Tesla shares continued to slide on Monday as investors are increasingly seeing the company’s eccentric CEO, Elon Musk, and his involvement with the federal government as more of a liability than a tailwind.
With no real news out there about the company, Tesla fell more than 5% by midday. The company has been dealing with shrinking sales, more bearish analysts, and its lowest-ever approval rating. Its stores across the country have been vandalized.
Only a few months after formally launching its defense unit, Salesforce has become the latest beneficiary of the Pentagon’s desire for more streamlined software.
The stock is up more than 2% in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company announced that Computable Insights, its US intelligence and national security focused subsidiary, had signed a deal potentially worth up to $5.6 billion with the US Army to provide its AI, CRM, and data analytics capabilities.
Per the press release, the announced 10-year “Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity” contract — agreements that offer an unspecified amount of services over a fixed period — will consist of a 5-year base ordering period and a 5-year optional ordering period with a $5.6 billion ceiling. The company noted that it is not a guaranteed purchase amount.
In the words of Kendall Collins, CEO of Salesforce’s Missionforce and Government Cloud unit: “This new contract, which builds on more than a decade-long relationship between Salesforce and the U.S. Armed Forces, will operationalize Missionforce across the Army and DOW, delivering trusted data and seamless interoperability, and supporting the DOW’s transformation into an agentic enterprise.”
The cloud-software provider doubled down on its defense business after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made implementing modern commercial systems a priority in a March note, debuting a new security-focused business unit Missionforce in September and launching a version of popular messaging-app Slack with security levels in line with Defense Department standards.
Web-infrastructure company Cloudflare rose more than 7% in pre-market trading Tuesday, building on a 9% gain on Monday, as social media buzz around the viral AI agent Clawdbot drew investor attention to Cloudfare's role in the infrastructure behind emerging AI tools.
Clawdbot is an open-source AI assistant built on Anthropic's Claude model, which has recently gained traction among developers for its ability to carry out tasks autonomously rather than just responding to prompts. After a weekend of online chatter around the tool, investors began linking that momentum to Cloudfare's infrastructure — which is commonly used to deploy and secure AI tools and agents.
One feature getting particular attention is Cloudfare Tunnel, which allows developers to securely connect locally run tools (like AI agents) to the public internet, without exposing their servers directly. According to Cloudfare's website, its AI services are "already used by 80% of the top 50 generative AI companies."
Cloudfare is expected to report earnings on February 10, which investors will be watching closely for signs that the AI-related buzz is showing up in actual traffic and revenue.
Silver prices soaring to fresh records on Monday translated into record activity in the iShares Silver Trust.
While geopolitical factors and some signs of physical market tightness have played a role in the parabolic moves in precious metals, escalating prices are in large part a function of escalating financial demand.
Nearly $40 billion changed hands in SLV, the ticker for the iShares Silver Trust, on the opening session of the week. That’s roughly 3.8 times the prior peak set in Q2 2011. Call volumes of 3.64 million were nearly a full million above the previous record high from January 2021.
So intense was the scramble to get exposure to silver through this product that SLV dollar volumes nearly eclipsed those of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, the most heavily traded fund on the planet, and well exceeded those of the Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq 100.
It’s the first time since May 2011 that the silver fund traded more than QQQ, and the closest it’s come, bar April 25, 2011, to besting SPY on this metric.
This shiny metal product continues to enjoy more trading activity than the SPDR Gold Shares ETF, which holds its more richly-valued previous peer.
“The Big Short” is now “The Big Catalyst.”
Michael Burry’s Substack post on Monday, in which he announced that he owns GameStop and had been buying the stock recently, was a spark for retail to follow in his footsteps.
The revelation spurred a wave of activity around the stock, especially in short-term options. Call volumes were north of 695,000 on Monday, more than 4.5x their 20-day average.
Per JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain, the net retail imbalance in GameStop shares was the most positive since late Q1 2025.
That timeline loosely aligns with the release of GameStop’s fourth-quarter results for 2024 on March 25 of last year, wherein the company booked its largest operating profit since Q4 2017.
More importantly for retail demand, management also confirmed that the board had “unanimously approved” its ability to start buying bitcoin.
That confirmed the worst-kept secret in finance, with reports about potential crypto buying having picked up steam after GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen posted a picture with Strategy founder Michael Saylor.
Ahead of that report, positioning in GameStop options was tilted decisively to the bull side as traders hoped for a crypto confirmation-induced bump.
(Ironically, there’s current speculation that this very pivot to bitcoin is something the company might be shifting away from, as GameStop has moved its crypto holdings from cold storage to Coinbase Prime.)
Micron sees an AI boom and wants to sell more chips into it.
On Monday evening, the company announced that it broke ground on an additional wafer fabrication facility at its complex in Singapore, kicking off a decade-long, $24 billion project.
Shares are up more than 3.5% as of 4:05 a.m. ET.
Of note: this is an expansion of NAND capacity, rather than DRAM. The latter contains high-bandwidth memory and makes up the lion’s share of Micron’s revenues.
“Wafer output is scheduled to begin in the second half of calendar 2028, helping Micron address growing market demand for NAND technology driven by the rapid expansion of AI and data-centric applications,” per the press release.
Micron’s rivals in South Korea enjoyed strong sessions on Tuesday despite President Donald Trump threatening to raise tariffs on the nation’s exports to the US to 25%, from 15%. The KOSPI Index rebounded from early losses with SK Hynix and Samsung soaring. SK Hynix’s outsized gains appeared to be fueled by a report from local media that it will be the sole supplier of HBM3E for Microsoft’s new Maia 200 chip, which was unveiled on Monday.
As we’ve discussed before, the supply crunch in memory and storage is the shortage that traders have wanted exposure to for much of the past five months.
The beneficiaries of memory chip giants’ quest to increase capacity include semicap stocks like ASML, Lam Research, KLA Corp, and Applied Materials, which provide the equipment used in new fabs.
