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Claire Yubin Oh

TSMC keeps the AI train on track; beats on Q3 EPS and hikes 2025 sales growth outlook to ~35%, up from ~30%

TSMC is rising in early trading on Thursday after the Taiwanese chipmaker posted another record quarterly profit and raised its outlook for the rest of the year.

The world’s largest contract chipmaker saw its net profit rise 39% to 452.3 billion New Taiwan dollars (about US$14.8 billion) from a year earlier, with diluted earnings per share also increasing 39% to NT$17.44 for the third quarter ended September 30 — roughly 10% ahead of Wall Street’s estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

In TSMC’s earnings release, Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang said, “Moving into fourth quarter 2025, we expect our business to be supported by continued strong demand for our leading-edge process technologies.”

Indeed, while the Q3 numbers were solid, the company’s revised guidance might have perked up investors the most. TSMC now expects Q4 2025 revenue to be between US$32.2 billion and US$33.4 billion, and sales growth in the mid-30% range for the full year, up from “about” 30% in July.

TSMC’s shares have soared nearly 40% this year as demand for high-performance semiconductors, crucial in the race to build out the AI data center infrastructure necessary for large language models, continues to grow. Per Bloomberg, the company’s CEO said that “AI demand actually continues to be very strong, stronger than we thought three months ago.”

The bullish outlook in the face of a rapidly shifting geopolitical environment was noteworthy, too. While company executives downplayed the impact on its overall business, trade policy is complicating the chip supply chain: Taiwan is still negotiating its 20% tariff on US-bound goods, Beijing is restricting the supply of rare earth minerals, and the US-China tussle over the flow of advanced AI chips continues.

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Luke Kawa

Retail traders’ favorite risky, speculative stocks are getting taken to the woodshed


Call it the spec wreck.

Speculative pockets of the market, featuring companies with no to low revenues, are getting clobbered on Thursday.

There’s no material news driving the price action in these groups, which have very different business models but a thing or two in common: most are names that retail traders love and/or had displayed strong positive price momentum that now seems to have flipped on its head. In other words, they’re stocks with common owners, and that has given them common cause to act alike.

In quantum computing, sentiment continues to sour on the pure-play names in the space, with Rigetti Computing off double digits and D-Wave Quantum, IonQ, and Quantum Computing also sharply lower. Per SwaggyStocks, negative references to Rigetti have been running hotter than positive mentions on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit for three consecutive days now. Twice as many puts have traded on Rigetti versus calls through 1:56 pm. ET.

Same story in the crypto-adjacent space, where Riot and MARA Holdings are getting walloped.

Zero-revenue Oklo, whose market cap recently exceeded that of alternative energy giant First Solar has been hammered, along with peer Nuscale. Oklo’s put/call ratio had been averaging about 0.8 over the prior 10 sessions; that’s up to about 1 today.

Cipher Mining and IREN, the crypto-miner-turned-data-center duo, are each seeing elevated selling pressure.

Unfortunately, there’s no turning to pot stocks to blunt the pain: Tilray and Canopy Growth are both off more than 5%, too.

This broad speculative pain is short-sellers’ gain, as many of these stocks have high levels of short interest in light of their unproven business models and elevated valuations. A Goldman Sachs basket of the most-shorted companies in the Russell 3000 is down more than 3% as of 2 p.m. ET.

Max Knoblauch

United and rival airlines are getting battered as analyst criticizes the industry’s capacity growth

Shares of United Airlines fell as much as 9.3% in Thursday afternoon trading, amid the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

Traders exchanged about 16 million shares of UAL as of 1:10 p.m. ET, nearly three times the full day average volume over the past 30 days. Potentially spooking investors were comments from Bloomberg Intelligence analyst George Ferguson, who, speaking with Yahoo, criticized United’s capacity growth amid a relatively slower economy.

An airline's capacity is measured by the number of seats on flights that are available for purchase. Increasing capacity involves more flights, which increases costs. That can be worth it if more capacity leads to a higher number of seats purchased.

