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Rivian Reveals All-Electric R2 Midsize SUV
(Phillip Faraone/Getty Images)

Rivian shares poised for best day since January as the EV maker hypes its next SUV during earnings call

Rivian shares surged more than 15% the morning following its Q3 earnings results.

Max Knoblauch

Rivian is on pace to record its second-best trading day of the year. The EV maker’s shares rose more than 15% in Wednesday morning trading following its third-quarter results, which dropped after market close on Tuesday.

The company posted a top- and bottom-line beat for Q3, including a nearly 80% sales spike year over year, and reaffirmed its guidance for full-year earnings and deliveries. That, along with an earnings call flush with hype for Rivian’s upcoming midsize SUV, the R2, appears to have investors excited.

“Were very, very bullish on what were building with R2. The way we think about it as a team is were building the best car you can buy in this category and in this price point,” CEO RJ Scaringe said on the company’s call with investors Tuesday evening.

Scaringe pitched the R2, which will be priced in the “$45,000 to $50,000 range,” as a direct competitor to Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y. The company reaffirmed that it anticipates R2 production costs to come in at half of the R1’s.

“At this mass market price point... theres really been a single dominant brand with really two products. Thats of course Tesla with the Model 3 and the Model Y,” Scaringe said. “And with them taking up roughly half the market, 50% market share, its not a reflection of a healthy market. Its a reflection of a very underserved market in terms of choice and options.”

Rivian, which has been working to cut costs ahead of mass production of the R2, said it will devote nearly three-quarters of its Normal, Illinois, plant to building the vehicle. Its future Georgia plant will eventually support further production of the R2 and future vehicles, which are “architected... and designed from the very beginning contemplating Europe and planning for Europe.”

Rivian said the R2 is still on track to launch in the first half of 2026. “We would steer folks to there being limited volumes in the first half of the year. And then the second half of the year, well build up our ramp and see increasing production volumes,” said CFO Claire McDonough.

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Palantir continues to dive as retail favorites, momentum stocks get hit

Palantir’s market pounding continues, as the intelligence, defense, and commercial AI software company slumps along with other retail favorites, bitcoin, and high-beta momentum trades such as space plays AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab, and quantum computing trades D-Wave Quantum and Rigetti Computing through the first half of Thursday’s session.

Palantir partisans could credibly argue that Alex Karp’s company shouldn’t be lumped in with that sort of crowd, some of which are a long way from profits, when Palantir has posted outstanding financial performance in recent quarters. But the market doesn’t seem to be listening — or at least, has stopped hearing reassurance after the stock’s massive run-up.

Thursday’s drop of more than 5% — shortly before 12 p.m. in New York — brings its cumulative losses to more than 35% since its November 3, 2025, all-time closing high. And that’s done considerable amounts of damage to the technical backdrop for the shares.

Late last month, Palantir traded far below its 200-day moving average, a key level of technical support that had held since May 2023, when the shares first started to gather steam. A break below the 200-day moving average underscores a serious loss of momentum for a stock, and can prompt some traders to reconsider their views on whether a stock that has been a winner has truly lost its mojo.

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How the character of the AI trade has changed — for the worse — in 2026

A smattering of observations on how the character of the AI trade has changed this year — with, obviously, some of these trends not having waited for a full turn of the Earth around the sun to start to establishing themselves:

  • All the bullish oxygen is being sucked out of the room and squarely into the memory chip shortage, which is offering bumper profits for a handful of firms. On a related note, semicap equipment stocks have been an upstream beneficiary of this dynamic. The underlying message is that near-term scarcity is being rewarded by the market.

  • That the big capex spenders will generate a high return on investment from their outlays is not something traders are willing to take for granted. Big budgets are not necessarily getting applauded; even companies that seemingly earn the benefit of the doubt by posting accelerating revenue growth, à la Meta, aren’t able to maintain those gains for long.

  • The big “consumers” of memory chips are getting squeezed. This includes the hyperscalers, obviously, but even more so the likes of Qualcomm, which has to wait behind these giants in line for supplies, which played a role in the company’s underwhelming outlook.

  • For public markets, the theme is more of a net negative than a positive. Firms seen as the most likely to be disrupted by AI (basically, the entire software industry) are getting indiscriminately clobbered, regardless of how good their quarterly results and guidance are.

  • The facilitators of disruption, in many cases, have not yet arrived on public markets but plan to do so this year. That’s SpaceX/xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. So if the AI theme has seemed a little “negative sum” in this year, that might be about the room that investment firms know they’re going to need in their portfolios to add these stocks once they’re able to (or, in some cases, ahead of time).

  • And this isn’t really a 2026 dynamic, strictly speaking, but the two biggest chip companies have been dead money for months. Since the end of Q3, Nvidia and Broadcom are both negative, with the S&P 500 up about 2% over this span.

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Memory chip makers bounce back after report of customers turning to China for supplies

High-flying memory chip stocks like Sandisk and Micron bounced back early Thursday after dropping in pre-market trading following a Nikkei report that some PC makers are considering turning to Chinese companies — such as ChangXin Memory Technologies — for supplies amid a historic chip price spike sent them down in the premarket session.

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Nio projects its first quarterly profit, sending shares surging

Chinese EV maker Nio on Thursday said it expects to achieve its first-ever quarterly profit in its fourth quarter. Its US-traded ADRs rose more than 6% in premarket trading.

Based on a preliminary assessment, Nio projects Q4 adjusted profit from operations of between $100 million and $172 million. Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet estimated a Q4 adjusted operating loss of $19 million.

Nio attributed the preliminary results to sustained sales volume growth, vehicle margin optimization, and cost reductions. Nio delivered 124,807 vehicles in its fourth quarter, which ended in December, up 72% year over year.

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