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Luke Kawa

Micron soars after reporting huge Q1 beat, with Q2 guidance ahead of every Wall Street analyst’s estimates

Micron is soaring double digits after the memory chip specialist posted stellar results for its fiscal Q1 2026 and a much better outlook for the current quarter than Wall Street anticipated after the close on Wednesday.

For Q1, the company reported:

  • Revenues: $13.64 billion (estimate: $12.95 billion)

  • Adjusted earnings per share: $4.78 (estimate: $3.95)

And the Street’s consensus was well ahead of even the upper ranges of the guidance provided by management for the quarter for sales of $12.5 billion (plus or minus $300 million) and $3.75 (plus or minus $0.15).

For Q2, management provided an outlook for adjusted revenues of $18.3 billion to $19.1 billion, and adjusted EPS of $8.22 to $8.62. Wall Street had penciled in revenues of $14.38 billion with adjusted EPS of $4.71.

Even the bottom end of the ranges management provided is well above the top analyst’s estimate for the quarter.

“We are in a very interesting environment where the aggregate demand for both DRAM and NAND is substantially higher than the ability to supply to it not just from a Micron perspective but even that aggregate industry level,” said Micron chief business officer and executive vice president Sumit Sadana. “So we are not really able to meet the demand for customers across any segment.”

These results may help spark a revival in semi stocks, which have gotten trounced in recent sessions. Hard disk drive sellers Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital are also rising on Thursday, as is flash memory seller Sandisk.

Micron has been one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 since last Thursday’s record close, down double digits from then until Wednesday’s close as investors broadly dumped AI names. Prior to that, shares had been on fire amid a bevy of Wall Street price target hikes and surging memory chip prices as demand runs ahead of supply. The AI boom has fueled a spike of immense appetite not only for GPUs and custom chips but also memory chips as well, as data centers also need a boatload of these to store information and feed it to those processors. Micron and its major competitors, SK Hynix and Samsung, have already sold out production for their most advanced high-bandwidth memory offerings for calendar year 2026.

Micron recently announced that it would be exiting its consumer chip business to focus on serving its AI customers.

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Max Knoblauch

Whirlpool tumbles on Q1 earnings, says war is causing “recession-level” decline in US appliance demand

Shares of home-appliance giant Whirlpool Corp. are tumbling on Thursday following its Q1 earnings and stark warning about consumer confidence.

According to Whirlpool, the war with Iran “resulted in recession-level industry decline in the US as consumer confidence collapsed in late February and March.”

The company’s Q1 sales were down about 10% year over year. In April, Whirlpool issued its “largest price increase in more than a decade,” with costs for consumers rising 10%. US appliance demand dropped 7.4% in Q1, Whirlpool said, including a 10% drop in March.

“This level of industry decline is similar to what we have observed during the global financial crisis and even higher than during other recessionary periods,” CEO Marc Bitzer said on the company’s earnings call.

Whirlpool shares were down more than 20% in premarket trading, but pared some of those losses in early trading. It remains on pace for one of its worst trading days in company history.

markets
Claire Yubin Oh

Krispy Kreme jumps on narrower Q1 loss and “significant progress on turnaround”

Krispy Kreme’s shares are climbing this morning, with the stock ticking up around 5% as the market opened after the company reported narrowing losses and highlighted the success of its turnaround efforts before the bell.

For the quarter ended March 29, 2026, Krispy Kreme trimmed its net loss to $22.8 million, down from $33.3 million a year earlier, though still wider than the $10.8 million loss analysts had penciled in (compiled by Bloomberg). Adjusted EBITDA for Q1 came in at $33.1 million, a little more than the $30.6 million that analysts had been expecting.

CEO Josh Charlesworth struck an optimistic note around the earnings, commenting that Q1 “highlighted significant progress across every pillar of our turnaround plan” and that management expects “this momentum to continue through 2026, driven by profitable growth in the U.S. with key strategic partners, higher digital sales, and international expansion.”

The donut chain is tightening its belt quicker than previously anticipated and expects a net leverage ratio of less than 5.5x in 2026, where they’d expected the level to remain at or below 5.5x last quarter. DNUT also expects more than $15 million in cash flow by the end of the fiscal year as it tightens its debt reduction target.

