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Luke Kawa10/30/25

US mineral stocks soar on lack of full rollback of China’s rare earth export curbs

There’s a silver lining for US mineral stocks even after US President Donald Trump rated his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in South Korea a “12 out of 10.”

China is delaying the imposition of its planned onerous restrictions on rare earth shipments, which had caused Trump to countenance a “massive increase” in tariffs on Chinese imports earlier this month. However, there seems to be no full rollback of China’s rare earths curbs, as measures announced in April that limited the flow of seven rare earth minerals by requiring export licenses appear to remain in effect, per Reuters.

Shares of Critical Metals, USA Rare Earth, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, and United States Antimony Corp. are all meaningfully in the green in premarket trading. This group had come under severe pressure on Monday after top US and Chinese trade negotiators said they made substantial progress on ironing out some thorny issues, teeing up a positive result for the Trump-Xi meeting.

Andrew Bishop, global head of policy research at Signum Global Advisors, believes that China came out ahead in this trade deal as Xi “traded tangibles for intangibles,” writing that Beijing’s latest step-up on this file were “never-planned-to-be-enforced rare earth controls.”

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Shopify tumbles despite strong first quarter as Q2 guidance fails to impress

Shopify fell in premarket trading Tuesday after the e-commerce company’s strong Q1 results failed to offset concerns over its second-quarter outlook.

The stock was recently down 5.9% premarket.

Revenue for the first quarter rose 34% year on year to $3.17 billion, topping the $3.09 billion estimate compiled by Bloomberg, while gross merchandise volume — the total dollar value of goods sold through its platform — hit $100.7 billion, also above the roughly $98.8 billion analysts expected.

But investors appeared to look past its Q1 beat, focusing instead on the company’s second-quarter outlook that pointed to slower growth and higher-than-expected operating expenses in the near term.

For Q2, Shopify forecast revenue to grow in the “high-twenties” percentage rate year on year, gross profit growth in the mid-twenties, and operating expenses of 35% to 36% of revenue — compared with the 33% consensus estimate for full-year 2026, per Bloomberg.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana had previously warned that Q2 growth could slow on softer spending as fuel prices rise.

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Helena Cheng11m

Cipher Mining gains despite posting underwhelming Q1 revenues

Cipher Digital shares are gaining in pre-market trading, following the release of its Q1 2026 results. Investors are watching to see how the company's aggressive pivot toward AI infrastructure is showing up in its contracted revenue backlog, hoping for color on the potential for additional lease signings.

Key numbers:

Q1 revenue: $34.8 million (estimate: $36.5 million)
Adjusted EBITDA: -$48.2 million (estimate -$7.3 million)

Cipher Digital rebranded from Cipher Mining in February 2026 to align with its new focus on industrial-scale data centers for AI and cloud workloads.

The company has signed a 15-year, 300-megawatt agreement with Amazon Web Services at its Black Pearl campus, as well as a 10-year lease with Fluidstack and Google at its Barber Lake site. Cipher also added a third, unnamed client in March. Together, its deals total around $11 billion in contracted revenues over the next decade.

By 2030 and beyond, Cipher anticipates having multiple gigawatts of capacity available for sale as it continues its data center construction efforts in anticipation of an enduring AI boom.

Cipher Digital expected portfolio capacity beyond 2030 — Source: Cipher Digital

The company has also moved to strengthen its balance sheet, securing a $200 million revolving credit facility backed by major banks including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sach, and JPMorgan, giving it additional flexibility to fund data center expansion.

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J. Edward Moreno25m

Pfizer reports Q1 results above consensus, reaffirms 2026 guidance

Pfizer rose in premarket trading after it reported earnings results that beat Wall Street expectations and reaffirmed its annual guidance.

For the first three months of 2026, Pfizer reported:

Revenue at $14.5 billion, greater than the $13.8 billion analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. Growth in some of its newer treatments helped offset the decline in demand for its COVID-19 products, it said.
Adjusted earnings per share of $0.75, higher than the $0.72 the Street was penciling in.

For the full year 2026, Pfizer still expects:

Annual adjusted earnings per share to land between $2.80 and $3.00, compared to the $2.96 analysts are currently expecting.
Annual revenues to hit between $59.5 billion and $62.5 billion, compared with the $61.3 billion analysts have forecast.

The pharmaceutical giant is working to reignite growth after demand for its COVID-19 products has waned and as some of its biggest moneymakers get nearer to the end of their patents’ lives. It has made investments in oncology and late last year it acquired Metsera, a biotech working on a once-monthly GLP-1 shot.

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J. Edward Moreno1h

AB InBev reports Q1 sales, adjusted EPS above estimates as beer volumes rise

AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer, rose in premarket trading after it reported results that beat Wall Street estimates and its beer business grew for the first time since 2023.

For the first three months of 2026, the company reported:

Revenue at $15.3 billion, higher than the $14.7 billion analysts polled by FactSet were expecting.
Adjusted earnings per share of $0.97, greater than the $0.89 the Street was penciling in.

The Bud Light maker also affirmed its 2026 guidance, pricing in a boost from demand around this summer’s World Cup.

The company reported overall sales volume growth of 0.8% compared to the same point last year, marking the first year-over-year increase in three years. That growth was driven by beer volumes, which grew 1.2%, while non-beer volumes — such as ready-to-drink cocktails and seltzers — fell by 1.9% in the same period.

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Claire Yubin Oh2h

FIS rises on partnership with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to banking, starting with financial crimes

FIS jumped as much as 6% in premarket trading on Tuesday after the company announced a partnership with Anthropic to develop agentic AI for banking systems, starting with a focus on anti-money-laundering investigations.

The new AI agent will focus on improving efficiency in financial crime investigations, specifically by “automatically assembling evidence across a bank's core systems, evaluating activity against known typologies, and surfacing the highest-risk cases for investigator review,” per Fidelity National Information's press release.

BMO and Amalgamated Bank will purportedly be the first institutions to deploy the agent, with broader implementations planned in the second half of 2026. Anthropic’s Applied AI team will be embedded within the company to co-design the first AI agent and transfer knowledge so FIS can build additional agents independently in the future.

FIS plans to develop further curated agents — spanning credit decisioning, deposit retention, customer onboarding, and fraud prevention — for its financial institution clients on its platform.

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