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The Hollywood sign and Netflix logo in LA
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As Netflix drops on earnings miss, it’s investing just $0.40 into content for every $1 of revenue

Netflix shares fell in after-hours trading on Tuesday, following the release of the streamer’s third-quarter earnings report.

Max Knoblauch

Netflix investors bailed out of the company’s stock after the streamer posted its worst earnings miss in years.

Shares dropped as much as ~6.5% in trading after the bell on Tuesday, toward the $1,160 level, and have continued to languish there on Wednesday morning.

Netflix posted third-quarter earnings of $5.87 per share, below analyst expectations of $6.97, marking its biggest earnings miss since Q4 2022. It reported revenue of $11.51 billion, in line with the consensus estimate of analysts polled by FactSet and up 17% from last year.

While Netflix’s revenue base keeps growing, the streamer is reinvesting a lower percentage of that revenue back into content. When the first season of “Stranger Things” debuted on Netflix in the third quarter of 2016, the company was investing more money into content than it was making in revenue ($2.44 billion vs. $2.29 billion).

At the time, for every $1 of revenue, Netflix put $1.07 into creating or acquiring new shows or movies.

Nine years later, with the fifth and final season of Netflix’s premier franchise set to debut next month, the streamer’s strategy has shifted. In Tuesday’s earnings report, for every $1 of revenue Netflix made in Q3, it invested $0.40 into content.

That’s above the $0.35 it invested in the previous quarter, but significantly below the $0.73 it posted in the fourth quarter of 2021 before its “Black Tuesday” earnings report cratered the stock in 2022 and led to big shifts in the streamer’s content spending strategy. While it may be rough for Hollywood, Wall Street certainly enjoys the idea of spending less and making more.

Of course, the trend reflects a ratio of content spending to revenue. In absolute values, Netflix is spending more on content than it used to — it’s just making more. In 2016, the company spent about $8.7 billion on content. This year, it said it expects to spend about $18 billion.

For the latest quarter, Netflix reported an operating margin of 28.2%, below its outlook of 31.5% and the 29.6% in the same period last year. It attributed the miss to “an expense related to an ongoing dispute with Brazilian tax authorities” and said it doesn’t expect the matter to affect future results. On its ad-supported tier, which analysts expect to eventually generate a higher average revenue per user than the pricier ad-free subscription, Netflix said it’s “using AI to test new ad formats.”

Looking ahead, the company said it expects revenue to grow 17% in the fourth quarter for $45.1 billion in full-year revenue, slightly better than Wall Street’s estimate of $45 billion.

Netflix’s fourth-quarter slate has some notable entries, including, as mentioned, the series finale of “Stranger Things,” along with two Christmas Day NFL games. (The company paid $75 million per game for the slot last year.)

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Report: US senators plan to introduce bill blocking Nvidia from selling advanced chips to China for 30 months

US senators are on the verge of introducing a bill that would block Nvidia from selling its H200 or Blackwell chips to China for 30 months, the Financial Times reports. The H200 is Nvidia’s best chip from the Hopper generation, while the Blackwell line is its current flagship offering.

Shares of the chip designer are little changed in the wake of this report, still up more than 1% on the session. The reaction makes sense, seeing as previous positive indications on Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China failed to inspire much positive momentum in its shares.

The stock got a short-lived jolt higher (that didn’t last the day!) on November 21 after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had discussed the possibility of selling its H200 chips to China.

Nvidia has effectively been shut out of China’s AI market in 2025. First, export restrictions meant it could no longer sell the H20, a nerfed version of its Hopper chip, to the world’s second-largest economy. After that export ban was lifted, demand from China “never materialized,” per Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Reports indicate that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them toward domestic alternatives.

President Donald Trump had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi in late October, but failed to do so. The two leaders did not discuss the topic at that time.

Per the FT, this upcoming bill would be a bipartisan effort, being cosponsored by the leading Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia subcommittee.

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AI energy plays soar on an explosion of call buying

Like their quantum computing counterparts, AI-linked energy plays are benefiting from an explosion of bullish options activity on Thursday.

  • Oklo is up double digits with call volumes above 106,000 as of 2:46 p.m. ET, more than double its 20-day average for a full session, with a put/call ratio of about 0.6. Call options with a strike price of $110 that expire this Friday (which are now in-the-money thanks to today’s surge) are seeing the most activity.

  • Nuscale, another nuclear energy play, has seen nearly 140,000 call options change hands versus a 20-day average of 51,073.

  • And fuel cell company Bloom Energy has traded nearly 80,000 calls, roughly twice its 20-day average, with a put/call ratio of about 0.3.

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up the potential for nuclear energy, saying, “In the next six to seven years I think you are going to see a whole bunch of small nuclear reactors.”

This adds to the evidence that the speculative bid is back in a big way after smaller stocks tied to the AI boom and quantum computing cratered from mid-October through most of November as credit risk began to seep into the AI trade.

Old electronic items tossed on ground for disposal, Hudson

Technology giants don’t look like they used to, as the asset-light era fades

Oracle and Meta are now some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the S&P 500, spending more than energy giants. I guess data really is the new oil?

markets

Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

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