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Oscar Health beats Q1 estimates on lower medical costs, reaffirms full-year guidance

Oscar Health is soaring in premarket trading after it reported earnings results that beat Wall Street expectations and reaffirmed its full-year guidance.

For the first three months of 2026, the company reported:

  • Earnings per share of $2.07, compared to the $1.11 analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.

  • Revenue at $4.65 billion, higher than the $4.5 billion that was penciled in.

  • A medical cost ratio of 70.5%, lower than the 73.8% the Street was expecting. The company said this was because of a “disciplined pricing strategy, claims and risk adjustment seasonality from metal and new member mix, and favorable prior period reserve development.”

For the full year 2026, Oscar reaffirmed the guidance it gave in February:

  • Revenues between $18.7 billion and $19 billion, in line with the $18.8 billion analysts expect.

  • Its medical cost ratio to sit between 82.4% and 83.4%, also in line with the 83.3% the Street is penciling in.

The company, like most health insurers, struggled last year amid rising medical costs. Oscar’s higher-than-expected profit was driven by a sharp drop in medical costs and increased premiums alongside higher enrollment.

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Disney rises after quarterly revenue beat, boosted by streaming and theme park growth

Disney reported its second-quarter results before markets opened on Wednesday.

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Stocks rally, oil falls as US and Iran reportedly close in on deal to end war

Stocks rallied and oil prices fell after Axios reported that the White House is closing in on an agreement to end the war with Iran, which would lift restrictions around transit through the Strait of Hormuz.

The one-page, 14-point memorandum of understanding to end the war also reportedly includes Iran committing to a moratorium on nuclear enrichment and the U.S. agreeing to lift its sanctions, among other things.

Many of the terms would hinge on a final agreement being reached, potentially leaving the chance for “an extended limbo in which the hot war has stopped but nothing is truly resolved,” per Axios.

S&P 500 futures, which were already in the green in the early hours of Wednesday, got a jolt on the news and are currently up 0.7% as of 6 a.m. ET.

Brent crude futures fell 6.90% to $102.29. Oil and gas producers like Occidental Petroleum, Coterra Energy, APA Corporation, and ConocoPhillips fell in premarket trading along with oil giants Exxon and Chevron.

Meanwhile, airlines and cruise lines — several of which just told investor high fuel prices would weigh on their profits — rose in early trading. Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, JetBlue, American Airlines, Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian all rose.

Many of the terms would hinge on a final agreement being reached, potentially leaving the chance for “an extended limbo in which the hot war has stopped but nothing is truly resolved,” per Axios.

S&P 500 futures, which were already in the green in the early hours of Wednesday, got a jolt on the news and are currently up 0.7% as of 6 a.m. ET.

Brent crude futures fell 6.90% to $102.29. Oil and gas producers like Occidental Petroleum, Coterra Energy, APA Corporation, and ConocoPhillips fell in premarket trading along with oil giants Exxon and Chevron.

Meanwhile, airlines and cruise lines — several of which just told investor high fuel prices would weigh on their profits — rose in early trading. Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, JetBlue, American Airlines, Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian all rose.

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Novo beats Q1 estimates, raises full-year guidance

Novo Nordisk rose in premarket trading after it reported first quarter earnings results that beat Wall Street expectations and raised its full year guidance on demand for its new weight loss pill.

For the first three months of 2026, the drugmaker reported:

  • Sales of 96.8 billion Danish kroner ($15.1 billion). That was significantly ahead of the DKK 70.8 billion ($11.1 billion) analysts polled by FactSet were expecting, though the headline figure was boosted by a ~$4.2 billion one-off from a provision reversal related to the 340B Drug Pricing program.

  • Revenue included DKK2.26 billion ($353.6 million) in sales of its new Wegovy pill, more than double the DKK1.1 billion ($172.5 million) analysts were penciling in.

  • Adjusted operating profit of DKK32.8 billion ($5.15 billion).

For the full year 2026, the company now expects:

  • Sales and operating profit to fall by between 4% and 12%, having previously forecasted a a 5% to 13% drop.

Going into the report investors were eager for signs of how the weight loss pill, which came to market January 5, is performing. Novo, which was the first to market GLP-1 injections, has lost ground in the past year to Eli Lilly.

But early signs that its Wegovy pill is off to a strong start will buoy investors. The pill has been prescribed 2 million times since launch, Novo said, “which marks the strongest-ever GLP-1 volume launch in the US.”

The higher-than-expected sales for the pill were thanks to “pre-launch pipeline fill with wholesalers and telehealth partners,” Novo said.

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Alphabet gains on report that Anthropic’s committed to spending $200 billion on cloud services over the next 5 years

Shares of Google are catching a bid in postmarket trading after The Information reported that Anthropic plans to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud over the next five years, citing a person with knowledge of the situation.

That would amount to more than 40% of its $462 billion backlog as of the end of Q1, which nearly doubled from $240 billion in Q4.

The relationship between the two companies has been deepening in recent weeks, with Google reportedly planning to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, but this reports puts a firm price tag on how much the AI chatbot developer will be paying out to the hyperscaler.

Last year, when it was revealed that Oracle’s remaining performance obligations were dominated by OpenAI, the stock gave back some of its massive advance. Counterparty and concentration risk has been an overhang on the cloud giant ever since.

That’s a stark contrast to how traders are behaving today. It’s a sign of how Alphabet is seemingly on much more secure financial footing than Oracle (even after today’s debt offerings!), and also, probably, implies that Anthropic is a more reliable customer than OpenAI. In addition, as The Information noted, Google has more ways to make money off its relationship with Anthropic than Oracle does with OpenAI.

Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.

OpenAI, on the other hand, is now billing the billions it’s burned on securing compute as a competitive advantage.

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