CLOSING BELL | | Good afternoon, and happy Tuesday. The market is mixed, the indexes falling slightly while the Dow hit records yet again. SpaceX mania has not subsided, the stock is now the fifth most valuable in the world by market cap, and eyes are looking beyond its three day, 43% run up. | Iran is still in the grips of ‘maybe peace deal’ purgatory, so traders spent Tuesday looking at battles over smaller stocks, and waiting for the FOMC meeting Wednesday. It is the first policy opportunity for new FOMC head Kevin Warsh, but most economists see a nothingburger of a report, more on that below. | Stocktwits was chasing story stocks over index moves: $SPCX stayed the retail magnet, $SNAP sparked the hardware debate, and $NFLX, $SOFI, $CRM, and $FUBO carried the loudest single-name fights. | Today's Briefing: | After the Bell: Snap’s $2,195 AR glasses put Spiegel’s post-smartphone bet back on trial Company News: OpenAI’s financials exposed the AI cash burn while SpaceX kept its IPO fever alive with the Cursor deal Macro News: Warsh’s first Fed meeting and the Hormuz relief trade gave markets two big reasons to wait for the fine print Pops and Drops & More
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| | | | AFTER THE BELL
Snap Sees Specs |  | Singer Jack Harlow in Specs, from Snap |
| Snap, the social app Snapchat and ‘camera company,’ is taking another swing at hardware with Specs, a $2,195 pair of AR glasses aimed at consumers instead of developers. Evan Spiegel is pitching them as a post-smartphone bet, but Wall Street is still asking who pays for the experiment. I mean, look at the picture: would you wear these things? | The RIP: $SNAP ( ▼ 9.63% ) fell around after unveiling Specs. The glasses cost $2,195, require a $200 refundable deposit, offer nearly 4 hours of battery life, and are expected to ship later this year in the U.S., U.K., and France. | The product is ambitious, but the timing is rough. Meta and Google can fund smart-glasses experiments with massive ad profits, while Snap has never posted a full-year profit as a public company. That makes Specs less of a gadget launch and more of a margin-of-error test for Spiegel’s long-term AR thesis. 👓 | Community is bullish, message volume is high across ~234k Watchers. Traders were not convinced the selloff was worth it. | @jbjbjb55555 said: “$SNAP highly skeptical that everyday consumers will shell out over $2,000 for a pair of smart glasses.” (post) @Orko said: “$SNAP down over the glasses? Feels like an overreaction. Specs aren't even a meaningful part of revenue today.” (post)
| Sound off in $SNAP: glasses gamble or gimmick → |
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| | | | COMPANY NEWS
OpenAI’s Burn Rate Goes Public | OpenAI’s audited financials gave investors a rare look under the hood before a potential IPO, and the headline is simple: the ChatGPT maker is growing like a rocket while spending like one too. Financial Times was out with the exclusive report today, showing how much the massive lab lost last year. | The RIP: OpenAI spent about $34B in 2025, including $19B on R&D and nearly $6B on sales and marketing. Revenue was about $13B, monthly revenue hit $2B by year-end, and the firm reported net loss reached roughly $39B. | The catch is that about $30B of that loss was tied to a non-cash accounting charge from OpenAI’s old investor structure, not day-to-day operations. Strip out that charge and other non-cash items, and the loss was closer to $8B, still a massive reminder that AI demand is not the same thing as AI profitability. | For public-market traders, the cleanest read-through remains infrastructure. Microsoft keeps getting the strategic exposure, Nvidia keeps getting the compute-demand story, and the next IPO wave is basically asking investors how much loss they will tolerate for AI scale. That is, until the stock goes public, and Stocktwits goes crazy again. | SpaceX Buys Code | SpaceX led the way for OpenAI to hit the public markets later this year. The AI and space company climbed again Tuesday, reaching higher in market cap than both Amazon and even Microsoft briefly. | It stole the show for the third day in the Stocktwits community, the highest