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Roblox drops after saying plans to prioritize safety impact may weigh on growth next year

The gaming platform reported its third-quarter earnings before the market opened on Thursday.

Max Knoblauch

Gaming platform Roblox, one of the industry’s biggest “black holes,” reported its third-quarter earnings on Thursday morning. Shares climbed 8% as investors digested the results, before turning negative and dropping more than 9%.

Third-quarter bookings, or the amount users spend on Roblox, rose about 70% year over year to $1.92 billion, beating Wall Street’s expectations ($1.7 billion per Bloomberg-compiled data) and better than the company’s guidance range of between $1.59 billion and $1.64 billion.

Roblox boosted its full-year booking guidance of between $5.87 billion and $5.97 billion to between $6.57 billion and $6.62 billion. Analysts polled by FactSet expected about $6.2 billion on the year.

“While the path may not be entirely linear, we are increasingly bullish about our ability to capture 10% of the $180 billion global gaming content market on Roblox and, ultimately, become one of the great global consumer internet platforms,” per management.

The reason for that less-than-linear path and the stock’s premarket reversal appear to be tied to Roblox’s safety plans. The company has been the target of several child safety lawsuits. Roblox gave updates to its safety goals, saying that it plans “to require facial estimation for all users accessing communication functions, and to limit communication between adults and minors who do not know each other in real life.” According to Roblox, these new policies “may negatively impact platform engagement in the short term”:

“As we look to next year, our long-term objectives have not changed, though we recognize that tough comps and valuable new safety features will factor into reported growth in 2026. With respect to margins, we will continue to prioritize investments to support genre expansion and long-term growth. As a result, our operating margin could decline slightly year-over-year due to the combination of higher DevEx rates and the impact of infrastructure and safety related investments catching up with rapid bookings growth in the back half of 2025.”

An average of 151.5 million daily users played Roblox on the quarter, up 70% and easily beating expectations of 132.2 million users. In the same period last year, the company reported 88.9 million daily users.

Roblox paid out $427.9 million to creators in the quarter, up from $231.5 million in the same quarter last year. Through September, payouts have now reached more than $1 billion in 2025. The platform has shattered concurrent player records with popular games like “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot” this year. Earlier this month, Morgan Stanley called Roblox a clear leader in next-gen entertainment, making parallels to YouTube.

Read More: He didn’t set out to create a kids company. Roblox’s “Builderman” wound up with one anyway.

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Exxon and Chevron surge as oil rises; gold keeps getting clobbered

Exxon and Chevron jumped again on Friday, the two largest positive contributors to the S&P 500 as of midday, even as the broader market remained mired in the red.

The two giant US energy companies are also on track to notch another in a series of new all-time highs as well Friday, and for obvious reasons.

Energy continues to be the bright spot for the S&P 500 since the start of the Iran war. (It is the only gainer of the 11 separate sectors that compose the blue-chip index, rising more than 7% in March.)

But energy’s gain has come with pain elsewhere. Since rising gas prices work mechanically as a tax on other forms of consumer spending, staples stocks have been hit hard, with the sector down more than 6% this month alone. Meanwhile, the inflationary pressure pushing the Fed away from further rate cuts continues to hit precious metals and miners. SPDR Gold Shares ETF and iShares Silver Trust futures both fell further on Friday; they’re down roughly 10% and 15% for the week, respectively, and producers like Newmont and Freeport-McMoRan also continue to drop.

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Investors have been drawn to software stocks since the Iran war started — Figma has been an exception

Since the Iran war started, risky assets have been in the crosshairs. Stocks have sold off as oil prices spiked, the odds of rate cuts later this year have been slashed, and even the usual safe havens like gold and silver have been unreliable ports in the growing storm.

One port of refuge, however, has been in software stocks. As noted by my colleague Matt Phillips recently, a number of high-profile software names — the same ones that some pundits doomed to obsolescence because of AI just a few short weeks ago — have held up well. Design company Figma, however, has not been one of those names.

Figmas stock has dropped 19% since the close of trading on February 27, while the iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF has gained 2%.

