Markets
markets

UnitedHealth Group jumps after Berkshire Hathaway discloses stake

UnitedHealth Group soared in after-hours trading after Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway revealed that it purchased and held 5 million shares of the embattled healthcare giant as of the end of the second quarter, a new position for the conglomerate.

That was a roughly $1.6 billion position as of June 30 — but less now, even after the stock popped nearly 8% higher on this announcement.

It’s been a rough year for health insurers in general, but especially for UnitedHealth. This is a rare highlight during a year to forget. The company cratered after reporting Q1 earnings, saw its CEO leave and pulled guidance shortly thereafter, then fell out of bed again after posting disappointing second-quarter results at the end of July. Oh, and it’s also facing a probe from the Department of Justice into its Medicare Advantage practices.

All this bad news has pushed the company’s stock price down 46% year to date as of Thursday’s close, but that also may have been what made it attractive to a value-oriented shop like Berkshire.

At the end of the second quarter, UNH’s forward price-to-earnings multiple was about 13.1x, versus a trailing five-year average of 19.2x.

Since the end of Q2, its valuation has risen, but for a bad reason: its earnings estimates keep getting chopped.

More Markets

See all Markets
markets

JetBlue takes off on bullish options activity

Low-cost airline JetBlue is up more than 8% on Tuesday, on pace for its biggest daily gain since August. If the price momentum holds, Tuesday will mark JetBlue’s sixth-best trading day of the past 52 weeks.

The carrier is being propelled by bullish options activity, with more than 53,000 call options changing hands as of 12:14 p.m. ET, nearly 4x the 20-day average for a full session.

JetBlue closed up 4.6% on Monday, as traders appeared to price in medium-term oil supply relief due to the possibility of Venezuela’s reserves getting more developed amid tensions with the US.

markets

Moderna rallies after BofA raises its price target to $24 from $21

Moderna rose on Tuesday after Bank of America analysts raised their price target for the ailing biotech behind the COVID-19 vaccine, painting a rosy picture of the products in its pipeline.

BofA kept Moderna’s “underperform” rating but raised its price target to $24 from $21, which now accounts for “refreshed revenue builds for lead assets.” Analysts said the company’s cost-cutting measures, paired with potential new revenue from its investigatory oncology vaccines, could bring it back to profitability in the coming years.

Moderna is best known for being tapped by the US government to quickly develop a vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020, a product that remains its single source of revenue. The company has yet to bring new products to market and is now faced with a second Trump administration hostile to that product.

markets

Roblox drops following overnight outages and a lowered price target from TD Cowen

Gaming platform Roblox fell as much as 7% on Tuesday, following reports of widespread outages overnight and a lowered price target from TD Cowen.

Downdetector, a monitoring service that uses “signals from its own websites, social media platforms and other sources” to analyze outages, tracked roughly 22 outage reports per second at peak overnight Monday into Tuesday.

Meanwhile, TD Cowen issued a new research note on Roblox Tuesday, lowering its price target on the stock to $70 from $77. Analyst Doug Creutz wrote that user engagement with the platform’s biggest hits, including “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot,” declined 52% between mid-September and mid-December. The firm lowered its fiscal year bookings estimate from $8.48 billion to $8.09 billion.

markets

Data storage stocks surge as Nvidia CEO calls the market “completely unserved”

Sandisk soared in early trading, leading the pack of data storage stocks that topped the market last year — including Western Digital, Micron, and Seagate Technology Holdings — sharply higher Tuesday.

Despite little news on Sandisk itself, its shares were trading at a furious rate. Shortly before 10 a.m. ET, roughly 4.1 million had changed hands, more than 3x as much as normal for that stage of the session.

Besides benefiting from a broad upswing in AI-related trades on Tuesday, memory chip and data storage makers have soared, alongside prices for their products, in an rally that started late last year.

Closely watched comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Consumer Electronics Show underscored the strong outlook for demand from the AI industry for data storage.

“This market will likely be the largest storage market in the world, basically holding the working memory of the world’s AIs,” he told analysts at the trade show Monday, who called storage “a completely unserved market today.”

That demand seems set to continue to push prices up in early 2026, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

In a note published Tuesday, tech hardware analysts at the bank wrote that prices for DRAM memory, which Micron makes, are expected to increase 40% to 70% quarter over quarter in Q1.

Similarly prices for NAND flash memory — a crucial form of memory for long-term storage and the heart of Sandisk’s products — are expected to increase 30% to 35% in Q1 2026, Morgan Stanley analysts said, citing industry estimates.

markets

Nvidia’s partners really want you to know they’re involved with Vera Rubin, too

Everybody’s trying to get on the Vera Rubin rocket ship.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s confirmation that its new flagship AI chips are in “full production” sparked a flurry of announcements from partners reminding us that they’ll also be involved in this rollout, sending their stocks meaningfully higher on Tuesday, before most pared gains.

  • Nvidia-backed Nebius “will deploy the NVIDIA Rubin platform through Nebius AI Cloud and Nebius Token Factory, unlocking next-generation reasoning and agentic AI capabilities for customers starting H2 2026.”

  • Also Nvidia-backed CoreWeave said it expects “to be among the first cloud providers to deploy the NVIDIA Rubin platform in the second half of 2026, offering its customers greater flexibility and choice as AI systems scale.”

  • Server company Super Micro Computer announced “expansions in manufacturing capacity and liquid-cooling capabilities, in collaboration with NVIDIA, to enable first-to-market delivery of data center-scale solutions optimized for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin and Rubin platforms.”

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.