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CarMax sinks following Q4 earnings report

Used car retailer CarMax reported its fourth-quarter earnings before the bell on Tuesday. Its shares fell about 7% in premarket trading.

The company reported:

  • Adjusted earnings of $0.34 per share, compared to Wall Street estimates of $0.23 per share, as compiled by FactSet.

  • Sales of $5.9 billion, above expectations of $5.7 billion.

  • Retail gross profit per unit of $2,115, slightly below estimates and down $207 from the year prior.

  • 181,188 used vehicles sold to retail customers, down about 1% from the year prior.

For fiscal 2027, CarMax said it expects to open four new stores. The company expects retail GPU (gross profit per unit) to “decline at a rate broadly in line with our Q4 FY 2026 year-over-year trend.”

CarMax has seen elevated interest in EVs and hybrids in recent weeks, as gas prices continue to climb amid the war in Iran. Last month, the company told Sherwood News that page views for EVs and hybrids had risen more than 9% compared to the month prior.

Activist investor Starboard recently took a $350 million stake in CarMax, urging the company to cut costs and adopt more dynamic pricing. Last week, it was announced that CarMax would add two board members after talks with Starboard.

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Sandisk initiated at “outperform” by Evercore ISI, with target of $1,200

Evercore ISI analysts see further upside for Sandisk shares, even after their nearly 2,900% gain over the past 12 months.

In a note initiating coverage on the top-performing S&P 500 constituent — giving it an “outperform” rating and an above consensus price target of $1,200 — Evercore analysts wrote:

“We believe SNDK is levered to one of the most attractive areas of the AI infrastructure stack — data storage, where demand is accelerating and supply remains constrained at minimum through CY28 if not beyond. While concerns around peak NAND pricing and cyclicality persist, we think the current cycle is structurally tighter and more durable, underpinned by AI-driven demand and sustained supply discipline that is creating ‘SCA’s’, providing memory providers with pricing floors and upfront cash payments (Strategic Contractual Agreements between cloud companies and NAND/DRAM providers).”

Even with the positive news, Sandisk shares sold off 4% in recent trading, taking a little wind out of an epic run-up that still stands at 16% over the past five days and 30% over the past month.

Sandisk has been the subject of a fair bit of positive commentary in recent days, with both Citi and Bernstein analysts boosting their price targets for the shares ahead of its earnings report due on April 30.

The broader memory/data storage trade has recovered from its recent big wobble following Google’s release of details about a new, potentially less memory-heavy AI algorithm technology called TurboQuant.

Hard disk drive maker Western Digital has more than doubled since the start of the year, Seagate Technology Holdings is up about 90%, and DRAM maker Micron — DRAM is the basis for the AI-focused memory product called high-bandwidth memory, or HBM — is up more than 50% in the first 3.5 months of 2026.

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Lucid climbs after announcements of new CEO and expanded robotaxi partnership with Uber

Shares of luxury EV maker Lucid climbed more than 12% in premarket trading on Tuesday following two announcements, before news of a public stock offering erased most of the gains.

First, the company announced it has found a permanent CEO in Silvio Napoli. Napoli was formerly CEO of the Schindler Group, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of elevators and escalators.

Lucid has been led by interim CEO Marc Winterhoff for more than a year, who will now step into the role of chief operating officer.

Lucid also announced an expansion of its robotaxi partnership with Uber from 20,000 planned vehicles to 35,000. Uber will increase its investment in Lucid by $200 million, bringing the total to $500 million. The PIF, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, also committed a new investment of $550 million into the company.

The company is still planning a commercial launch of its robotaxi service with Uber later this year in the Bay Area.

Following those updates, Lucid said it would raise an additional $300 million through a public stock offering. Its premarket gain decreased to about 5%.

$286🛢️

HSBC Groups CEO, Georges Elhedery, just broke down why end buyers of oil are facing prices way above what traders see on their screens.

During a fireside chat with Bloomberg TV’s David Ingles at HSBC’s Global Investment Summit, Elhedery explained why his “biggest worry about the global economy is the disruption that’s coming from the Strait of Hormuz closure, or quasi closure.”

While the ceasefire between the US and Iran was intended to improve the flow of oil through this key choke point, the subsequent announcement of a US blockade of the waterway threatens to do precisely the opposite.

And that’s potentially prolonging, or exacerbating, the pain for crude importers, as Elhedery unpacked:

“What worries me is not the headlines. I mean, oil headline is above $100, $110. Realistically, if you are now trying to get oil from the Middle East, you may be paying $140, $150.

Realistically, if you try to get oil from the Red Sea, you are paying more than $30, $40 for shipping. Insurance costs, which used to be 25 basis points, is more like 5%, and war insurance has been scrapped — you’re paying 5% without even the war insurance component.

So the barrel of oil door to door or the barrel of refined oil door to door is way above the headline price of oil. The highest I’ve seen, and I’m hoping we don’t see more of that, but the highest I’ve seen is $286 for a barrel of oil that reached Sri Lanka. This is not a country and an economy that can easily afford these kind of prices sustainably.”

In a separate interview with Bloomberg News, Elhedery warned that the continuation of these shipping disruptions would be felt not just in the price of energy, but also its availability.

Separately, the International Energy Agency updated its oil market outlook, with the Paris-based organization now forecasting a contraction in both supply and demand for oil, predicting an “80,000 bpd drop in demand growth this year, from a 640,000 bpd rise in its ​March report,” according to Reuters.

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American Airlines jumps on potential merger talks with United

American Airlines was trading up more than 5% in premarket trading on Tuesday after Bloomberg and Reuters reported that United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby had floated the idea of a possible merger with American Airlines.

According to Reuters, Kirby raised the idea during a February White House meeting with President Trump, though it remains unclear whether United has made any formal approach to American or whether any deal process is underway.

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