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Visa lives up to reputation for quality defense

A solid beat on top and bottom lines.

4/29/25 3:54PM

Visa delivered strong earnings and sales results for its fiscal Q2 and maintained full-year earnings-per-share guidance, giving the shares a modest lift in the after-hours trading session.

The company announced that its Q3 EPS growth guidance was in the “high teens,” but left its previous full-year guidance for earnings per share in the “low teens.”

Visa has been a bastion of stability for the S&P 500 so far in 2025, rising 8% year to date, compared to the 5.5% decline for the blue-chip index as of Tuesday’s close.

That’s no surprise given Visa’s reputation as a high-quality defensive position, due to its ability to generate consistent growth more or less regardless of economic conditions.

Berkshire Hathaway invests in The New York Times, cuts stakes in Amazon and Apple

The latest SEC filing shows the company’s first media buy since 2020.

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Riot Platforms rises on activist push to accelerate AI data center pivot

Shares of major crypto miner Riot Platforms jumped as much as 5.6% in premarket trading Wednesday after activist investor Starboard Value urged the company, in a letter seen by Bloomberg, to accelerate its shift from bitcoin mining toward AI-focused data center operations.

Starboard Urges Bitcoin Miner Riot to Speed Up Shift to Data Centers

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Applied Digital, WeRide, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals dip as Nvidia exits positions

Three stocks took a dip in after-hours trading on Tuesday after Nvidia’s 13F filing showed the chip designer sold its stake over the final three months of 2025 in:

Applied Digital, a data center operator in which Nvidia was the seventh-largest holder as of the end of Q3.
- That being said, Nvidia still has some quasi-direct Applied Digital exposure through its still substantial CoreWeave position. The neocloud acquired warrants in APLD last June.
WeRide, the Chinese self-driving firm.
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which engages in AI-driven drug development.

Nvidia also sold its stake in Arm Holdings, but that was offset by some good news: part of Nvidia’s expanded pact with Meta will see Arm-based CPUs assume a more prominent role in data center environments, which may help boost its volumes and selling prices.

Nvidia added positions in Nokia, Intel, and Synopsys in Q4, all of which had been previously announced via press releases. Its CoreWeave and Nebius positions were unchanged relative to Q3.

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Nvidia enhances partnership with social media giant Meta to deploy “millions” of its GPUs

Winners: Nvidia, Arm. Losers: AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Arista.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang interviews Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the 2024 SIGGRAPH conference in Denver, CO on July 29, 2024.

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Sandisk drops after Western Digital confirms plan to unload $3 billion in stock at a discount

Western Digital is cashing in more of its Sandisk position.

The hard drive seller is exchanging more than $3 billion in Sandisk shares as part of a debt-for-equity swap.

This secondary offering was priced at $545 per share, a discount of roughly 8% to where Sandisk closed on Tuesday.

Shares of Sandisk are down nearly 3% in premarket trading as of 5:50 a.m. ET, while Western Digital is up more than 2%.

The two companies were once one, but Western Digital spun off a little more than 80% of its flash drive business (which would become Sandisk) in February 2025, and already exchanged the lion’s share of what remained in a separate debt-for-equity swap in June.

This move was very, very well telegraphed by Western Digital, which recently confirmed plans to monetize its Sandisk position before the one-year anniversary of that split (February 21). And Sandisk’s press release makes clear that the company is not the one selling more stock or making any money off of this.

That being said, being a high-flying stock that has a Bloomberg headline with “secondary offering” in it could, in theory, spark some turbulence. Particularly when that happens at a discount.

After this transaction, Western Digital will own a little less than 1.7 million shares of Sandisk, and plans to dispose of the rest through either exchanging these shares for its own (effectively, a buyback) or giving them to its shareholders.

Western Digital announces additional $4 billion in share buybacks, with management poised to unload its remaining stake in Sandisk