Olive Garden parent company Darden rises on cheery earnings report
Darden Restaurants, the parent company of Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, rose 5% in premarket trading after it reported sales and profit that beat Wall Street estimates.
The company reported adjusted earnings per share of $2.98, topping the $2.95 analysts polled by FactSet expected. It also reported sales of $3.27 billion, compared to the $3.26 billion analysts were penciling in.
Darden has been able to grow its sales even amid fears of consumer pullback. It also revamped its portfolio in recent years, selling Red Lobster and acquiring Chuy’s Tex Mex restaurants.
The relentless slide in software stocks continues, with the iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF trading to the downside and lagging the market on Friday.
The growing adoption of Claude Code, and more recently, the launch of Claude Cowork by Anthropic, has been an attention-grabbing moment as to the power of AI agents and how they can be housed and operated solely under one highly integrated user interface.
To say that software stocks have fallen out of favor would be an understatement, as having this much industry-specific market pain is incredibly rare. Based on data going back to 2001, if IGV has fallen at least 5% over the past month, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF is typically also down between 5% to 6% over the same period. Less than 3% of the time does SPY rise at least 1% while software stocks have gotten slammed — 28 instances in total, going back to August 2001 — and three of those are the past three sessions. Their valuation compression has also been intense.
Doug O’Laughlin, president of SemiAnalysis, authored a thought-provoking piece on just how momentous this recent technological progress is, along with his views on how AI agents will displace software and what disrupted companies can do adapt. A couple excerpts:
“Assuming it improves, has harnesses, and can continue to scale large context windows and only become marginally more intelligent, I believe this is enough to really take us to the next state of AI. I cannot stress enough that Claude Code is the ChatGPT moment repeated. You must try it to understand.
One day, the successor to Claude Code will make a superhuman interface available to everyone. And if Tokens were TCP/IP, Claude Code is the first genuine website built in the age of AI. And this is going to hurt a large part of the software industry.”
“I believe that all software must leave information work as soon as possible. I believe that the future role of software will not have much ‘information processing’, i.e., analysis. Claude Code or Agent-Next will be doing the information synthesis, the GUI, and the workflow. That will be ephemeral and generated for the use at hand. Anyone should be able to access the information they want in the format they want and reference the underlying data.
What I’m trying to say is that the traditional differentiation metrics will change. Faster workflows, better UIs, and smoother integrations will all become worthless, while persistent information, a la an API, will become extremely valuable.”
The growing adoption of Claude Code, and more recently, the launch of Claude Cowork by Anthropic, has been an attention-grabbing moment as to the power of AI agents and how they can be housed and operated solely under one highly integrated user interface.
To say that software stocks have fallen out of favor would be an understatement, as having this much industry-specific market pain is incredibly rare. Based on data going back to 2001, if IGV has fallen at least 5% over the past month, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF is typically also down between 5% to 6% over the same period. Less than 3% of the time does SPY rise at least 1% while software stocks have gotten slammed — 28 instances in total, going back to August 2001 — and three of those are the past three sessions. Their valuation compression has also been intense.
Doug O’Laughlin, president of SemiAnalysis, authored a thought-provoking piece on just how momentous this recent technological progress is, along with his views on how AI agents will displace software and what disrupted companies can do adapt. A couple excerpts:
“Assuming it improves, has harnesses, and can continue to scale large context windows and only become marginally more intelligent, I believe this is enough to really take us to the next state of AI. I cannot stress enough that Claude Code is the ChatGPT moment repeated. You must try it to understand.
One day, the successor to Claude Code will make a superhuman interface available to everyone. And if Tokens were TCP/IP, Claude Code is the first genuine website built in the age of AI. And this is going to hurt a large part of the software industry.”
“I believe that all software must leave information work as soon as possible. I believe that the future role of software will not have much ‘information processing’, i.e., analysis. Claude Code or Agent-Next will be doing the information synthesis, the GUI, and the workflow. That will be ephemeral and generated for the use at hand. Anyone should be able to access the information they want in the format they want and reference the underlying data.
What I’m trying to say is that the traditional differentiation metrics will change. Faster workflows, better UIs, and smoother integrations will all become worthless, while persistent information, a la an API, will become extremely valuable.”
Silver’s ridiculous romp higher in 2025 and at the start of this year is showing some signs of fraying around the edges.
And with just how fierce the move higher has been, strategists are warning of the potential for intense downside as some of the key parts of the fundamental and technical theses for silver are starting to look less solid.
Michael Purves, CEO of Tallbacken Capital Advisors, who’s been bullish on the shiny metal, thinks it’s once again time to hedge long exposure.
On Thursday, he recommended selling $95 strike calls on the iShares Silver Trust that expire in February to purchase $75 strike puts.
Purves previously recommended that clients hedge their silver exposure on December 26 (its 2025 peak) before declaring that the coast was once again clear for longs on December 30.
“It might be surprising to know that speculative long silver futures positions are at 20 month lows, or that Open Interest is at five year lows,” he wrote. “Once again, hedging long positions is in order — particularly given the distorted put-call skew which allows [investors] to sell calls to finance long put positions.”
Viresh Kanabar, an investment strategist at Macro Hive, followed this up on Friday by flagging one of several key changes in the market structure for silver. The physical market tightness, cited by bulls as an important driver behind silver’s skyward ascent, is showing signs of reversing.
“1m forwards on physical silver have flipped back to contango,” he wrote. “This lines up with physical ETF outflows and evidence that high prices are weighing on industrial demand.”
“In short, we are not bullish on silver at these levels, instead, see increasing signs of risks skewing to the downside,” Kanabar added.
David Cervantes, founder of Pinebrook Capital Management, told clients on Thursday that he’s taken a short position in silver by owning put options on SLV with three months to expiry, noting that its outperformance of the stock market over the past 100 and 252 days has reached unprecedented levels.
“THIS IS HIGHLY SPECULATIVE AND A SMALL GAMBLE-SIZED WAGER WILL BE MADE OVER WHICH SLEEP WILL NOT BE LOST,” he emphasized.
GE Vernova rose Friday as the market digested reports of Trump administration plans to effectively push hyperscalers to foot the bill for new power plants to feed the giant grid that’s home to some of country’s most data center-dense districts.
In a note, Jefferies analysts called GE Vernova — the maker of turbines for natural gas-fueled power plants — the “clearest winner” of such a plan.
(The need for additional power plants would mean more sales and/or higher prices for its products.)
Jefferies says plans for additional capacity in the PJM grid — a 13-state swath that includes areas of high data center concentration like northern Virginia and Ohio — is a negative for companies like Vistra, Constellation Energy, and Talen Energy, which had invested heavily in the the PJM grid, likely hoping elevated prices would persist. That seems less likely should plans to boost power supply in the grid actually come to pass.
(The need for additional power plants would mean more sales and/or higher prices for its products.)
Jefferies says plans for additional capacity in the PJM grid — a 13-state swath that includes areas of high data center concentration like northern Virginia and Ohio — is a negative for companies like Vistra, Constellation Energy, and Talen Energy, which had invested heavily in the the PJM grid, likely hoping elevated prices would persist. That seems less likely should plans to boost power supply in the grid actually come to pass.
Retail favorite and satellite-services-from-space play AST SpaceMobile jumped early Friday on news that it’s signed a deal as a “prime contract awardee” for the US Department of Defense’s Golden Dome missile defense strategy, allowing it to quickly bid on and deliver services in R&D, engineering, and operations.
The agreement, known as an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract, effectively prequalifies ASTS as a vendor for the Trump administration’s proposed Golden Dome project.
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