markets

Google worker charged with using inside information to make $1.2 million on Polymarket

Polymarket trader AlphaRaccoon wasn’t just feeling lucky when he took positions related to Google’s year-end top search results late last year, but was instead using confidential data from his position inside the company, according to a criminal complaint filed in New York, which was unsealed yesterday.

Michele Spagnuolo, a Staff Information Security Engineer at Google Zurich, per his LinkedIn profile, has been charged with money laundering, commodities fraud, and wire fraud, with the account having allegedly made $1.2 million across various trades.

The complaint alleges that Spagnuolo used nonpublic information to place trades such as the rapper and alleged murderer D4vd being the #1 search on Google in 2025. When it was placed, Polymarket had assigned a “a near-zero probability” to that position.

As we noted late last year, the stakes involved and the volume of activity around this one specific subject aroused suspicion at the time, and the AlphaRaccoon (a username which was then changed to 0xafEe) account page now lies dormant as a key part of one of the first insider trading cases in the prediction market arena.

Google Employee Charged With Insider Trading

Google Employee Charged With Insider Trading

Michele Spagnuolo, a Staff Information Security Engineer at Google Zurich, per his LinkedIn profile, has been charged with money laundering, commodities fraud, and wire fraud, with the account having allegedly made $1.2 million across various trades.

The complaint alleges that Spagnuolo used nonpublic information to place trades such as the rapper and alleged murderer D4vd being the #1 search on Google in 2025. When it was placed, Polymarket had assigned a “a near-zero probability” to that position.

As we noted late last year, the stakes involved and the volume of activity around this one specific subject aroused suspicion at the time, and the AlphaRaccoon (a username which was then changed to 0xafEe) account page now lies dormant as a key part of one of the first insider trading cases in the prediction market arena.

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Nebius rises after AI hedge fund Situational Awareness discloses 5.6% stake

Nebius jumped 12% in premarket trading Thursday after Situational Awareness, the hedge fund run by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, disclosed a major stake in the AI cloud company.

According to its 13G filed Wednesday, the fund reported owning 12.4 million Class A shares of Nebius, representing a 5.6% stake worth ~$2.6 billion as of Wednesday’s closing price. The position didn’t appear in the fund’s most recent 13F filing — which covered holdings as of March 31 and included other neocloud companies such as CoreWeave and IREN — suggesting the Nebius stake was added sometime after the first quarter.

The disclosure puts Situational Awareness among Nebius’s largest disclosed institutional shareholders, at least based on the latest available ownership filings, which show Blackrock as the largest institutional holder as of March 31, with 4.5% of shares outstanding.

One of the "neocloud" stocks, Nebius has gained traction recently after securing large cloud contracts with Microsoft and Meta, as well as an equity investment from Nvidia and an energy partnership with Bloom. Shares are up 165% this year and a whopping 475% over the past 12 months.

Founded in 2024 by Aschenbrenner — and named after his widely-read essay on artificial superintelligence — Situational Awareness has built its portfolio around the physical infrastructure AI runs on, from chips and data centers to power and compute. Per its 13F filings, the fund’s reported portfolio value climbed to $13.7 billion as of the first quarter, up nearly 2.5x from $5.5 billion at the end of 2025.

markets

Snowflake climbs after Q1 results top expectations, guidance gets a boost

Shares of Snowflake are surging after the company beat Wall Street’s projections in its latest earnings report, delivering on its AI thesis, with Q1 revenue up 33%.

It also announced an acquisition of an AI agent platform.

Snowflake stock soared 30% in after-hours trading. If that move were to hold on Thursday, it would more than erase Snowflake’s nearly 20% decline so far this year.

Here are the numbers:

Revenue of $1.39 billion in the first quarter (compared to analyst estimates of $1.32 billion).
Adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 (estimate: $0.32).
Full-year product revenue guidance for 2027 of $5.84 billion, up from previous guidance of $5.66 billion (estimate: $5.67 billion).

Snowflake is a cloud-based database company — essentially allowing businesses to mine their data for insights, charging for compute and storage along the way.

The company’s stock has fallen this year as the company manages competition from hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services as well as the high cost of AI-related build-outs as they double down on AI tools.

On Wednesday, Snowflake announced an eye-popping $6 billion multi-year deal with AWS to "to accelerate enterprise agentic AI adoption."

