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Matt Phillips9/11/25

Duolingo up on bullish note, hopes for a user rebound

Duolingo rose by the most in nearly a month after an analyst note painted a more bullish picture of the gamified language-learning company despite a dearth of news otherwise.

A quick check-in with analysts covering the stock on Wall Street found most of them otherwise flummoxed on the reason behind the uptick Thursday.

Some, however, suggested the rise may reflect optimism that the company has been able to reverse a monthslong downturn in daily active user metrics — a slump that set in after a social media backlash to a somewhat artless LinkedIn post from the company about its AI first strategy.

The bullish analyst note, published Thursday by Citizens JMP, suggested Duolingo could be a big beneficiary from a change to Apple’s rules governing its App Store driven by a ruling on a federal antitrust case against the company. The analysts wrote:

Given “Apple’s recent changes to U.S. App Store rules that allow developers to steer payments to the web where fees are similar to typical credit card fees rather than Apple’s 30% fee for in-app purchases and 30% fee on subscriptions for the first year and 15% thereafter, we expect mobile app companies including Duolingo, Life360, and Grindr Inc. to unlock meaningful cost benefits.”

At any rate, the next big event on the company’s calendar is its Duocon 2025 conference on Tuesday, where analysts are hoping to hear more hard information on all of the above topics.

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Oracle plans to raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity this year to fund its AI ambitions

On Sunday evening, Oracle told investors just how much money it’s going to need to from them to fund its data center expansion efforts.

Management said it plans to raise $45 billion to $50 billion this calendar year, split roughly equally between debt and equity in a bid to maintain its investment grade rating.

The lion’s share of the equity raise ($20 billion) will come from at at-the-money offering that enables the firm to opportunistically issue shares. This year’s debt issuance will come in one fell swoop, per the company, and happen early in the year.

Carl Quintanilla Vital Knowledge ORCL — Source: Bluesky

On the bright side, at least this is an answer. During the conference call that followed Q2 results in December, Oracle said that capex for the fiscal year would be $15 billion higher than previously anticipated. When asked how much money the company would need to raise, CEO Clay Magouyrk said “it’s hard to answer that question exactly,” before saying he thought it would be “less, if not substantially less” than $100 billion in order to complete its multi-year AI buildout.

“Oracle is raising money in order to build additional capacity to meet the contracted demand from our largest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers, including AMD, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, TikTok, xAI and others,” per the press release.

Put it in alphabetical order all you want, we all know who your biggest customer is!

Oracle’s (over)reliance on OpenAI as a source of future revenues has prompted markets to view the firm as less creditworthy.

Nvidia’s not investing $100 billion in OpenAI because the chip designer doesn’t want to pay the OpenAI valuation tax

The upshot of the WSJ report on Nvidia’s relationship with OpenAI is that the former wants you to know they’re not going to be dependent on the latter.

Nvidia developer conference GTC

Tasha Matsumoto

Tech drags down stocks; gold and silver plummet

Gold and silver sank amid Trump’s plans to nominate reputed inflation hawk Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair.

Public sculptures along the Clear Creek Trail in downtown Golden, Colorado.

Ben Walsh, Luke Kawa1/30/26

Gold and silver plunge, suffering their worst losses since the 1980s

Gold and silver suffered their worst losses in decades on Friday, with the iShares Silver Trust falling more than 30% at one point during afternoon trading before recovering slightly.

After recently crossing $5,000 per ounce for the first time, gold’s dip was relatively muted compared to silver’s rout, but nevertheless eye-watering for a traditional safe haven asset. At one point, gold’s intraday dip exceeded 10%, its worst intraday drop since the 1980s and surpassing its declines seen during the 2008 financial crisis, per Bloomberg.

Silver’s drop was its worst in percentage terms since 1980.

Gold, and particularly silver, have been pushed higher recently by a storm of retail trader enthusiasm for the metals, as well as more traditional drivers of precious metals such as geopolitical risks and concerns over a fall in the dollar’s value due to trade wars and possibly waning central bank independence.

Leveraged ETFs that hold gold and silver futures have become increasingly popular trading vehicles amid the parabolic moves in precious metals prices, and likely contributed to the magnitude of the unwind today.

Case in point: look at silver futures for delivery in March. That’s the dominant contract held by the ProShares Ultra Silver ETF, which offers exposure to 2x the daily move in the shiny metal. Volumes exploded (and the contract rebounded modestly) right around 1:25 p.m. ET, which is when silver futures settled and around the time the ETF performed its daily rebalancing (which in this case, involved massive selling).

Max Knoblauch1/30/26

Gaming stocks plunge following release of Google’s AI tool that can create playable, copyrighted worlds

Shares of major gaming companies are plunging on Friday as investors get a deeper look at the capabilities of Google’s new generative-AI prototype, Project Genie.

The tool allows users to “create and explore infinitely diverse worlds” with a text or image prompt. Users have already exposed its ability to realistically recreate knockoffs of copyrighted games from Nintendo and other gaming companies.

As users experiment with recreations of game worlds like Take-Two’s “Grand Theft Auto 6,” shares of major gaming companies are sinking. Unity Software, the maker of the popular Unity game engine, is down over 25%, while gaming platform Roblox is down about 9%.

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