But Ferguson questioned whether United's 7% increase in capacity in the third quarter was warranted giving that overall US economic growth is somewhere around half that level.

“It looks to us like the market is saturated. Definitely at the basic economy level it looks like there's just far too much capacity and fares are pretty soft there. Some of the premium is probably softening as well,” said Ferguson, who also said Delta’s capacity growth seemed a bit high.

The continuing government shutdown may also be playing a role in airline stock performance. Along with United, JetBlue, American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, and other rivals were also trading lower.

markets
Matt Phillips

Snowflake jumps on Palantir partnership announcement

Snowflake jumped after announcing a partnership deal with AI software and defense data company Palantir Technologies, in which Snowflake’s AI-focused data storage product — called “AI Data Cloud” — is integrated into Palantir’s Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform software.

Data storage and management has emerged as a popular market theme this year as an offshoot of the all-things-AI trade.

Providers of relatively cheap, hardware-based storage options like hard disk drives — such as Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital — have been some of the S&P 500’s top performers.

Data management software firms like Snowflake and Datadog have also picked up momentum recently. Snowflake has doubled over the last 12 months, while Datadog has seen a 27% gain.

RBC analysts spotlighted Snowflake in a note Wednesday, writing, “We continue to believe Snowflake is well-positioned as an AI beneficiary as organizations turn to the company to prepare their data for AI workloads.”

Snowflake and Palantir Announce Strategic Partnership for Enterprise-Ready AI & Analytics

Snowflake and Palantir Announce Strategic Partnership for Enterprise-Ready AI & Analytics

Providers of relatively cheap, hardware-based storage options like hard disk drives — such as Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital — have been some of the S&P 500’s top performers.

Data management software firms like Snowflake and Datadog have also picked up momentum recently. Snowflake has doubled over the last 12 months, while Datadog has seen a 27% gain.

RBC analysts spotlighted Snowflake in a note Wednesday, writing, “We continue to believe Snowflake is well-positioned as an AI beneficiary as organizations turn to the company to prepare their data for AI workloads.”

markets
Max Knoblauch

Nio denies Singapore wealth fund’s accusations of inflating revenue

Court documents indicate that Chinese EV maker Nio has been sued in US courts by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, which alleges the company inflated its revenue, causing “significant losses.”

The news sent Nio shares down 8% in premarket trading on Thursday.

The EV maker “issued materially false and misleading statements and omissions that misrepresented... the Company’s true revenue and earnings figures,” the lawsuit alleges. The suit accuses Nio of unlawfully recognizing more than $600 million in leased battery revenue in fiscal year 2021.

Last month, Nio announced a $1 billion share sale to fund development around smart EVs. The company has yet to post a profit in its 11-year history.

Update (10:35 a.m. ET): Nio has responded to the lawsuit, telling CnEVPost that the complaint stems from false allegations made in a short-selling report by Grizzly Research and is “not a newly occurring incident, nor is it directed at NIO's recent operational performance.”

markets
Hyunsoo Rim

ABAT sinks after the US Department of Energy terminates its grant for lithium facility

American Battery Technology Co. is in a hole early on Thursday, currently trading 20% lower than yesterday’s close price, after the company revealed in an SEC filing that the US Department of Energy has terminated its $57.7 million grant supporting the construction of a lithium hydroxide facility.

The termination follows a May memorandum ordering audits of all grants issued by the DOE’s Manufacturing Energy Supply Chain office.

In September 2023, ABAT signed a $115 million funding deal with the DOE for the lithium plant, under which both sides were to contribute $57.7 million each. After the DOE’s audit announcement in May, the agency terminated the grant on October 9. ABAT says it appealed the decision the next day and that it plans to seek dispute resolution remedies, according to its 8K filing.

As of last week’s grant termination, about $52 million in DOE funds remain unused. The company said it has “already raised over $52 million of funds from the public markets” this year, and intends to keep the project going “without impact to timeline or scope.”

In April, the firm also received a $900 million financing letter of interest from the US Export-Import bank to back its Nevada lithium mine and refinery.

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