markets

J. Edward Moreno2h

Match Group invests $100 million in Grindr rival Sniffies, with future option to acquire the startup

Tinder owner Match Group has invested $100 million in Sniffies — a gay hookup site that’s earned a reputation as a raunchier rival to Grindr — in a deal that gives it an option to acquire the startup in the future.

It would not be Match’s first investment turned acquisition, having pulled the same strategy with Hinge, its currently fastest-growing app. Match will be sunsetting its existing gay dating app, Archer, and focusing its attention on Sniffies, the company told Bloomberg. The announcement sent Grindr slipping in after-hours trading.

Unlike Grindr, which must abide by Apple’s App Store rules, the privately held Sniffies is a website and isn’t bound by the same restrictions. Users can make their profile photos explicit images and enjoy wider anonymity. This has, however, subjected the platform to increasingly common government restrictions on porn sites.

Sniffies has 3 million monthly active users globally, according to Match Group, compared to the 15.2 million on Grindr in the last quarter of 2025. Still, it has grown massively in popularity, clocking 60 million page visits in March, up 60% from last year, per Similarweb figures.

Sniffies founder and CEO Blake Gallagher said the investment “unlocks our ability to move faster on the things that matter most: stronger trust & safety, better product, and a more dynamic network.”

Unlike Grindr, which must abide by Apple’s App Store rules, the privately held Sniffies is a website and isn’t bound by the same restrictions. Users can make their profile photos explicit images and enjoy wider anonymity. This has, however, subjected the platform to increasingly common government restrictions on porn sites.

Sniffies has 3 million monthly active users globally, according to Match Group, compared to the 15.2 million on Grindr in the last quarter of 2025. Still, it has grown massively in popularity, clocking 60 million page visits in March, up 60% from last year, per Similarweb figures.

Sniffies founder and CEO Blake Gallagher said the investment “unlocks our ability to move faster on the things that matter most: stronger trust & safety, better product, and a more dynamic network.”

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Matt Phillips & Claire Yubin Oh2h

Corning sinks after posting underwhelming Q2 guidance, despite Q1 beat

Corning reported Q1 results before the bell on Tuesday that beat Wall Street’s expectations, but shares still fell from the company’s softer second-quarter guidance.

For the first quarter, Corning reported:

Non-GAAP core earnings per share of $0.70, just beating consensus analyst expectations of $0.69, according to FactSet.
Core sales of $4.34 billion vs. a $4.30 billion consensus estimate from analysts.

The fly in the Corning ointment was the outlook for Q2 2026. The maker of fiber-optic networking equipment now expects core sales to grow to approximately $4.6 billion, slightly lower than $4.65 billion forecast by analysts. Core EPS is expected to reach a range of $0.73 to $0.77, largely in line with the $0.75 Wall Street consensus.

Management highlighted the company’s “powerful momentum across our Market-Access Platforms,” or five fast-growing industries ranging from optics to mobile consumer electronics, but also noted that an additional $30 million of expense is expected in the second quarter compared to the first, as it upgrades and repairs its solar wafer facility to a “permanent power system.”

After such a hot run, with the stock up 85% so far this year, it’s no wonder that it’s taking a breather on results that don’t give analysts enough excuses to meaningfully bump their forecasts.

Indeed, Corning is one of a number of fiber-optic networking stocks — including Lumentum, Coherent, and Ciena Corp. — that have soared this year. They all handle slightly different aspects of the same undertaking: using light and electrical signals to almost instantly transfer the data that AI technology both consumes and produces.

Demand for their products has jumped as AI’s requirements for bandwidth, speed, and power have moved beyond the capacity of long-standing networking technologies, such as the copper cables that usually carry signals using electricity.

markets

Max Knoblauch2h

JetBlue reports deeper-than-expected Q1 loss on elevated fuel costs

JetBlue reported its first-quarter earnings before markets opened on Tuesday. The carrier’s shares have ticked down about 2% in premarket trading.

For Q1, JetBlue reported:

An adjusted loss of $0.87 per share, compared to Wall Street estimates of a loss of $0.73 per share from analysts polled by FactSet.
Total revenue of $2.24 billion, in line with estimates.

