Closing Bell - Closing Bell Overtime: Tech Titans Regain Ground, CoreWeave’s First Report, and eToro’s IPO Pop 5/14/25

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Big Tech has been surging this week, including Nvidia and Tesla. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management breaks down the momentum across the sector.Coreweave and Cisco report. Evercore’s Amit Daryanani breaks down Cisco's latest quarter. SuRo Capital’s Mark Klein, a Coreweave shareholder, joins to discuss CoreWeave’s first report as a public company. We also take a look at eToro’s IPO and what it means for other companies considering going public.  Barbara Doran of BD8 Capital and Bob Doll of Nuveen unpack the market action and we look ahead to Walmart, reporting on Thursday, with Corey Tarlowe of Jefferies. 

That bell marks the end of regulation. Lithium Argentina, we're going to close the bell for New York Stock Exchange, H2O America doing the honors at the Nasdaq. And stocks are ending the day mixed. The Nasdaq closing higher for the sixth straight day, its longest win streak since August. Communication Services was your S&P sector leader as Alphabet and Metagame. Healthcare again the laggard today, this time with Bristol Myers and Teva lagging. The sector now down more than 4% in the past week.

Chips leading the tech charge today. AMD and Nvidia the top performers. AMD announcing a $6 billion buyback and Nvidia is back into positive territory for 2025. Treasury yields higher which probably was a cold shower for a lot of stocks at the 10 year solid lead back above 4.5%. the move of hitting the home builders with nearly all members of the sector ETF lower.

That is the scorecard on Wall Street, but we're going to stay late. Welcome to Closing Bell Overtime. I'm John Ft. Morgan Brennan is on assignment, and we are waiting for a couple key after-hours reports, starting with Cisco snapping a five-day winning streak today, but still positive for the week. Analysts are expecting earnings of 92 cents a share on 14 billion in revenue. And then we're gonna hear from AI Infrastructure Play.

CoreWeave, all time high. First report as a public company. A loss expected here, but the stock's up nearly 70% from its IPO day six weeks ago, a healthy six and a half plus percent today. Well, we start, of course, with tech and its recent run. Nvidia leading the charge, as I said, up 15% for the week. Now back above $3 trillion in market cap.

AMD up double digits as well, and that's helping chips ETF ticker SMH to a better than 10% gain this week and elsewhere, Apple, Amazon, Meta, all outperforming this week. Meta having its best week of the year and Apple also crossing the $3 trillion market cap mark for the first time in a month.

Tesla, another big winner, up 16% in three days. Shares have been rebounding since Elon Musk promised to spend more time at the company, Less in DC. And today the FT reporting Tesla's board is working on a new compensation plan for Musk. Go figure. So, should you be piling into the big tech trade again? Joining us now, Gene Munster,

managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management. Gene, good to see you. So, if you still believed in big tech when it was down, then you're probably happy right now. But can you buy it given that there's some other things that are down a bit more and arguably, you know, a lot of people were overweighted to begin with. I think the answer is you can't just buy the Mag 7.

You have to buy pockets of it. I think about some of that performance, what's going on with Google is really breathtaking what is undergoing in terms of the shift from 10 Blue Links. You cannot sleep well at night just simply owning Google. And I think that when you answer the question more holistically, there's still, if you look at, we looked at 20 different companies, tech companies in their reporting season and graded each of them. And of the six MEG-7, five of the six, we gave it an A grade.

And so there's still this outperformance that you're seeing with the fundamentals on these companies, but that doesn't mean that the best opportunities to invest is necessarily with them. And so again, more of a targeted approach. I think that companies like Nvidia, nice to see it return into the positive. But this company, if I'm right, where AI goes,

over the next one, two, five, 10 years, this company is still cheap and will still have strength. So John, you have to be strategic in terms of what you're buying. If you wanted to buy a basket, I would buy a basket of smaller tech companies sub $500 billion and focus on those. It's probably where your bigger outperformance is.

Yeah, a lot to choose from under $500 billion. I've been looking recently at names like Atlassian, which is at half of its 2021 highs. Zoom at $25 billion. Market Cap is at a fifth of where it peaked out. And then there's DevOps names like MongoDB, PagerDuty, Snowflake. The charts don't look like people believe in them, but how much of a case is there to be made that some of these names are going to be decent AI beneficiaries?

Well, there's a great case, and I think that that's the fundamental question all investors need to ask, is just how transformative is AI going to be? And these companies, many of those that you just mentioned are going to have a meaningful benefit to that. There's a lot of conversations around it, but where the rubber hits the road, that central question to ask is how far along are we? And I think the answer is one way to look at that is to look at GPT in terms of the percentage of the online daily activity that uses GPT daily.

