Cava restaurant (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Cava’s stock sizzles after JPMorgan calls the chain a long-term buy

Cava shares have soared over 125% since its 2023 IPO debut.

3/20/25 10:41AM

Cava shares were up nearly 6% Thursday morning after a JPMorgan upgrade fueled fresh optimism for the Mediterranean fast-casual chain.

JPMorgan analyst John Ivankoe upgraded the fast-growing food spot from neutral to overweight and reiterated his $110 price target. That implies a roughly 27% rally from the stock’s current levels. “We view the stock as a ‘buy now and own for the long-term,’” he wrote, emphasizing Cava’s US growth opportunity.

Cava expanded its footprint over the past year, adding 58 net new restaurants, bringing its total to 367. Ivankoe believes the chain will now easily top its original 1,000-store goal for 2032, predicting 2,000 locations by 2037 and 3,500 by 2043.

While fast-food rivals struggle, Cava has been able to grow sales and keep prices reasonable. Since 2019, the CPI has increased 23% while Cava’s prices have gone up only 15%. Despite a phenomenal 162.5% surge in 2024, Cava shares have tumbled about 24% this year.

Luke Kawa35m

Micron gains after breaking ground on new facility in decade-long, $24 billion investment plan

Micron sees an AI boom and wants to sell more chips into it.

On Monday evening, the company announced that it broke ground on an additional wafer fabrication facility at its complex in Singapore, kicking off a decade-long, $24 billion project.

Shares are up more than 3.5% as of 4:05 a.m. ET.

Of note: this is an expansion of NAND capacity, rather than DRAM. The latter contains high-bandwidth memory and makes up the lion’s share of Micron’s revenues.

“Wafer output is scheduled to begin in the second half of calendar 2028, helping Micron address growing market demand for NAND technology driven by the rapid expansion of AI and data-centric applications,” per the press release.

Micron’s rivals in South Korea enjoyed strong sessions on Tuesday despite President Donald Trump threatening to raise tariffs on the nation’s exports to the US to 25%, from 15%. The KOSPI Index rebounded from early losses with SK Hynix and Samsung soaring. SK Hynix’s outsized gains appeared to be fueled by a report from local media that it will be the sole supplier of HBM3E for Microsoft’s new Maia 200 chip, which was unveiled on Monday.

As we’ve discussed before, the supply crunch in memory and storage is the shortage that traders have wanted exposure to for much of the past five months.

The beneficiaries of memory chip giants’ quest to increase capacity include semicap stocks like ASML, Lam Research, KLA Corp, and Applied Materials, which provide the equipment used in new fabs.

J. Edward Moreno12h

UnitedHealth, CVS, Humana drop after WSJ reports Trump admin will propose flat rates for Medicare insurers

Major health insurers dropped after The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the Trump administration will propose roughly flat rates for Medicare insurers next year.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is expected to announce an average 0.09% increase in payments to the plans in 2027, less than the 4% to 6% analysts expected, the Journal reported Monday after the bell.

Exclusive | Trump Administration Proposes Keeping Steady the Rates Medicare Pays Insurers

Tasha Matsumoto

13h

Stocks jump higher ahead of this week’s Big Tech earnings

The S&P 500 is back within striking distance of its all-time high.

Patrick Williams #44 of the Chicago Bulls dunks the ball during the second half against the Boston Celtics at the United Center on January 24, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois.

Luke Kawa17h

GameStop surges after Michael Burry reveals he owns the stock

Shares of GameStop are surging after Michael Burry, former hedge fund manager of “The Big Short” fame and current Substacker, announced that he’s been buying the video game and collectibles retailer recently.

The revelation came in Burry’s long-anticipated follow-up post on GameStop. The stock initially jumped when Burry tweeted about his history of being long the stock in November, and again in December as he teased a more thorough write-up of the experience.

Per CNBC, Burry wrote in a Substack post on Monday:

“I own GME. I have been buying recently. I expect I am buying at what may soon be 1x tangible book value / 1x net asset value. And getting a young Ryan Cohen investing and deploying the company’s capital and cash flows. Perhaps for the next 50 years.”

Trading volumes in GameStop went parabolic after the news crossed the wires. As of noon ET, 11.9 million shares have changed hands, more than 6x the average by this time of day.

And while Burry said he’s “willing to hold long-term,” his ownership is spurring a big rush into short-term call options on GameStop. As of 12:20 p.m., call volumes are more than double their 20-day moving average. The four most active contracts are calls that expire this Friday with strike prices of $25, $24, $20, and $23.

GameStop is a stock that has traded off of nostalgia, its exposure to things that are cool or entertaining, and leaders with big main character energy. And Burry’s the first injection of main character energy into the shares since Keith Gill, aka Roaring Kitty, came back to spur another meme stock rally in GameStop in the second quarter of 2024 and then disappeared almost as quickly as he’d arrived.

Gill and Burry have a lot in common: both like GameStop because they think it’s cheap and they’re willing to make “a bet on the management, in particular, of course, Ryan fucking Cohen.”

Luke Kawa17h

Extreme optimism on global growth is a bad omen for cyclically sensitive trades

By mid-December, it became pretty clear that investors were pricing in an acceleration in global growth for 2026, and price action since then has only calcified that narrative.

“The equity market has rapidly priced a positive expected growth outlook for this year,” Goldman Sachs’ Cullen Morgan wrote. “Similar has been seen in other asset classes as well, leading to our Global Growth Optimism Factor (RAI PC1) hitting a level seen only a handful of times over the last two decades.”

RAI stands for “risk appetite indicator,” the bank’s proprietary metric for investor sentiment.

One problem with all this optimism embedded in asset prices, Morgan noted, is that it can serve as a high-water mark for trades perceived to be sensitive to the ebbs and flows of the economy — in particular, small-caps and cyclicals versus defensives.

Goldman Growth Optimism — Source: Goldman Sachs

“To be clear, we continue to recommend select cyclicals as beneficiaries of the economic acceleration in early 2026 given the market does not yet appear to be fully pricing our economists’ above-consensus growth forecasts, but we are growing wary of a limited runway,” he concluded.

Investors are pricing in a global growth revival for 2026