Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon (Getty Images)

Goldman Sachs shatters expectations as the bank roars back from the brink

4/15/24 10:54AM

Goldman Sachs blew the doors off expectations with a $3.9 billion profit in the first quarter, a respite following a rocky streak at the Wall Street bank marked by layoff news and departures of top executives.

The bank’s trading operations — stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities — did well, with revenues rising 10% to $7.6 billion. Revenues in its asset and wealth management division jumped 18% to $3.8 billion. Fees from investment banking — managing bond and stock offerings, and advising corporation on M&A — jumped 32% to nearly $2.1 billion.

The market liked it, giving Goldman Sachs a nice boost.

OpenAI doesn’t have the cash to pay Oracle $300 billion — raising it will test the very limits of private markets

The ChatGPT-maker plans to burn though $115 billion by 2029. No company in history has ever lit that much money on fire intentionally, let alone tried funding such a splurge through private markets alone.

David Crowther21m

Matt Phillips

38m

Seagate, Western Digital romp as hard drive makers dominate S&P 500 leaderboard

Hard drive makers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital surged Monday, putting them comfortably in the top two spots of this year’s top performers in the S&P 500.

Shortly after 10:30 a.m. ET, they were looking at gains of roughly 145% and 130%, respectively, for the year.

Not much news on the day, though Bank of America analysts have boosted the price target for Seagate to $215 from $170 while upwardly revising their outlook for hard disk drive demand this year, per The Fly.

Positive background music on the US and China’s trade relationship, important to IT hardware makers, is also likely helping, along with a general upswing in the AI data center trade.

Data storage is so hot right now

Positive background music on the US and China’s trade relationship, important to IT hardware makers, is also likely helping, along with a general upswing in the AI data center trade.

Luke Kawa

41m

International investors want to own US assets — and have nothing to do with the US dollar

Looking at ETF flows, Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos found that 80% of recent foreign inflows into US stocks and 50% of inflows into US bonds have been on a hedged basis.

College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic - Clemson v Notre Dame

Max Knoblauch

Nio climbs ahead of new SUV launch as Chinese EV giants recommit to paying suppliers faster

Shares of Chinese EV maker Nio climbed in Monday morning trading as investors cheered news that its ES8 SUV — priced to compete with Tesla’s Model Y — will begin deliveries this weekend.

Nio may also be seeing a boost from the recommitment by several Chinese EV giants on Monday to pay their suppliers within 60 days. That effort could help tame some of the brutal price wars between automakers in the country, which the Chinese government has struggled to contain.

The move is seen as a boost to the stability of the Chinese auto industry, and Nio rivals Li Auto and BYD also climbed.

At the end of 2023, Nio took nearly 300 days to pay its suppliers, according to Bloomberg reporting. In June, Nio and 16 other Chinese automakers agreed to the 60-day payment window, though a government report in August found that only three had set up payment systems.

Luke Kawa

CoreWeave soars on $6.3 billion cloud computing purchasing agreement with Nvidia

Shares of CoreWeave are flying higher in early trading after the company struck an agreement with Nvidia that will see the chip designer purchase all of CoreWeave’s unused cloud computing capacity through April 13, 2032.

The new order has an initial value of $6.3 billion, per a filing from CoreWeave that outlines this modification to its April 2023 services deal with Nvidia.

Securing access to cloud computing capacity has been the hot topic in the AI space, which was underscored by last week’s deal between Microsoft and Nebius as well as Oracle’s mammoth pipeline of sales, thanks in large part to OpenAI.

As such, it strikes me as a bit odd that this particular agreement for CoreWeave — securing full utilization of its cloud computing capacity, which everyone seems to want and where demand appears to outstrip supply — is such a big deal, but hey.

Nvidia has secured a high degree of vertical integration throughout the AI ecosystem through its equity positions and partnerships with cloud computing and data center companies.