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GM surges on better-than-expected Q3 earnings, forecasts a smaller hit from tariffs and higher profits

GM reported third-quarter earnings before the market opened on Tuesday.

Electric vehicle sales and elevated profits revved up GM in the third quarter, sending shares surging more than 9% in premarket trading Tuesday. If these gains hold, it would mark the stock’s best day of the year.

The Detroit automaker posted adjusted diluted earnings per share of $2.80, more than 20% better than Wall Street’s expectations of $2.29 per share. Its sales reached $48.6 billion, slightly down from last year but ahead of Wall Street’s expected $45 billion.

The automaker hiked its full-year diluted earnings outlook to between $9.75 and $10.50, from a range of $8.25 to $10. Analysts polled by FactSet were anticipating $9.46.

GM reported a net tariff impact of $1.1 billion in Q3, matching the second quarter. The automaker lowered its full-year gross tariff impact outlook to between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion, from between $4 billion and $5 billion.

Electric vehicles were a big seller between July and September, with GM delivering 66,501 EVs in the quarter — a sales record. So far this year, the automaker has sold more than twice as many EVs as it did last year. Much of the third-quarter surge had to do with customers rushing to capitalize on the expiring $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

GM attempted to keep the EV party going with an accounting loophole, but has since scrapped that plan after incurring anger from GOP lawmakers. Earlier this month, GM had said it would take a $1.6 billion hit in Q3 as it adjusts its EV capacity to a lower demand environment.

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Beyond Meat’s meme stock rally continues after Monday’s frenzied session broke its records for volumes, options traded, and one-day gains

Beyond Meat is showing what happens when a low nominal share price, retail enthusiasm, heavy options activity, and relatively elevated short interest collide: this is what a meme stock rally looks like.

Shares of the plant-based meat company are on a tear again on Tuesday morning, pushing toward the $2 level after sinking as low as $0.50 last Thursday. As of 7:39 a.m. ET, more than $115 million has changed hands trading Beyond Meat, the fourth-most of any stock listed on US exchanges.

The rally didn’t need any fundamental news, but it got some anyways: management announced plans to expand its product availability at over 2,000 Walmart locations nationwide, further adding to the stock’s early gains.

This continues Beyond Meat’s high-volume surge that saw the stock more than double on Monday, in what was by far its biggest one-day gain on record. By the time the dust settled on the opening session of the week, Beyond Meat had volumes in excess of 1.2 billion, effectively turning over its (newly boosted) shares outstanding three times over during the course of the day. That’s a higher level of turnover than Opendoor Technologies enjoyed during its most insane session of this year back on July 21.

JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain observed that this retail interest came out of nowhere as the stock was trading for coins rather than dollars, as this chart on BYND’s daily net retail imbalance through Friday shows:

JPM BYND net imbalance
Source: JPMorgan

This sudden flood of positive retail sentiment appears to be in no small part thanks to a (since banned) Reddit user with the handle capybaraSTOCKS, who has since transitioned to YouTube and X to share his thesis on the company. Business Insider identified this person as Dimitri Semenikhin, a Dubai-based real estate developer.

The move on Monday included a massive spike in call volumes up to more than triple their previous daily record:

When you’re a meme stock, your equity is what becomes your top product. And while, yes, most companies do tend to see higher trading volumes on any given day than the sales they’re making, this discrepancy is particularly stark with Beyond Meat. Through its history as a publicly traded company, it’s recorded plant-based meat sales of 487.5 million pounds. In other words: more than twice as many shares traded on Monday compared to pounds sold from Q1 2018 through Q2 2025!

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IonQ rises after company releases two technical papers that demonstrate 99.99% two-qubit gate performance

IonQ is up in early trading on Tuesday after the quantum computing company shared two technical papers that demonstrate 99.99% two-qubit gate performance.

According to IonQ’s press release, this marks a new “quantum computing world record” for a two-qubit system, topping the previous world record of 99.97% set last year by Oxford Ionics, which IonQ acquired earlier this year. Though 99.99% and 99.97% sound very similar, the former represents an error rate of 1 in 10,000 operations; the latter represents an error rate of 3 in 10,000 operations.

The company says it is the first and only quantum computing company to cross the “four-nines” benchmark, per the release, putting IonQ on track to scale up toward millions of qubits by 2030.

The “two-qubit gate fidelity,” or the error rate of quantum computers’ two-qubit operations, is an important yardstick to measure the performance of a quantum computer. When accuracy improves, the technology’s window for commercial operations widens — a welcome development in the nascent industry, which has been fueled by increased US government interest and speculative trading as much as it has been by technical breakthroughs this year.

In July, peer Rigetti Computing announced that its two-qubit fidelity was 99.5%, catalyzing its largest one-day gain since January. The two companies both operate gate-based models, but with different approaches: Rigetti uses superconducting circuits, while IonQ, as its name implies, uses trapped ions.

In CEO Niccolo de Masi’s words:

“This level of quantum performance has been the industry’s north star for decades and crossing it brings fault-tolerant quantum systems years closer to mass market adoption. For our global customers, it means unlocking more value from quantum computing sooner, while dramatically lowering the cost and complexity of large-scale systems.”

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