell's rosy outlook for its AI-powering servers has given a leg up to HP Enterprise, which is also up 18% this morning.

Super Micro Computer is spiking on elevated call demand amid the company’s push to show it’s part of the chip-smuggling solution, rather than the problem.

Call volumes are running at 392,857 as of 12:16 p.m. ET, already well north of the 214,893 average over the past 20 sessions. The put/call ratio of 0.16 is also well below the 20-day average of 0.29, underscoring the bullish tilt in options.

This morning, management put out a statement saying that the company had “worked closely with Taiwanese authorities” to help prevent its servers (which contain Nvidia’s AI chips) from making their way into China in violation of export controls, and that this collaboration “resulted in the arrest of three suspects and the seizure of 50 servers that had been deceptively acquired after being sold by Supermicro to an authorized reseller.”

The company also aimed to emphasize that none of this was its fault.

“This case highlights the challenges that can arise when products are resold through multiple downstream parties beyond direct manufacturer control,” per the statement.

Back in March, Super Micro’s cofounder was among those charged by US prosecutors for allegedly attempting to sell $2.5 billion in servers with Nvidia GPUs to China. The stock had swooned on the news and lifted fellow server companies that weren’t tainted by this association. One analyst even suggested that Super Micro lost a billion-dollar contract with Oracle in part because of these allegations.

Shares have since recovered all those losses, and then some.

On the conference call following Super Micro’s big Q3 earnings beat, CEO Charles Liang said he didn’t “feel a negative feeling” from customers at the time despite these charges.

CFO David Weigand added that the company also hasn’t seen a decrease in its allocation of chips from Nvidia in the wake of this news.

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.

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.”