Musk-Trump feud triggers wave of retail dip-buying

AI infrastructure company Vertiv Holdings is spiking after posting Q4 earnings that beat estimates and sunny guidance.

For Q4, the major provider of power and cooling solutions for data centers reported:

• Adjusted earnings per share of $1.36 vs. $1.29 consensus expectation from analysts surveyed by Factset.

• Sales of $2.88 billion, in line with estimates.

For Q1, management said adjusted earnings would come in between $0.95 and $1.01; even the lower end of that range is higher than the $0.93 consensus estimate. Q1 guidance for net sales of $2.5 billion to $2.7 billion also outstripped Wall Street’s call for $2.54 billion.

For the full year, the lower end of Vertiv’s range of guidance for net sales ($13.25 billion to $13.75 billion) and adjusted earnings per share ($5.97 to $6.07) were both above the highest estimates from analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Vertiv has to be one of the more successful examples of SPAC-era financial engineering.

The company came out of the combination of GS Acquisition Holdings Corp., a so-called blank check company, and Vertiv Holdings — then owned by private equity company Platinum Equity — as part of a roughly $1.9 billion deal, including debt, first announced in late 2019.

The stock pretty much went nowhere for years after it listed as Vertiv on Feb. 10, 2020. But as the AI datacenter boom began to roll, the shares exploded. Since the end of 2022, they’re up more than 1,300% and Vertiv has created roughly $70 billion in market value.

Robinhood Markets posted fourth-quarter revenue that fell short of analysts’ estimates, but earnings topped Wall Street’s forecasts.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. I own Robinhood stock as part of my compensation.)

The stock, crypto, and options trading platform reported:

• Q4 earnings per share of $0.66 vs. analysts’ consensus estimate of $0.63, according to FactSet.

• Sales of $1.28 billion vs. expectations of $1.35 billion.

• Transaction-based revenue of $776 million vs. expectations of $797.6 million. 

Shares of the company were down 5.4% shortly after the report.

Robinhood shares notched gains of 193% and 204% in 2024 and 2025, respectively, though they’ve recently given up some of those gains amid volatility in the crypto markets.