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Nia Warfield8/20/25

Target nabs Q2 beat, but stock sinks as management continues to warn of slumping sales

Target shares sank 10% in premarket trading after the retailer posted a Q2 earnings beat but reiterated expectations for a sales drop this year.

The company also announced that longtime CEO Brian Cornell would step down.

Adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.05, versus Wall Street’s estimate of $2.04. Revenue landed at $25.2 billion, compared with forecasts of $24.9 billion. Meanwhile, same-store sales fell 1.9%, better than the projected 2.9% decline, per FactSet.

Looking ahead, Target affirmed its full-year guidance. For fiscal 2025, it expects a low single-digit sales decline and adjusted EPS ranging between $7.00 and $9.00, the midpoint of which is well above the $7.30 from analysts polled by Bloomberg.

Target has been fighting through a sales slump and lowering prices to win shoppers back. But it hasn’t been enough to stop the bleed: last week, Bank of America analysts downgraded their rating for the stock to “underperform,” warning that the retailer was already lagging peers and would need to raise prices by roughly 8% on average to fully offset tariffs expected in fiscal 2027.

And now, the retailer’s leadership is set to change. Longtime CEO Brian Cornell will step down in February after more than a decade at the helm. He’ll be succeeded by current Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke, who has been with the company for nearly 20 years.

Target shares were down 23% year to date prior to earnings.

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Applied Digital whipsaws after posting quarterly revenue beat in Q1

Shares of Applied Digital are gyrating down and up and down again in postmarket trading after the company reported better-than-expected results for its fiscal Q1, the three-month period ended August 31.

The data center company, which counts Nvidia and CoreWeave among its major share and warrant holders, booked $64.2 million in revenues (estimate: $46.1 million) with an adjusted diluted loss per share of $0.03 (estimate: loss of $0.13).

“With hyperscalers expected to invest approximately $350 billion into AI deployment this year, we believe we are in a prime position to serve as the modern-day picks and shovels of the intelligence era,” Chairman and CEO Wes Cummins said.

The options-implied move for the stock on earnings is a whopping 17.6%, per Bloomberg data.

Applied Digital is also one of the components in the Roundhill Meme Stock ETF, which relaunched this week.

Tasha Matsumoto

Stocks retreat from records

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 all closed lower.

Mascot Clark the Cub poses before a Spring Training game between the Chicago Cubs a the Seattle Mariners at Sloan Park

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Matt Phillips8h

AST SpaceMobile soars again, up 80% in October

Another day, another giant gain for satellite services provider AST SpaceMobile, which continues to get a lift from its announcement earlier this week that it has signed a deal with telecom giant Verizon to provide some cellular broadband services from its satellites by 2026.

Retail enthusiasm for the stock, despite the fact that it has posted growing losses over the last four years, is high, helped out by a fair amount of online boosterism.

JPMorgan analysts have AST on their list of “most hyped stocks on social media,” which they included in their “Retail Radar” note published Thursday. A quick glance at r/WallStreetBets or volumes of call options — which hit their highest level in over a year yesterday — would seem to confirm retail participation.

It’s been a good trade. AST SpaceMobile is up more than 2,500% over the last two years, a rally that has created more than $20 billion in stock market wealth. To the moon, indeed.

Matt Phillips11h

Analysts at consulting firm Pantheon Macroeconomics estimate that the stock market’s enthusiasm for all things AI has added some $8.5 trillion to aggregate US household wealth since late 2022. They wrote:

“The S&P 500 returned about 70% between the start of ChatGPT mania around the end of 2022 to the end of Q2 2025, with roughly half of those returns generated by the ‘magnificent seven’ tech stocks, a very rough proxy for the stock market boost from AI euphoria.

We estimate that translates into a lift to household wealth held in stocks of about $8.5T.”

As my colleague Luke Kawa recently wrote, stock market wealth seems to be underpinning US consumer spending, especially among the richest Americans. Some of that spending may retrench if AI is indeed a bubble — as some have recently mooted — and eventually pops.

Analysts break down what’s driving SoFi’s recent surge

Part of the rally is related to the federal government’s retreat from student lending. But there’s more to it.

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