S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 futures are off to a strong start in the premarket as the “bad momentum” in oil and yields subsides.
Crude is sliding after the head of US Central Command said that energy shipments through Hormuz were at a six-month high and President Donald Trump expressed openness to meeting his Iranian counterpart this week.
AI hardware stocks are soaring, in particular CPU-geared names like Intel, Arm Holdings, and Advanced Micro Devices, buoyed by the burgeoning popularity of Meta’s Muse agent.
Bitcoin has also broken out in what may be a signal of expanding risk appetite, lifting the likes of Coinbase, Robinhood Markets, and Figure Technology Solutions.
As a subsidiary of Robinhood, Sherwood Media is restricted from writing about any company in which Robinhood is or was a selling group member of the IPO during the regulatory "quiet period" for that company.
Revolving doors
A little more than a year ago, online real estate company Opendoor Technologies hit a mullti-year high of $10.87, boosted by a flood of retail buyers attracted to the potential turnaround play. The firm had recently announced the return of co-founder Keith Rabois to serve as Chairman, while Kaz Nejatian was poached from Shopify to become the new CEO.
Earlier that month, I had the pleasure of talking to some of Opendoor’s most enthusiastic shareholders — one of whom owned more stock than three board members combined! — about their outlooks for the company. The passion was palpable.
For my money, this was the meme stock — or cult stock, if you prefer — with the most cultural resonance since GameStop’s 2021 and 2024 sequel manias.
But, much like other eye-popping moves that seemingly came out of nowhere, the gains have evaporated. Shares are down more than 75% from their September 2025 highs despite the new management team largely doing what they said they’d do: reducing headcount and flipping a higher volume of homes to become profitable on an adjusted basis.
(That being said, progress toward transformative partnerships or fresh business lines that could meaningfully accelerate growth have been slower than some proponents had hoped for.)
What happened? Well, you could argue that, to a certain extent, the world got in the way. High interest rates have weighed on the performance of real estate companies, whether they be focused on transactions or homebuilding.
(Ironically, Opendoor competitor Compass has held up far better than most in the space!)
Likelier still, what’s transpired here is a more common pattern that we’ve seen take place across other names that have captured retail attention.
Normally, you tend to see massive volume expansions in stocks as investors scramble to get out, rather than in. The opposite is true of meme/cult stocks. They go up on attention. On activity. On leveraged appetite for the shares, via hordes of call buying.
The flows lead the way, and they can’t accelerate forever. Once they don’t, the stock price tends to turn lower, too.
This sequencing is not unique to Opendoor. It’s also true of Beyond Meat, Allbirds (now Smartbird), and GoPro, all of which at least doubled in a five-session period from September 2025 through April 2026.
If anything, the booms in these stocks make the bars for management to clear higher, not lower. Incremental operational progress may not be enough to justify parabolic moves. Once you’ve gotten anyone who will buy in to fully buy in, the challenge then lies in convincing the rest of the world that the growth story makes sense at a much higher valuation. Under Ryan Cohen, for instance, GameStop has strung together nine consecutive quarters of positive cash flow from operations. Investors don’t really seem to care.
On the Robinhood platform, we’ve seen peaks in net purchases from retail traders roughly coincide with the intermediate peaks in the stock price for three of these four companies.
The lone exception is GoPro, which pulled an Allbirds in pivoting toward AI. Management agreed to be purchased by Starman Optical earlier this month for $1.14 per share, with plans to remain independently publicly traded thereafter.
FT Alphaville observed that the stock popped well ahead of the press release with news of this M&A activity. Shares proceeded to jump to as high as 80% above the agreed purchase price in the following sessions.
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Situational signature
The reported re-entry of Situational Awareness into public markets is, in a word, stunning.
I’ve been reading a whole bunch of philosophizing about how AI compresses economic and market time — primarily relating to the rollout of agents who’ll work non-stop — and am nonetheless blown away.
With the caveat that no one knows anything for sure, one thing that’s stood out is how seemingly easy it’s been for pros to single out certain transactions that appear to be Leopold Aschenbrenner-esque (in part because of the use of flex options).
Everyone knew Mariano Rivera was throwing a cutter every pitch. Only the Arizona Diamondbacks and Boston Red Sox ever really made him pay for it in a high-leverage situation.
But as a general rule in financial markets, as Kris and Don allude to above, you don’t want the world to know how you move.
One place we saw this distinctly was in 2018, when the well-known behavior of a huge systematic options strategy helped define the contours and particulars of the Q4 bludgeoning of US stocks.
Seen on Socials
Via Christian Fromhertz on X:
What to watch
Monday:
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee scheduled to speak at 6:30 a.m. ET.
Tuesday:
Autozone earnings expected premarket.
New York Fed President John Williams slated to deliver remarks at 10:05 a.m. ET.
Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin scheduled to speak at 1 p.m. ET.
Wednesday:
General Mills earnings due out premarket.
Thursday:
NY Fed President John Williams due to speak at 4:10 a.m. ET.
BlackBerry and Darden Restaurants earnings due out premarket.
Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin due to deliver remarks at 8 a.m. ET.
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack scheduled to speak at 8:50 a.m.
Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson slated to speak at 10:10 a.m. ET.
Costco earnings due out postmarket.
Friday:
NY Fed President John Williams due to speak on a panel at 5:15 a.m. ET.
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack slated to participate in a panel discussion at 2 p.m. ET.
