Stocks sink amid AI and tariff fears

IBM is sinking as Anthropic touts Claude Code’s ability to modernize COBOL code bases.

COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language, is a programming language for business functions. Code written in this language has been developed and altered over decades, getting increasingly clunky and cluttered on mainframes, and the number of experts who know this language well is dwindling.

Anthropic said in a blog post that Claude Code can automate COBOL modernization, and, with the help of human judgment, migrate this code incrementally into modern languages, where it can be hosted across various cloud providers.

That is a potential threat to the likes of IBM, an architect of the COBOL system that uses the language on its mainframes for enterprises. IBM is also offering AI tools (like watsonx) to modernize COBOL code, but crucially, wants to keep the outputs running on its hardware and software.

“The strength of our Z placement fuels our flywheel for growth with its attractive 3x to 4x stack multiplier across IBM,” CFO James Kavanaugh said after the company’s latest earnings report. “Z” refers to IBM’s mainframe offerings. As such, getting and keeping customers on IBM’s mainframe is a key way the company drives revenue growth for other software and services.

COBOL is standard in many financial operations (like ATMs), as well as in government and airline systems, as Anthropic notes, so users may want to keep this code tied to one mainframe architecture for security, reliability, and speed (it’s the devil they know!) rather than migrating to a different platform.

Bloomberg reports that PayPal is the subject of takeover interest, with shares down nearly 90% from their 2021 closing high.

Per the report, management “has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors,” citing people familiar with the matter.

After being briefly halted for volatility, shares jumped 8%.

There’s reportedly appetite from “one large rival” to buy the entire company, while other potential purchasers want only certain parts.

Shares of the payments company recently closed at their lowest level since 2016, having lost ground to the likes of Apple and Google in the digital realm.

Earlier this month, shares cratered after the company posted weaker-than-anticipated Q4 results and 2026 profit guidance while announcing its CEO would soon be leaving the company.

Sandisk continued to shake off a slump that hit the shares last week after it priced a secondary offering of almost 6 million shares owned by its former parent, Western Digital.

Tomorrow marks a year since Sandisk started trading on its own, after its spin-off from WDC. The stock soared amid a global shortage of memory chips that seemed to catch even experts completely off guard. The stock is up almost 1,300% since it began trading independently.

The company appeared to tease an event or product launch for tomorrow, February 24, in an X post on Friday, but the specifics were not entirely clear.

Sandisk’s gain over that period is the largest of any constituent of the S&P Total Market Index with a market cap of $4 billion or more — and the third-largest increase overall, out of its roughly 3,800 constituents.

Year to date, Sandisk is among the best performers in the Russell 1000 Technology Index and a key driver of the trend that has seen small clutch of hardware manufacturers trounce software shares.