🔵 They Big Blew It

IBM notched an eye-watering 25% drop in its stock price yesterday, its biggest drop by market cap in company history. The cause? While IBM certainly was the first company to get a robot on “Jeopardy!,” a confluence of factors directly related to their failures in the AI race torpedoed the quarter for them and rattled investors. 

• First up, the data center buildup has driven up costs and pushed companies to plow their IT budgets into servers and chips. That meant less money left in the pot for IBM’s mainframes and software, as discretionary IT spend bottoms out. 

• This came as a surprise to IBM, and it couldn’t come at a worse time, as investors have already begun to consider a future in which IBM’s software products are replaced by competing AI tools. 

• Revenue of $17.2 billion on expectations of $17.86 billion is bad, but having the stink of being one of those bloated SaaS companies that isn’t capitalizing on the AI boom is how you lose a quarter of your market cap in one session. 

Jacob Bourne of eMarketer called the situation — capex concentrating in hardware, diverting money from software, and a market downright eager to punish legacy companies who lose ground in the AI boom — “a triple whammy.”

The Takeaway

It used to be an axiom of the technology business that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Turns out all good things have to come to an end at some point. There’s another tech industry axiom that enters into play here, one relevant for a SaaS company that didn’t really demonstrate that the prevailing theme in markets is working for it: if you’re not at the table, you’re probably on the menu.

The 2026 Home Run Derby gave us everything we could ask for, from homering hot-streaks to a classic Philadelphia crowd that cheered failures and booed successes. (We love you, Philly.) The final between Jordan Walker of the Cardinals and local Phillie favorite Kyle Schwarber saved the best for last, though. After Schwarber homered on six of his first eight swings, and then four of his final five — including clobbering a special last-swing ball to extend the round — it set the bar for Walker so high that the market gave Schwarber a 93.5% chance of winning. But after falling behind early, Walker stormed back with six consecutive homers (!) to close the round — four straight coming on do-or-die swings — to win what was arguably the greatest Derby in contest history:

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• World Cup: After a thrilling semifinal yesterday that saw Spain beat France 2-0, today we see England take on Argentina to decide what the 2026 World Cup final will look like. England’s got the edge, but only slightly; markets are pricing in a 54% chance of an English victory, and a 45% chance of Argentina mounting a second consecutive return to the World Cup final. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Johnson & Johnson expected to report earnings premarket. 

• Federal Reserve’s Beige Book published at 2 p.m. ET. 

• United Airlines expected to report earnings postmarket.