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Luke Kawa5/2/25

Apple’s pain following court-ordered commission ban is AppLovin and Unity Software’s gain

Two retail favorites are massive beneficiaries of a federal court order this week telling Apple that it can no longer collect commissions on off-app purchases made in mobile games, per Wedbush Securities.

“This ruling is highly likely to have wide-ranging impacts across the app landscape with clear positives for developers and clear second order positives for companies such as AppLovin and Unity Software,” analyst Michael Pachter wrote.

This news is obviously a boon for game publishers, but also these two aforementioned companies that make money from ad sales and purchases made in games. Pachter has an “outperform” rating on both stocks, with a whopping $620 price target on AppLovin (more than double its current price) and $31.50 for Unity.

With game developers no longer having to fork over money to Apple, that means they can invest those savings in promoting their games — which is AppLovin and Unity’s bread and butter.

“We estimate customer ‘LTV’ (lifetime value) could rise by 60-100%, which should increase user acquisition spending by at least $5-10 billion annually, almost all of which is going to flow to in-app ads if developers maintain current LTV/CAC [customer acquisition cost] targets,” he added.

AppLovin is up double digits over the past two sessions, while Unity has made a much more modest advance.

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GameStop falls after Q3 revenues dip about 5% year on year

The video games and collectibles retailer just reported Q3 results.

GameStop signage

Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks waver ahead of tomorrow’s interest rate decision

The S&P 500 struggled for direction, but small-caps were trading near all-time highs.

The small polar bear lady Antonia eats an ice cake with fruit and vegetable filling at the zoo in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 20 December 2017.

Matt Phillips8h

The buy-the-dip bid from retail traders has been a massive market theme throughout 2025, and analysts at Jefferies have tried to quantify just how big of a footprint individual traders now have in US markets.

In a note published Tuesday, they wrote (emphasis added):

“Retail investors have become an increasingly relevant component of the US trading ecosystem, representing >20% of volume — and even higher among names <$5. Growth in accounts, assets, and activity is reflected in the growth of Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, Charles Schwab, etc. A burgeoning product suite, expanded trading hours, and increased investor education support continued growth. Retail interest is here to stay; institutional investors should adjust their strategies accordingly.”

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

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JPMorgan said Marvell’s management told them their Microsoft and Amazon custom chip business is on track, contradicting other reports

The latest release from the Marvell Chipematic Universe is out:

JPMorgan analyst Harlan Sur hosted a meeting with Marvell Technology President and COO Chris Koopmans and Senior VP of Investor Relations Ashish Saran on Monday amid reports that the chip company was poised to lose business from its two biggest hyperscaler custom chip clients: Amazon and Microsoft.

Benchmark downgraded the company on Monday, citing a loss of Trainium3 and 4 business, while The Information said on Friday the latter was planning on shifting its business to Broadcom. Shares tumbled 7% on Monday, erasing all of its post-earnings bounce, and are down again on Tuesday.

The message communicated to Sur from Marvell is, in short, one of Vince Vaughn’s quotable lines in “Wedding Crashers”: “Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!”

“At our meeting yesterday, the Marvell team reiterated securing purchase orders for all of CY26 for the next-gen Trainium 3 XPU ASIC program at AWS and that the Microsoft 3 nanometer Maia AI XPU ASIC program remains on track to ramp back-half of calendar year 2026 and into calendar year 2027,” Sur wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. “Moreover, the team reiterated that they are already working on next-gen 2 nanometer XPU programs for both customers.”

The analyst maintained a $92 price target and “overweight” rating on the shares.

Sur added that Marvell’s management “remains perplexed/frustrated at all of the ‘noise’ in the market.”

This whole thing is starting to have the feel of a three- to four-episode subplot arc from HBO’s “Billions.”

Apple’s stock is behaving differently from the rest of BATMMAAN because its AI strategy is nowhere

Apple is so bad at AI that its stock is increasingly detached from the rest of Big Tech. Some days that’s a blessing; on others, it’s a curse.

Parakeet among pigeons on cobblestone sidewalk

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