Hey Snackers,
The American government is planning to plow billions of dollars into an American supply chain for critical minerals, rare-earth metals, and more precursors for crucial industries. That prompted a whole lot of rebrands from companies in the space, which now include American Critical Minerals, US1 Critical Minerals, U.S. Critical Materials, and U.S. Critical Metals. Notice a theme? That’s not even the best part; US1 Critical Minerals, for instance, has a red-white-and-blue website, a Statue of Liberty motif, an American flag in the logo, and anyway guess what — incidentally, the company is Australian. They’re not even the only one: Aussie tungsten and antimony miner Trigg Minerals has become American Tungsten and Antimony, never mind the fact that there are already two companies called American Tungsten and American Antimony.
Last Friday, the S&P 500 fell from its record high but managed to post a third consecutive weekly gain, its longest weekly winning streak since May.
Reddit’s jumped into the S&P 500, proving there really is riches in niches.
On Thursday evening, Reddit was named as the newest member of the S&P 500, a move that sent the price of the stock up by around 13%. The company has had a relatively down 2026, with the stock down about 23% year to date, but it remains an interesting company as it attempts to surf a number of trends.
At the precise moment that every AI lab in the country is both incredibly deep-pocketed and desperate for novel human-written text upon which to train their models, Reddit’s sitting pretty with 26 billion posts and a wide latitude to license that text.
The AI boom is having some negative effects for the company — search traffic is down — but pain now, in the form of reduced Google traffic, in exchange for reward later in the form of licensing deals with the LLMs that intend to replace Google anyway is a pitch that many are buying.
Reddit’s exciting for companies that want to advertise because so much of the stuff on the website comes down to what people ought to own. CEO Steve Huffman laid it out plainly in an interview with Yahoo! Finance: "Reddit is so naturally commercial: Forty percent of the conversations people are having organically on Reddit are more or less about what to buy.”
The company has made some significant changes to how its homepage works that have meaningfully changed what goes viral on the site, a move that had the effect of diminishing the posts from “karma farmers” and rewarding content from smaller communities. Again, while that’s clearly going to have positive effects on the user experience, it’s also making the site a whole lot more attractive for advertisers.
The Takeaway
In their most recent earnings call, Reddit executives underscored that they’re thinking a lot about the site’s video experience, and they see that their rivals for user attention — Instagram with its Reels, YouTube with its Shorts, and TikTok with its, well, TikToks — are pulling things off with algorithmic video feeds that Reddit has yet to pull off. Reddit had long maintained a quirky and somewhat idiosyncratic user base (heck, go to a random subreddit and there’s usually a solid chance that the fourth- or fifth-most-upvoted post of all time is still about Ajit Pai) but Reddit doesn’t want a quirky and idiosyncratic user base, they want a billion users, and websites with a billion users ain’t quirky.
Stocks pop when companies get into the S&P 500 because that means that millions of retirement accounts and boring index funds must start auto-buying them. Those 401(k)s and set-it-and-forget-it index funds don’t care what time the narwhal bacons, they want ROI, and Reddit won’t have much difficulty deciding whose needs — users or shareholders — come first.
Lovesick: Could letting men message first boost Bumble’s ailing user numbers?
For anyone vaguely au fait with the world of online dating, the recent news that Bumble has scrapped one of its central tenets — the women-message-first rule — may have come as a shock, as Bumble begins to look more like many other dating apps in the crowded space.
In the statement announcing the shift, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s CEO and founder, and a co-founder of Tinder, explained that “While women making the first move was a radical idea, being women-first was never about prescribing just one way to connect.” Per a survey from the dating platform itself back in 2024, 66% of female Bumble users were already saying they preferred men to send the first message.
This departure from the core feature that set Bumble apart shows that the company is getting serious about a rather unromantic part of the industry: trying to retain customers. While it could be a good sign for the people who’ve left the app, Bumble hemorrhaging paid users in each of the last seven quarters obviously hasn’t been great for business.
A brilliant analysis of NOAA data covering 149,126 boats found that 46.4% had names, with “Freedom,” “Liberty,” “Serenity,” and “Grace” among the most popular. Around 14.5 million American households own a boat.
What else we’re Snackin’
The Improbable, Inevitable Return of the Suit
Hmm: Nvidia’s $500 billion plan envelops Wall Street in its AI frenzy
OpenAI’s talent exodus raises “huge red flag” ahead of IPO
The buzziest new game right now is “Big Walk,” a cooperative game of a genre called “Friendslop”
The Lakers are a massive bet on AI disruption
The stock market may already be adjusting to a future with slower earnings growth 🤔
Snack Fact of the Day
A fungus called Armillaria ostoyae, also known as the "Humongous Fungus," in the Blue Mountains of Oregon is believed to be a single organism anywhere from 1,900 to 8,650 years old.
This week
Rosenblatt hosts AI summit; companies slated to speak includeLumentum, Terawulf, AMD, Infleqtion, Fortinet, Coherent, Cisco, and Penguin Solutions. Needham hosts virtual industrial tech, robotics, and power conference
Home Depot poised to release earnings ahead of the open. Rosenblatt AI summit continues. Navitas Semiconductor, Applied Optoelectronics, and Arista Networks scheduled to speak.
Target, Lowe’s, Analog Devices, TJX Cos., and Estée Lauder slated to post quarterly results premarket. Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s July meeting to be released at 2 p.m. ET. Wolfspeed scheduled to release quarterly results after the close.
Walmart and Deere & Co. scheduled to release results ahead of the open. Ross Stores slated to announce quarterly results after the close.