Last year, Snowflake — which now calls itself “the AI Data Cloud company” — announced a $200 million deal to power its agentic AI with Anthropic’s Claude.

Alongside its Q1 earnings, Snowflake also announced it has signed an agreement to purchase Natoma, a platform for securely integrating AI agents with data, like Snowflake’s. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“AI agents will only become enterprise-ready if organizations can govern how they operate across systems, applications and tools,” said Pratyus Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of Natoma. “Together with Snowflake, we’re building the governance and connectivity layer that enables enterprises to securely operationalize AI at scale.”

markets

Synopsys drops despite better-than-expected Q2 results, big boost to full-year guidance

Synopsys is falling in postmarket trading despite delivering better-than-expected quarterly results and boosting full-year guidance by more than analysts had anticipated.

For its fiscal Q2, the electronic design automation firm (which helps chipmakers make chips) reported:

Revenue of $2.28 billion (compared to analyst estimates of $2.25 billion and guidance for $2.25 billion, plus or minus $25 million).
Adjusted earnings per share of $3.35 (estimate: $3.14, guidance for $3.14 plus or minus $0.03).

Management boosted its full-year sales outlook to a range of $9.63 billion to $9.71 billion; the consensus estimate matches the low end of that range. On the bottom line, Synopsys now expects adjusted earnings per share between $14.72 and $14.80, which is well about the consensus call for $14.45.

The company has received two high-profile backers since December: Nvidia unveiled a stake in the company that month as part of a partnership to “design, simulate and verify intelligent products.” More recently, Elliott Investment Management took an activist position in the company, reportedly pushing for higher sales and margins closer to its peer Cadence Design Systems.

Along with these results, management announced that the company entered into a cooperation pact with Elliott, and is adding Elliot Managing Partner Jesse Cohn to the board.

markets

Marvell Technology boosts sales guidance for this year and the next (again)

Marvell Technology gave back most of its big knee-jerk gains after the custom chip and networking company released results in line with estimates while continuing to offer an increasingly optimistic view on future sales.

Shares peaked during the conference call as management formalized Marvell’s sales outlook.

The company lifted its revenue guidance for this fiscal year to $11.5 billion, up $500 million from the outlook delivered last quarter. The following year, Marvell anticipates sales of $16.5 billion, a $1.5 billion boost in the view versus three months ago. That fiscal 2028 guidance is well ahead of Wall Street’s call for $15.3 billion.

“We are seeing exceptional AI-related bookings, and as a result, we are significantly raising Marvell’s revenue outlook for both fiscal 2027 and fiscal 2028 compared with the guidance we provided last quarter,” said Chairman and CEO Matt Murphy in the press release, attributing this to “strong demand across a broad set of Marvell solutions.”

Taking a step back, here were the key numbers for Marvell’s opening quarter in fiscal 2027:

Net revenue: $2.42 billion (estimate: $2.41 billion, guidance for $2.4 billion plus or minus 5%).
Adjusted net income per share: $0.80 (estimate: $0.80, guidance for $0.79 plus or minus $0.05).

For the current quarter, management expects sales between $2.57 billion and $2.84 billion, the midpoint of which is higher than the $2.61 billion consensus estimate. The outlook for adjusted net income per share is $0.93, plus or minus $0.05, which is above the $0.90 call from the Street.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Marvell had set a high bar for itself coming into this report. The stock surged even after its Q4 results came in broadly in line with estimates in early March, as management issued rosy Q1 guidance and an upgrade to their sales forecast through 2027 (its fiscal 2028).

That bar is just getting even higher. To borrow a line from Creative Strategies CEO and Principal Analyst Ben Bajarin, “All viable compute will be used.”

That sentiment is the loose reason why the stock has more than doubled year to date heading into this release, riding the wave of heavy demand for both compute and connectivity solutions.

Marvell already counts Microsoft and Amazon as major customers (and is reportedly in talks with Google about custom chips). At the end of March, the company got the Jensen Huang seal of approval, receiving a $2 billion investment from Nvidia as part of a partnership to ensure custom chips work seamlessly within Nvidia’s data center architecture.

Tasha Matsumoto

S&P 500 closes flat as traders weigh peace prospects

The S&P 500 managed to just barely eke out a new record closing high as traders digested conflicting reports on US-Iran negotiations.

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