Low-cost airlines climb amid report that Spirit Airlines could liquidate as soon as this week

Oklo pacing for big week, helped by risk-on appetite and Trump policy directive

Retail favorite Oklo, the “pre-revenue” designer of smaller experimental modular nuclear reactors with close ties to the Trump administration, is on track for its best week since January, even after slumping early Thursday.

Before Thursday’s slight decline, Oklo had posted big gains for four straight days, rising 33% in that time frame. Another stock in the category, Nuscale, rose 27% in the same span.

Oklo shares may have benefited from a directive published Tuesday by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directing federal agencies to “establish cost-effective partnerships with private-sector innovators to meet near-term objectives that include safely deploying nuclear reactors in orbit as early as 2028 and on the Moon as early as 2030.”

Oklo’s close ties to the US government could put it in a position to benefit from such orders. US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright formerly served on Oklo’s board of directors.

Separately, Oklo announced new members of its board of directors Tuesday, adding David Christian, a former executive from Dominion Energy, and David Park, CEO of Standard Lithium, among others.

Whether these announcements ultimately translate into a financial gain for Oklo remains to be seen. But it likely won’t be seen for a while.

The company doesn’t expect to generate any meaningful revenue until it brings its Aurora line of modular reactors, none of which have been built yet, to market. (The company has announced approvals of some design plans related to a prototype it’s building at the Idaho National Laboratory.)

On the other hand, Oklo does have some money to burn, reporting cash and marketable securities worth some ~$1.4 billion at the end of 2025. And with the share price spiking this week, Oklo executives might also be tempted to offer more stock as a source of funding.

Oklo’s upswing comes amid a rebound in retail trading this week that’s sending stocks and crypto beloved by individual traders — such as IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, Hims & Hers, and SoundHound AI — sharply higher, as worries about Iran ease and traders rush to buy whatever remaining “dip” there is.

Luke Kawa47m

15 months after crippling quantum computing stocks, Nvidia has sent the industry back into the stratosphere

All of the technological breakthroughs, sales deals, and acquisitions haven’t mattered much for quantum computing companies in 2026.

The speculative fever had broken, with call volumes traded and most retail darling assets having peaked in October, and the subsequent risk-off move during the Mideast war accelerated the retreat from expensive, thematic plays.

Then along came Nvidia to the rescue — the company that kneecapped the industry in Q1 2025 when CEO Jensen Huang said it would likely be a couple decades before quantum computers were “very useful.”

On Tuesday, the chip designer released a family of open models (dubbed Ising) designed to leverage AI to improve calibration and error correction for quantum computers, “two of the most critical challenges in building hybrid-quantum classical systems,” per the press release.

D-Wave Quantum, IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and Quantum Computing have surged between 23% and 42% over the past three sessions, as of 9:50 a.m. ET.

These stocks are all poised for their best weeks since September, and the return of intense call buying definitely appears to be magnifying the buying pressure:

Infleqtion, the relative newcomer on the scene, is up about 16% since Monday’s close.

True to form, Huang threw a bit of a backhanded compliment to the industry along with this lifeline.

“AI is essential to making quantum computing practical,” he said.

Claire Yubin Oh & David Crowther3h

Allbirds traded more than JPMorgan and Exxon Mobil yesterday

After a surprising announcement that the tech bro shoemaker would be pivoting to AI on Wednesday, shares of Allbirds were flying high — soaring nearly 600% by the end of the day in record trading volume.

This was, for many reasons, completely insane.

Flipping the BIRD

Before the latest pop, Allbirds had a miniscule market cap of some ~$22 million. Yesterday, some $3.8 billion changed hands in BIRD — with the company’s market cap ending the session at a still small $148 million.

That means that the company turned over more than 25x its market cap in trading volume. Indeed, there were no other stocks with a market cap less than $1 billion that traded more than $1 billion yesterday — something of an outlier, to say the least.

Two of the stocks that Allbirds out-traded were none other than the world’s largest bank (JPMorgan) and America’s largest oil company (Exxon Mobil), which only turned over $3 billion and $2.3 billion, respectively. And those weren’t even particularly low-volume days for those two corporate giants — Allbirds’ insane activity was way ahead of the average of the last 120 days for each.

Sole searching

Though this was perhaps more of a meme stock story than an AI story, those two worlds are starting to overlap, as retail traders have bought up anything adjacent to AI — particularly in the last couple of weeks, as risk-on assets have ripped higher since geopolitical risks have (seemingly) abated and indexes are back to all-time highs.

Of course, we’ve seen this movie before: remember Algorhythm Holdings, a former karaoke maker turned AI trucking logistics company, which obliterated the freight industry only a few months ago? Then there was the Long Island Iced Tea Corp., which, naturally, got into the blockchain.

Allbirds’ latest pivot, with a “long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider,” which will be funded with its new $50 million convertible financing facility, is unlikely to concern neocloud leaders like CoreWeave, which is planning to spend $30 billion in 2026.

J. Edward Moreno6h

Hims jumps after RFK Jr. announces FDA may loosen regulations for 12 peptides

Hims & Hers rose more than 13% on Wednesday and continued to rise in premarket trading on Thursday after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the Food and Drug Administration may ease restrictions on 12 peptides.

The move would allow compounding pharmacies to dispense the list of peptides, which have grown in popularity but are currently available only through suppliers who sell them for research purposes.

Hims and other consumer health companies have positioned themselves to begin selling peptides after getting the FDA nod.

Today, we took long-overdue action to restore science, accountability, and the rule of law.

In September 2023, the Biden FDA pushed a number of peptides into Category 2 — “Bulk Drug Substances that Raise Significant Safety Risks” — driving a dangerous black market that puts…
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) April 15, 2026

The peptide gold rush: How impending deregulation could supercharge a shadow industry