Though still notching very respectable top-line growth, with sales up 40% last year, Figma is far from the cash cow stage of its life — perhaps why its been hit harder than peers such as Adobe, Workday, or Salesforce. Indeed, on a GAAP basis, Wall Street still expects the company to lose $477 million this year, as heavy stock-based compensation weighs on its profitability.

Figmas pain was then compounded when Google announced a major update to Stitch on Wednesday — a product described as an AI-native software design canvas that allows anyone to create, iterate and collaborate on high-fidelity UI from natural language.

Debate is still raging on Reddit and other social media platforms as to whether Stitch, or other vibe-coding platforms and tools, will meaningfully eat into Figmas core business. One user said that it offers very little to experienced designers. It removes the tools Figma offers and delegates everything to AI. Figma at least has all the capabilities plus AI for people who want to use AI. Another — complaining about the newly prohibitive cost of credits in Figmas own AI-powered tool, Figma Make — was more bearish on Figmas usefulness, saying that the number of credits the designer would need to use would cost $16,000 under Figmas new pricing model.

For now, investors arent giving Figma the benefit of the doubt, with the stock down 12% in the last two days alone.

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Chip-smuggling charges against Super Micro cofounder boost rival server maker Dell

Dell is up in early Friday trading after rival Super Micro Computer plunged on news that one of its cofounders had been charged by US prosecutors with allegedly illegally smuggling AI chips to China.

Dell, Super Micro, and HP Enterprise are all what’s known as “system makers”: they sell ready-to-roll rack servers, storage systems, and the other hardware that’s needed to fill all those data centers that hyperscalers are so desperate to build.

Dell and Super Micro both sell systems built around Nvidia GPUs, so the US government’s allegations against key personnel tied to Super Micro could jeopardize the company’s access to Nvidia products and give Dell a leg up in that crucial AI-related server market.

Dell, Super Micro, and HP Enterprise are all what’s known as “system makers”: they sell ready-to-roll rack servers, storage systems, and the other hardware that’s needed to fill all those data centers that hyperscalers are so desperate to build.

Dell and Super Micro both sell systems built around Nvidia GPUs, so the US government’s allegations against key personnel tied to Super Micro could jeopardize the company’s access to Nvidia products and give Dell a leg up in that crucial AI-related server market.

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Planet Labs soars after earnings beat and positive analyst commentary

Planet Labs held on to huge post-earnings gains early Friday as analysts that cover the retail favorite issued largely upbeat reviews of its Q4 report released Thursday after the bell. Here’s some of their commentary on the satellite services company:

Wedbush (rating: “outperform, price target: $40): PL is seeing major tailwinds in the geopolitical space, continuing to drive mission-critical demand globally. Total RPO came in at ~ $852 million (up ~106% y/y) with backlog of ~$900+ million (up ~79% y/y) highlighted by 9- figure deal with the Swedish Armed Forces which was the third 9-figure Satellite Services contract over the past 12 months totaling $500+ million across Sweden, Japan, and Germany, with management noting on the call that both deal count and average size in the satellite services pipeline has grown appreciably.”

Citizens (rating: “market perform, price target: N/A): “In our view, Planets solid performance in the quarter and the significant revenue acceleration implied for FY27 reflect the companys success in shifting to a satellite services model and leaning (heavily) into the needs of Defense & Intelligence segment customers. We believe this is the correct area of focus (for management and investors) and view some of the flashier announcements around Project Suncatcher (space-based data centers), or more recently, AI enabling a renaissance within Planet’s Civil and Commercial businesses as somewhat of a distraction.”

Clear Street (rating: “buy, price target: $34): “While F2026 revenue grew 26%, non-defense verticals have lagged. Management signaled an inflection point, with use cases such as maritime awareness data poised towards gaining traction across finance, insurance, and supply chain, supported by a more tailored approach with LLM partnerships like Anthropic (private).”

There’s a reason the stock has built a strong retail following: it had already surged more than 500% over the past year, even before jumping another 20% after last night’s earnings.

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