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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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Matt Phillips3h

Palantir continues to dive as retail favorites, momentum stocks get hit

Palantir’s market pounding continues, as the intelligence, defense, and commercial AI software company slumps along with other retail favorites, bitcoin, and high-beta momentum trades such as space plays AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab, and quantum computing trades D-Wave Quantum and Rigetti Computing through the first half of Thursday’s session.

Palantir partisans could credibly argue that Alex Karp’s company shouldn’t be lumped in with that sort of crowd, some of which are a long way from profits, when Palantir has posted outstanding financial performance in recent quarters. But the market doesn’t seem to be listening — or at least, has stopped hearing reassurance after the stock’s massive run-up.

Thursday’s drop of more than 5% — shortly before 12 p.m. in New York — brings its cumulative losses to more than 35% since its November 3, 2025, all-time closing high. And that’s done considerable amounts of damage to the technical backdrop for the shares.

Late last month, Palantir traded far below its 200-day moving average, a key level of technical support that had held since May 2023, when the shares first started to gather steam. A break below the 200-day moving average underscores a serious loss of momentum for a stock, and can prompt some traders to reconsider their views on whether a stock that has been a winner has truly lost its mojo.

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How the character of the AI trade has changed — for the worse — in 2026

A smattering of observations on how the character of the AI trade has changed this year — with, obviously, some of these trends not having waited for a full turn of the Earth around the sun to start to establishing themselves:

All the bullish oxygen is being sucked out of the room and squarely into the memory chip shortage, which is offering bumper profits for a handful of firms. On a related note, semicap equipment stocks have been an upstream beneficiary of this dynamic. The underlying message is that near-term scarcity is being rewarded by the market.
That the big capex spenders will generate a high return on investment from their outlays is not something traders are willing to take for granted. Big budgets are not necessarily getting applauded; even companies that seemingly earn the benefit of the doubt by posting accelerating revenue growth, à la Meta, aren’t able to maintain those gains for long.
The big “consumers” of memory chips are getting squeezed. This includes the hyperscalers, obviously, but even more so the likes of Qualcomm, which has to wait behind these giants in line for supplies, which played a role in the company’s underwhelming outlook.
For public markets, the theme is more of a net negative than a positive. Firms seen as the most likely to be disrupted by AI (basically, the entire software industry) are getting indiscriminately clobbered, regardless of how good their quarterly results and guidance are.
The facilitators of disruption, in many cases, have not yet arrived on public markets but plan to do so this year. That’s SpaceX/xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. So if the AI theme has seemed a little “negative sum” in this year, that might be about the room that investment firms know they’re going to need in their portfolios to add these stocks once they’re able to (or, in some cases, ahead of time).
And this isn’t really a 2026 dynamic, strictly speaking, but the two biggest chip companies have been dead money for months. Since the end of Q3, Nvidia and Broadcom are both negative, with the S&P 500 up about 2% over this span.

markets

Matt Phillips6h

Memory chip makers bounce back after report of customers turning to China for supplies

High-flying memory chip stocks like Sandisk and Micron bounced back early Thursday after dropping in pre-market trading following a Nikkei report that some PC makers are considering turning to Chinese companies — such as ChangXin Memory Technologies — for supplies amid a historic chip price spike sent them down in the premarket session.

HP, Dell, Acer and Asus mull using Chinese memory chips amid supply crunch, Nikkei Asia reports

HP, Dell, Acer and Asus mull using Chinese memory chips amid supply crunch, Nikkei Asia reports

We have the futures market — and Ray Dalio — to thank for the Chicken McNugget

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio reimagined the chicken as an entity that consumes corn and soybeans on its way to being consumed by you.

Dozens Gather To Watch McDonald's Fan Eat Chicken Nuggets

markets

Max Knoblauch6h

Nio projects its first quarterly profit, sending shares surging

Chinese EV maker Nio on Thursday said it expects to achieve its first-ever quarterly profit in its fourth quarter. Its US-traded ADRs rose more than 6% in premarket trading.

Based on a preliminary assessment, Nio projects Q4 adjusted profit from operations of between $100 million and $172 million. Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet estimated a Q4 adjusted operating loss of $19 million.

Nio attributed the preliminary results to sustained sales volume growth, vehicle margin optimization, and cost reductions. Nio delivered 124,807 vehicles in its fourth quarter, which ended in December, up 72% year over year.

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