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Luke Kawa2/19/26

AppLovin gains amid report on its plans to launch a social networking platform

On Thursday, ad tech company AppLovin was reported to have designs on starting a social networking platform of its own after it was unable to get its hands on TikTok’s US operations.

This report came on the heels of a massive gain for the stock on Wednesday, though it’s unclear whether current gains are entirely to do with the potential foray, or if traders are just aiming to call a bottom in the stock after last week’s post-earnings tumble took shares below $360 for the first time since July.

The social network plans were discussed in a podcast days ago, and the company has had a job posting for a software engineer to build this platform, though a Bloomberg headline on the subject was only shared this morning.

“We aim to build a completely new next-generation social media platform,” Chief Product and Engineering Officer Giovanni Ge said on the “Valley 101” podcast.

He described the course the company is charting as the opposite of Meta’s, which started by gathering eyeballs and then built advertising around it.

Presumably, such a venture would give AppLovin more digital real estate to run ads, and any data it collects from its users may be useful in offering better targeted ads on other apps.

Last April, CNBC’s Marc Faber reported that the ad tech firm had made an offer for TikTok, and that the Trump administration had been “fully aware” of its interest.

AppLovin’s post-earnings swoon last week, despite solid Q4 results and a better-than-expected Q1 outlook, came as investors have worried about competitive threats to its business from new AI entrants as well as Meta.

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Netflix beats on Q1 revenue, issues downbeat Q2 forecast, and says Hastings will leave in June

It’s the streamer’s first earnings report since backing out of the Warner Bros. bidding war in February.

Max Knoblauch12h

Tasha Matsumoto

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 set new record closing highs

Stocks wavered before closing in the green as traders monitored the timeline for ending the US-Iran war.

Chicago Bulls Mascot Benny the Bull dunks the ball during the halftime show of the Missouri Valley Conference college basketball game between the Loyola-Chicago Ramblers and the Illinois State Redbirds on February 2, 2019.

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Matt Phillips17h

Oracle is on track for its best week since 1999

Oracle is up nearly 27% for the week in midmorning trading Thursday, putting it on track for its best weekly gain since June of 1999.

And yes, that run-up — which has added $100 billion to Oracle’s market cap this week — beats the nuttiness of last September, when the stock exploded up 36% in a single day after Oracle disclosed its massive AI-related sales backlog. By the end of that week, the stock ended up a mere 25%.

This week, the company soared 13% on Monday after signing a power deal with fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, as the market continues to be super focused on how quickly hyperscalers can get their AI data centers built and powered up. (Finding off-grid connections to electricity is proving increasingly tricky.)

On Thursday, Oracle also announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services that would allow customers of both companies to easily move data back and forth and run programs using data center infrastructure from either company.

Oracle, along with other large-cap AI beneficiaries and the rest of the market, has also been getting a lift from a period of relative calm in the Iran war, with stocks hitting new record highs and US crude oil prices declining by more than 10% this month.

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Matt Phillips18h

Oklo pacing for big week, helped by risk-on appetite and Trump policy directive

Retail favorite Oklo, the “pre-revenue” designer of smaller experimental modular nuclear reactors with close ties to the Trump administration, is on track for its best week since January, even after slumping early Thursday.

Before Thursday’s slight decline, Oklo had posted big gains for four straight days, rising 33% in that time frame. Another stock in the category, Nuscale, rose 27% in the same span.

Oklo shares may have benefited from a directive published Tuesday by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directing federal agencies to “establish cost-effective partnerships with private-sector innovators to meet near-term objectives that include safely deploying nuclear reactors in orbit as early as 2028 and on the Moon as early as 2030.”

Oklo’s close ties to the US government could put it in a position to benefit from such orders. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright formerly served on Oklo’s board of directors.

Separately, Oklo announced new members of its board of directors Tuesday, adding David Christian, a former executive from Dominion Energy, and David Park, CEO of Standard Lithium, among others.

Whether these announcements ultimately translate into a financial gain for Oklo remains to be seen. But it likely won’t be seen for a while.

The company doesn’t expect to generate any meaningful revenue until it brings its Aurora line of modular reactors, none of which have been built yet, to market. (The company has announced approvals of some design plans related to a prototype it’s building at the Idaho National Laboratory.)

On the other hand, Oklo does have some money to burn, reporting cash and marketable securities worth some ~$1.4 billion at the end of 2025. And with the share price spiking this week, Oklo executives might also be tempted to offer more stock as a source of funding.

Oklo’s upswing comes amid a rebound in retail trading this week that’s sending stocks and crypto beloved by individual traders — such as IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Hims & Hers, and SoundHound AI — sharply higher, as worries about Iran ease and traders rush to buy whatever remaining “dip” there is.

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15 months after crippling quantum computing stocks, Nvidia has sent the industry back into the stratosphere

All of the technological breakthroughs, sales deals, and acquisitions haven’t mattered much for quantum computing companies in 2026.

The speculative fever had broken, with call volumes traded and most retail darling assets having peaked in October, and the subsequent risk-off move during the Mideast war accelerated the retreat from expensive, thematic plays.

Then along came Nvidia to the rescue — the company that kneecapped the industry in Q1 2025 when CEO Jensen Huang said it would likely be a couple decades before quantum computers were “very useful.”

On Tuesday, the chip designer released a family of open models (dubbed Ising) designed to leverage AI to improve calibration and error correction for quantum computers, “two of the most critical challenges in building hybrid-quantum classical systems,” per the press release.

D-Wave Quantum, IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and Quantum Computing have surged between 23% and 42% over the past three sessions, as of 9:50 a.m. ET.

These stocks are all poised for their best weeks since September, and the return of intense call buying definitely appears to be magnifying the buying pressure:

Infleqtion, the relative newcomer on the scene, is up about 16% since Monday’s close.

True to form, Huang threw a bit of a backhanded compliment to the industry along with this lifeline.

“AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” he said.

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