JetBlue said it expects to pay between $4.13 and $4.28 per gallon for fuel in the second quarter, up from the $2.40-per-gallon average in the same period last year. The carrier also said it expects to recapture between 30% and 40% of fuel costs in Q2, and 100% by early next year. The airline forecast a boost in capacity by between 1.5% and 4.5% in the second quarter, compared to the Wall Street consensus of 3.2% growth.

Like its major US rivals, JetBlue has been pummeled by higher fuel costs amid the war in Iran despite reporting strong demand. Late last month, JetBlue became the first major US carrier to hike its bag fees in an effort to offset fuel costs. The rest of the industry soon followed.

In the coming days, JetBlue could see significant impact from the outcome of reports that the Trump administration is considering extending a lifeline to low-budget rival Spirit in the form of a loan of up to $500 million.

Like its larger rival United Airlines, JetBlue has reportedly been mulling merger partners of its own. A common industry theory is that United’s efforts to merge with American could have been a means to actually attempt a smaller (but still huge) merger with JetBlue.

markets

Spotify Q2 operating profit outlook disappoints, overshadowing a solid first quarter

The biggest music streaming business in the world just reported its first batch of earnings for the 2026 fiscal year, and shares have slumped nearly 12% in early trading as investors react to a more disappointing operating profit outlook for Q2.

In an otherwise solid Q1, Spotify reported:

Total revenue of €4.53 billion ($5.3 billion), which was broadly in line with the company’s guidance and analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Operating income of €715 million ($836 million), beating the €686 million ($802 million) consensus expectation from analysts.
761 million monthly active users, 2 million ahead of analyst forecasts at the headline level, though the number of Premium subscribers came in exactly where analysts were expecting, at 293 million.

The streamer, which raised US prices for the third time in three years at the start of 2026, has instead suffered this morning on its second-quarter guidance. For Q2, Spotify is now expecting operating income of €630 million — some way off the €674 million that analysts were forecasting before today’s print.

markets

Max Knoblauch2h

GM soars after Q1 earnings impress, with automaker boosting full-year guidance

Detroit automaker GM reported its first-quarter earnings before markets opened on Tuesday. Its shares climbed more than 5% in premarket trading.

For Q1, General Motors reported:

Adjusted earnings of $3.70 per share, compared to Wall Street estimates of $2.60 per share by analysts polled by FactSet.
Revenue of $43.62 billion, compared to the $43.51 billion consensus estimate.

Looking ahead, GM raised its full-year earnings guidance to between $11.50 and $13.50. It previously forecast between $11 and $13. In its earnings deck, the automaker said the change was due in part to “lower gross tariff costs from the $0.5B IEEPA tariff adjustment.”

Earlier this month, GM reported that its Q1 sales were down 9.7% from last year, though it called year-over-year comparisons “significantly skewed” due to last year’s tariff-induced panic buying.

GM has been steadily retreating from its once lofty EV ambitions in recent months, recording $7.6 billion in EV-related write-downs last year. (The figure was far lower than Ford’s $19.5 billion.)

markets

David Crowther3h

Technology stocks suffer after WSJ reports that OpenAI has missed key revenue and user targets

It was once a blessing to be associated with the world’s hottest startup.

Supplying chips, general data center hardware, or even just announcing a tangential partnership with the ChatGPT maker used to be enough to send a stock spiking. But those days are gone, with OpenAI once again weighing on a raft of its suppliers and partners after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company has missed a number of internal revenue and user targets, as its competition with Anthropic and others heats up.

As of 6:45 a.m. ET, CoreWeave is off 5.4%, Oracle is down 5.5%, and Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom are off roughly 4%. Nvidia, for its part, is the worst-performing Magnificent 7 component. With billions of dollars’ — and in some cases tens of billions of dollars’ — worth of contracts with each of those companies, any sign that OpenAI is struggling to reach the escape velocity that its remarkable “spend big to win big” strategy is based on is understandably seen as a negative. Even stocks less explicitly tied to OpenAI are under pressure — the company’s sheer size is enough to weigh on pretty much the entire AI ecosystem.

