markets

Claire Yubin Oh7h

ASML rises after Q3 bookings came in 10% ahead of estimates, offsetting a weak outlook in its China business

ASML shares are up over 4% in European trading on Wednesday after the Dutch semiconductor equipment maker reported 5.4 billion euros ($6.3 billion) in bookings in the third quarter, roughly ~10% ahead of the 4.9 billion euros expected by analysts (Bloomberg consensus estimates).

After striking a much more cautious tone in July, the company’s strong outlook for the remaining year helped reassure investors, despite realized revenues actually coming in a touch light relative to expectations in the quarter.

In Q3, the company has “seen continued positive momentum around investments in AI, and have also seen this extending to more customers,” ASML President and CEO Christophe Fouquet said in the press release. He added, “We do not expect 2026 total net sales to be below 2025.”

Europe’s largest company now expects fourth-quarter sales between 9.2 billion and 9.8 billion euros, with a gross margin of 51% to 53%, finishing the full year with 15% growth in total net sales. The lithography systems maker is also now targeting 60 billion euros of revenue in 2030, up from 28.3 billion euros last year.

The only significant blemish in the report was China. Responsible for ~42% of its net system sales this quarter, revenue from China will “decline significantly compared to our very strong business there in 2024 and 2025,” Fouquet said.

ASML has seen its stock rally nearly 30% this year as the dominant supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines needed to produce sophisticated chips.

More Markets

See all Markets

markets

Rigetti Computing tanks amid souring retail sentiment, bearish options bets

Rigetti Computing is getting taken to the woodshed on Wednesday amid souring retail trader sentiment and options bets on near-term downside.

In particular, one post on Reddit’s wallstreetbets forum from user bespoketrancheop, which shows the Google Street view (circa March 2025) of Rigetti’s listed headquarters, is generating a lot of attention. It’s the most popular Rigetti-centric post on the subreddit in the past seven months.

Rigetti HQ — r/wallstreetbets via bespoketrancheop

Per our executive editor, it’s giving this:

Clinton meme — Source: imgflip

But as one commenter notes, this isn’t exactly new news: “People been posting this since it was $11,” with another pointing out that “making an assessment on a google street view is lazy dd [editor’s note: due diligence].”

For what it’s worth, Rigetti’s Quantum Fab manufacturing facility in Fremont looks a lot more like a place where next-gen technology is being developed and a lot less like the middle school one of my colleagues went to.

Of course, it’s impossible to single this out as <the> specific catalyst for the price action in Rigetti today. But since there’ve been dozens of days in the past couple months where quantum computing stocks went up on no news whatsoever, it stands to reason there are also going to be days when they go down for no (good) reason whatsoever.

More important, perhaps, is the flurry of major options bets positioning for downside in the quantum computing company this week. Put options with a strike price of $50 that expire this Friday are in demand. That contract had open interest of under 7,000 heading into today but has already seen volumes of more than 30,000, suggesting fresh wagers made on a pullback in the formerly high-flying stock.

markets

AMD soars as HSBC hikes price target to a Street high of $310

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices are soaring after HSBC analyst Frank Lee strapped his price target for the chip designer to a rocket ship, hiking it to $310 from $185. The new price target ties that of Arete Research’s Brett Simpson for the highest on Wall Street, per data from Bloomberg.

The recently announced deal with OpenAI, which was followed by news that AMD will deploy 50,000 AI chips in Oracle’s data centers, catalyzed a massive wave of Wall Street love for AMD.

But that’s just nowhere near enough compared to what the stock deserves, per Lee, who sees AMD’s MI450 series of AI chips as being sufficiently competitive to Nvidia’s offerings. Through 2030, he sees the revenue opportunity of the OpenAI deal to be $80 billion.

“We believe the Street has underestimated the AI GPU revenue with our estimates 50% and 45% above consensus for 2026e and 2027e, respectively,” he wrote. “We believe there could be further upside driven by pricing premium as well as additional AI GPU volume.”

HSBC on AMD revisions — Source; HSBC

Morgan Stanley accounting analyst on what needs to be disclosed on AI circularity

Analyst: A lot more disclosure needed on these “circular” AI deals

The “circularity” issue keeps swirling.

Matt Phillips2h

markets

Matt Phillips3h

Bloom Energy, Rocket Lab, and Oklo all notch records as momentum stocks romp

Momentum stocks rallied on Wednesday, with fuel-cell-based power provider Bloom Energy and other stocks popular among retail traders notching record highs.

The iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF was handily outperforming plain vanilla indexes in early trading. And Goldman Sachs’ basket of High Beta Momentum Shares, which includes Bloom Energy, was up nearly 4% shortly before 11 a.m. ET.

Other momentum favorites romped in early trading: space launch and aspiring satellite services company Rocket Lab touched a record high, along with Oklo, an AI-aligned aspirational provider of fission nuclear reactors. (Oklo is not only losing money, but it isn’t expected to report any sales until 2028, according to FactSet.)

Bloom, for one, is up more than 1,000% over the past 12 months. Chatter on the stock has picked up recently on r/WallStreetBets, as has call options activity.

Wall Street analysts covering the shares are along for the ride. UBS raised its price target to $115 from $110 and kept a “buy” rating on the stock on Tuesday. BMO raised its target to $97 from $33, while keeping its rating at “market perform” (basically a “hold”).

The company reports earnings on October 28 after the bell.

markets

CoreWeave jumps on partnership with AI model developer Poolside

Neocloud company CoreWeave is surging after it announced a partnership with Poolside to provide more than 40,000 Nvidia GPUs to bolster the development of Poolside’s AI models while also serving as the anchor tenant and operational partner for its data center in Texas dubbed “Project Horizon,” where CoreWeave will deliver cloud services.

There were no financial terms provided in the press release. CoreWeave gets a customer and access to a lot of data center capacity; Poolside gets a lot of computing power and someone to run this data center.

“To compete at the frontier you need to be vertically integrated from dirt to intelligence,” said Eiso Kant, cofounder and co-CEO of Paris-based Poolside. “This partnership with CoreWeave ensures immediate access to next-generation silicon, enabling us to train multi-trillion parameter models with large scale reinforcement learning.”

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.

©2025 Sherwood Media, LLC