viewed page by nearely four times the runner up. The company wasted no time with its newfound shareholder support. It agreed Tuesday to buy AI coding startup Cursor, according to SEC files. The move gives Elon Musk a direct shot at OpenAI and Anthropic in the developer-tool race. | The RIP: $SPCX ( ▲ 4.83% ) rose. The Cursor deal is valued at $60B, Cursor recently hit $3B in annualized revenue, and SpaceX’s market value is tracking near $2.7T. Community is bullish, message volume is extremely high across ~75.7K Watchers. | The deal makes the SpaceX story even less about rockets alone. SpaceX worked with Cursor for two months as a partnership to build models, and apparently loved its code generator enough to buy the whole building. Bulls get a faster path into AI coding, better talent, and a reason to attach software multiples to Starlink and xAI. Bears get another capital-heavy bet after SpaceX posted a $4.94B net loss last year and capex nearly doubled to $20.7B. | Weigh in on $SPCX: AI empire or overreach → |
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| | | | MACRO NEWS
Warsh Gets The Wait | | Kevin Warsh’s first Fed meeting is shaping up less like a regime change and more like a big pause button. CNBC’s Fed Survey found economists, fund managers, and strategists expect no rate moves for a long time, even as the statement may drop its old cut-friendly lean. | "While Warsh is generally perceived as dovish, he will inherit a committee that has become noticeably more hawkish," Gregory Daco, EY chief economist, said. | Warsh wants ot change things at the Fed, including how open the FOMC is sharing its perspective. Some even expect Warsh to not include a dot in the famous Dot Plot graph that helps FOMC members show their predictions for the future rate path. Warsh would not be alone in his rebellion: in the same CNBC survey, 53% said they wanted to eliminate the plot, and 61% said it should be changed. | The RIP: 32 respondents; most expect no rate change through 2027; 88% expect the Fed to remove its easing bias; the Fed funds rate is currently 3.62%; 2026 GDP seen at 2.2%; 2027 GDP is seen at 2.3%; recession odds 25%, down from 33%; unemployment is 4.3%; 84% see AI stocks as overvalued by about 21%. | "The FOMC ought to hike rates to nip rising inflation expectations in the bud and get closer to neutral policy," John Ryding, Brean Capital chief economic advisor, said. | For markets, that keeps rate-sensitive trades in $IWM, $KRE, $DHI, and $LEN stuck waiting, while the AI wealth-effect risk keeps $NVDA tied to the macro story too. Watch for pressure on the duration of cuts with $TLT, credit appetite in $HYG, bank liquidity in $XLF, real estate math in $XLRE, oil-inflation hedges in $XLE, and AI multiples in $SMH. | Hormuz Gets Papered | So over the weekend, the US and Iran electronically signed a ‘memorandum of understanding’ to end the 109-day war, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and move the hard stuff into follow-up talks. Markets are treating it like a supply-relief trade, but the deal still has enough conflicting versions to make oil traders keep one hand on the eject button. The White House made moves Tuesday to limit any talk around the U.S. paying Iran relief funds. | The RIP: War day 109; formal signing expected Friday in Switzerland; 60-day follow-up period for nuclear, sanctions, and regional-security talks; no Hormuz tolls during negotiations; disputed Iranian claim of $25B in frozen-asset release; Brent fell 5.1% to $78.96; WTI fell 5.8% to $76.05; 5 oil and gas vessels passed Hormuz on Monday. | "All signed," President Donald Trump said. Tuesday was backtrack day, "There hasn’t been a single dollar of sanctions relief or unfrozen assets," Vice President JD Vance told reporters. | The contradiction is doing laps around the tanker lane. Washington says no sanctions relief, Tehran is signaling frozen funds and oil waivers, and Israel is already saying parts of the regional deal do not bind its operations in Lebanon. That makes this a relief rally, not a clean all-clear. |
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| | | | TRENDING ON STOCKS
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