The pain isn’t contained to OpenAI’s high-profile partners, but is also infecting most of the AI trade. Other data center stocks like IREN, Nebius, Applied Digital, and Cipher Digital are down sharply in premarket trading, as are networking and chip stocks like Marvell Technology, Astera Labs, Applied Optoelectronics, Lumentum, and Coherent. These stocks had been on fire as of late amid myriad signs of intense end user demand for AI compute — many of which came from Anthropic — and now seem to be getting speed-checked thanks to this lackluster news from its rival.

Per the WSJ, Sarah Friar, the company’s CFO, has “told other company leaders that she is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.”

The goals missed reportedly include:

A target to hit 1 billion weekly active users by the end of 2025.
Its annual revenue target for ChatGPT last year.
Multiple monthly revenue targets this year, as Anthropic has surged ahead in the enterprise markets.

Though some investors might be spooked, for what it’s worth, those missed targets haven’t exactly dampened the investor enthusiasm too much; the company recently announced that it had raised $122 billion, valuing it an eye-watering $852 billion.

It’s already been a busy week for OpenAI. Yesterday, the company announced a revised agreement with Microsoft, while CEO Sam Altman sent out a memo in which he mentioned “a lot of the things that we do that look weird — buying huge amounts of compute while our revenue is relatively small...”

This morning, the markets are deciding that kind of weird is worse than it was yesterday, in light of the missed targets.

Of course, the idea that OpenAI was limping into 2026 in light of competitive pressures from Google and Anthropic isn’t exactly new news. For instance, Altman reportedly called for a “code red” to improve ChatGPT in late 2025. OpenAI has spent 2026 championing its codex tool and its higher availability of compute — two things the company hopes will drive revenues going forward, especially from corporate customers.

OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO

OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO

As of 6:45 a.m. ET, CoreWeave is off 5.4%, Oracle is down 5.5%, and Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom are off roughly 4%. Nvidia, for its part, is the worst-performing Magnificent 7 component. With billions of dollars’ — and in some cases tens of billions of dollars’ — worth of contracts with each of those companies, any sign that OpenAI is struggling to reach the escape velocity that its remarkable “spend big to win big” strategy is based on is understandably seen as a negative. Even stocks less explicitly tied to OpenAI are under pressure — the company’s sheer size is enough to weigh on pretty much the entire AI ecosystem.

The pain isn’t contained to OpenAI’s high-profile partners, but is also infecting most of the AI trade. Other data center stocks like IREN, Nebius, Applied Digital, and Cipher Digital are down sharply in premarket trading, as are networking and chip stocks like Marvell Technology, Astera Labs, Applied Optoelectronics, Lumentum, and Coherent. These stocks had been on fire as of late amid myriad signs of intense end user demand for AI compute — many of which came from Anthropic — and now seem to be getting speed-checked thanks to this lackluster news from its rival.

Per the WSJ, Sarah Friar, the company’s CFO, has “told other company leaders that she is worried the company might not be able to pay for future computing contracts if revenue doesn’t grow fast enough.”

The goals missed reportedly include:

A target to hit 1 billion weekly active users by the end of 2025.
Its annual revenue target for ChatGPT last year.
Multiple monthly revenue targets this year, as Anthropic has surged ahead in the enterprise markets.

Though some investors might be spooked, for what it’s worth, those missed targets haven’t exactly dampened the investor enthusiasm too much; the company recently announced that it had raised $122 billion, valuing it an eye-watering $852 billion.

It’s already been a busy week for OpenAI. Yesterday, the company announced a revised agreement with Microsoft, while CEO Sam Altman sent out a memo in which he mentioned “a lot of the things that we do that look weird — buying huge amounts of compute while our revenue is relatively small...”

This morning, the markets are deciding that kind of weird is worse than it was yesterday, in light of the missed targets.

Of course, the idea that OpenAI was limping into 2026 in light of competitive pressures from Google and Anthropic isn’t exactly new news. For instance, Altman reportedly called for a “code red” to improve ChatGPT in late 2025. OpenAI has spent 2026 championing its codex tool and its higher availability of compute — two things the company hopes will drive revenues going forward, especially from corporate customers.

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