The company’s newly introduced FY2026 net revenue outlook, forecast to be between $1.25 billion and $1.35 billion, fell below Wall Street’s $1.46 billion estimates — a discrepancy that Krispy Kreme addressed by saying that analyst expectations don’t yet reflect recent asset sales.

markets
Helena Cheng

Datadog surges after boosting 2026 sales forecast, pulling software stocks higher

Shares of Datadog are surging after the cloud-monitoring platform announced Q1 results that beat Wall Street forecasts on the top and bottom lines while hiking its full year sales guidance.

Key numbers:

  • Revenue of $1.01 billion (up 32% year over year and above analyst estimates of $957.8 million).

  • Adjusted EPS of $0.60 (estimate: $0.52).

Full-year revenue guidance was lifted to $4.3 billion to $4.34 billion from the earlier range of $4.06 billion to $4.1 billion. Management also raised the company’s full-year guidance, now giving an adjusted EPS outlook of $2.36 to $2.44.

The boost to the sales outlook isn’t just helping Datadog, but also the beaten-down semiconductor industry at large. The iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF is up about 4% as of 10:46 a.m. ET, with the likes of Palo Alto Networks, GitLab, Palantir, Atlassian, and CrowdStrike outperforming.

“Overall, we view this as a transformational print/guide for DDOG as the company continues to demonstrate that AI is a powerful demand catalyst rather than a disruptive threat with mission-critical positioning across cloud migration, digital transformation, and now AI training/inference workloads creating a multi-year runway for accelerating growth and continued share gains,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives in the wake of this report, boosting his price target to $220 from $190.

The rally comes as Datadog announced that it has received FedRAMP High certification, meeting federal government cloud security and compliance standards for handling sensitive unclassified information. The certification is designed to protect controlled unclassified information in cloud environments through strict security controls.

“This milestone reinforces Datadog’s leadership in cloud security and compliance, and sets a new standard for observability platforms in regulated sectors,” said Emilio Escobar, CISO at Datadog.

Going into the report, Datadog had gained over 47% year to date.

markets
Matt Phillips & Helena Cheng

Vistra rises after reporting better-than-expected Q1 numbers

Power provider Vistra, a key AI energy trade, reported better-than-expected results early Thursday, sending shares up in premarket trading.

The Texas-based company, which supplies nuclear energy, natural gas, and coal-fueled power to wholesale and retail markets, reported:

  • Net income of $1.029 billion (including a massive $723 million unrealized gain from hedges expected to settle in future years) vs. Wall Street expectations for $434.2 million.

  • Adjusted EBITDA of $1.49 billion vs. expectations for $1.44 billion, per FactSet.

  • Revenue of $5.6 billion vs. an estimated $5.1 billion, per Bloomberg.

Vistra reaffirmed its 2026 Ongoing Operations Adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $6.8 billion to $7.6 billion and Ongoing Operations Adjusted Free Cash Flow before Growth range of $3.925 billion to $4.725 billion.

The company’s shares soared 258% in 2024 amid a flurry of excitement over the AI energy boom. Last year was more muted, with the stock rising 17%. So far in 2026, shares were down roughly 4% through yesterday’s close.

markets
Helena Cheng

Peloton jumps on surprisingly strong Q3 cash flow generation, boost to outlook

Peloton shares are jumping in premarket trading after the company reported a modest Q3 sales beat while generating surprisingly strong cash flows.

The key numbers:

  • Revenue of $630.9 million (compared to analyst estimates of $617.6 million).

  • Adjusted EBITDA of $126.2 million (estimate: $128.7 million).

  • Free cash flow of $150.5 million (estimate: $54.2 million).

For full-year 2026, Peloton nudged up its revenue guidance to a range of $2.42 billion to $2.44 billion, and also boosted its adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow outlooks.

Peloton has spent the last few years working through the aftermath of its pandemic-era hardware boom. The company announced a series of product updates last year in October featuring updated cross-training bikes and treadmills that include AI-powered form tracking and stronger processors.

Under CEO Peter Stern, the company is pivoting toward new growth levers by renewing efforts to expand content distribution and reach commercial markets. This includes the launch of the Peloton Commercial Series for high-use environments, which helped drive a 14% year-over-year increase in commercial business revenue.

A pillar of this strategy is its global partnership with Spotify. By integrating over 1,400 on-demand Peloton fitness classes into a new “Fitness” hub for Spotify Premium members, the company aims to reach new audiences outside its own hardware ecosystem.

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