markets

Matt Phillips9/4/25

Palantir loses crown as top S&P 500 stock this year

It’s no surprise to find a dominant player in a crucial technology is atop the S&P 500 leaderboards this year.

But it is slightly surprising that the technology in question is the disk drive.

Seagate Technology Holdings, a maker of ubiquitous data storage devices known as hard disk drives, has ridden a nearly 50% gain over the last three months to the top of the list of best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year.

Investors have good reason to be impressed. Seagate’s last five quarterly results have beat expectations on both the top and bottom lines, as the company has increasingly tilted its business to provide higher-capacity — and more profitable — disk drives designed for use in AI and cloud computing data centers.

But Seagate’s rise to the top was also aided by recent sputtering in performance from the previous market leader, Palantir, which is down almost 20% since it notched a high on August 12.

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Rocket Lab drops after announcing at-the-market offering to sell up to $1 billion of equity

What goes up must come down, and that’s exactly what's happened with Rocket Lab shares over the last day or so.

After a rally that saw the stock rise more than 10% on Tuesday, Rocket Lab shares came back down to earth in after-hours trading, after the company filed an offering that could see it sell as much as $1 billion in common stock over time. RKLB is down around 3% in premarket trading on Wednesday, as of 6:30 a.m. ET.

In the after-hours filing, the space company wrote that it would use proceeds from the offering to “fund future growth, including potential future acquisitions, and for general corporate and working capital purposes.” Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket, which will be key in any path to profitability that the cash-burning business may forge, was delayed again last month, sending shares down at the time.

RKLB was involved in a wider space, satellite, and drone stock surge yesterday, as investors rallied around the sectors amid the ongoing war in Iran. The FAA had also announced new streamlined launch licensing requirements which will affect companies like Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and SpaceX. Per the FAA, the new rule, dubbed “Part 450,” will:

reduce the number of times an operator needs an FAA license approval and allow one license for a portfolio of operations, different vehicle configurations and mission profiles, and even multiple launch and reentry sites.

That should cut down on the administrative burden on the industry more broadly.

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J. Edward Moreno57m

AI drone company Swarmer soars on IPO debut

AI drone software company Swarmer soared 520% on Tuesday, its first day as a public company, and shares continued to climb in premarket trading on Wednesday.

Swarmer sold 3 million shares at $5 each, raising ~$15 million in total, and giving it an initial market cap of about $60 million. By the time the closing bell rang on Tuesday it was worth $382.8 million, according to FactSet.

Swarmer makes AI software that allows operators to coordinate large fleets of unmanned drones. Its technology has been used on the battlefield in Ukraine, and the company's IPO comes amid the ongoing conflict in Iran.

The company made $310,000 in revenue in 2025, down 6% on the prior year, while its total losses also ballooned from $2.1 million in 2024 to approximately $8.5 million in 2025.

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Matt Phillips15h

Oklo reports larger-than-expected full-year loss per share

Oklo, the revenue-free nuclear power start-up that more than tripled last year and became a favorite of retail traders, reported full-year results after the close of trading Tuesday.

It reported:

A full-year net loss per share of $0.72 vs. the $0.61 loss per share that Wall Street analysts expected for the year.
R&D expenses of $58.9 million vs. the $46.0 million consensus estimate, according to FactSet.

Earnings have not been a big driver of Oklo shares. After all, analysts don’t expect the company to generate consistent revenues until at least 2028.

(The stock has tended to trade more on the company’s latest announcements about regulatory approvals and incremental steps toward generating revenue, such as those it made this morning.)

This report seems unlikely to turn around the recent performance of the shares, which has been awful. Oklo was down slightly in the after-hours session on Tuesday.

Oklo has dropped roughly 60% from its all-time high, which it hit back in mid-October. That’s also when Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of unprofitable tech stocks — of which Oklo is a member — topped out, suggesting that Oklo’s ills have, at least, something to do with shifting market sentiment among investors toward long-shot tech bets, in addition to its own performance.

Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks edge higher as investors shrug off an uptick in oil prices

Stocks built on yesterday’s gains in spite of the ongoing conflict in Iran. A rise in oil propelled energy stocks higher.

(GERMANY OUT) White cows in a field, Connemara County Galway, Ireland

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says the chip designer is getting closer to selling AI chips to China

H200 sales to China are back 𝚘̶𝚗̶ 𝚘̶𝚏̶𝚏̶ 𝚘̶𝚗̶ 𝚘̶𝚏̶𝚏̶ 𝚘̶𝚗̶ 𝚘̶𝚏̶𝚏̶ 𝚘̶𝚗̶ 𝚘̶𝚏̶𝚏̶ 𝚘̶𝚗̶ 𝚘̶𝚏̶𝚏̶ on the menu.

Bloomberg headlines from Nvidia’s conference in San Jose on Tuesday indicate that CEO Jensen Huang said the chip designer has received purchase orders from Chinese customers, received licenses for many customers, and that it’s firing up manufacturing to sell these AI chips from the Hopper generation to buyers in the world’s second-largest economy.

The situation in China has changed, he added.

Earlier this month, the FT had reported the opposite: that Nvidia had asked TSMC to ramp down its production of H200 chips in order to produce Vera Rubin, its upcoming flagship generation.

The situation loosely remains that Nvidia wants to sell AI chips to China, Chinese buyers want them, but authorities in both DC and Beijing don’t seem to want Chinese companies to be able to get their hands on too many of these processors.

Shares of Nvidia are ending the day lower, and are off more than 3% from their Monday knee-jerk peak reached after Jensen said that the company’s Blackwell and Vera Rubin sales would total at least $1 trillion through 2027.

It’s another case of good financial news from Nvidia failing to give the stock anything more than a short-lived lift.

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