And it's probably coming up around 20% of Google's population uses that daily. The point is that it's still relatively small, John. And I think that when we think about this other class of companies beyond the big tech and think about the opportunity, if we answer that question about how far are we in AI, about the opportunity if we're if we answer that question about how far are we in AI and the answer is we're still early as defined by the amount of usages today then you have I think a clear path

with these companies will continue to grow higher for longer and so we're at the point at deep water I mean this is even despite everything that's happened over the past two years we still believe we're early with an AI and still are at the bet the firm in terms of our investment philosophy around how big this shift is going to be. Ah, all right. Well, I do want to try to get a little bit more on that because when I think about the AI impact on some of tech, I think about this bifurcation between, say, Chegg and Duolingo. Both software names, both involved in education,

but they've gone in dramatically different directions. Chegg is trading under a buck a share, since it was one of the first stocks affected by OpenAI's use for education. Duolingo has figured out a way to build a premium tier that seems to be giving them benefit there. Hold on, we got some earnings news. Christina Partsenevelis has got Cisco's results.

Christina? Well, it was a strong quarter for the networking provider Cisco Systems with adjusted EPS of $0.96 a share on revenues of $14.15 billion, both higher than Wall Street estimates. Q3 gross margins also higher after management actually warned last quarter of a decline due to import duties. The press release that I'm reading right now highlights this 20% product growth, which is great, but Cisco's acquisition of software from Splunk is actually fully reflected in Q3 results.

So if you take out Splunk, products still actually increased 9%, so not bad. And then you have the Outlook, the midpoint of their range, still higher than the Street along with better than expected gross margins as well. Luckily, I was able to catch up with the CFO just about an hour ago, not even an hour ago, Cisco CFO Scott Heron, and he said that margins improve largely because tariffs changed, and you have the USMCA compliant goods

that were imported from Mexico into the US, those were exempted, so all of those two factors really acting as tailwinds for the company. The company also took in $600 million worth of AI orders and improvement from last quarter. That number was $350 million and well past their yearly billion dollar target. And I have to ask, given the recent layoff announcements, I asked Cisco CFO if we should expect any cost cuttings. He said, no, they are quote, performing extremely well.

We have some good tailwinds with campus refresh. And then he said that they'll manage their way through the tariff scenario Once it settles down stock up 1% All right, Christina. Thank you. And I know you'll be back in just a moment with core weave, which is out You'll be going through that that stock is higher by a little bit more than one and a half percent right now and don't miss Back to Cisco an exclusive interview with the CEO tomorrow at 9 a.m. on Squawk on the street. We're gonna go to Eamonn Jabbers now? Back to Gene Munster. Gene, Cisco didn't exactly blow the doors off here

on the top line despite those numbers on AI that might have been a surprise to some. How much does that speak to the overall uncertainty around core demand underneath AI excitement in the traditional enterprise market? Those results I would say they're good for Cisco and Cisco's context what is good for Cisco But I think it's even more important This is these are I would put them as great news for I think the broader AI trade and part of it is just not

Only that number that Christina outlined, that 350 million in AI infrastructure revenue going to 600 million. Now that's quarter over quarter, so that's a nice step up. Still only 3% of their overall revenue. So keep it in context. This is still a very small part. But the fact that that continues to grow is what, I mean, that is the canary that we need to be focusing in on here

in terms of the health of the broader AI trade. And it seems to be doing exceptionally well. Keep in mind, too, that Cisco is, even though their business benefits from AI infrastructure build out, it's kind of the old stuff. It's the less important. It's the lower margin part of that whole trade. And so I think the key piece here is that this is a positive

sign for broader AI. Still would not be investing in Cisco just given I think that there's just so many other names to own, better names to own that have higher growth profiles. Yeah, well, the canary is singing to a tune of 3.7% here in overtime so far. Gene, thanks. Well, now let's get to Eamon Jabber's day two of President Trump's trip to the Middle East. The White House saying the president has signed deals worth billions for American companies.

Eamon, what do we know about those numbers at this point? Yeah, not a lot, John. We're trying to get to the bottom of it, but President Trump's Middle East tour, you know, has featured quite a bit of deal-making along the way, including this announcement that we saw today from Saudi Aramco. It's a new batch, 34 of what it called memoranda of understanding with American companies that

have a potential value of approximately $90 billion. And among the deals highlighted were one with Honeywell for technology licensing, one with Aramco's US subsidiary Motiva for a project which the company said was subject to a final investment decision and a deal with Exxon Mobil related to evaluating an upgrade to a refinery. And in Doha today, President Trump announced a large purchase of Boeing aircraft by the Qataris, a deal that was confirmed in a press release from Boeing and Qatar Airlines this afternoon.

The two companies said the airline would buy up to 210 wide-body jets, which they said sets a new record as the largest wide-body order for Boeing, including the largest order for 787 Dreamliners and Qatar Airways' largest ever order. And we expect the president to continue his overseas trip tomorrow. But a big unknown here is whether he'll take a surprise detour to Turkey on Thursday to attend a Russia-Ukraine summit that's underway there. It's intended to help end the war between those two countries, so that could be a spur of the moment decision from the White House, depending on how the diplomacy is going on the ground between those two countries, John.

Back over to you. All right. Eamonn Jabbers, thank you. And in the meantime, Corweave's results are out. The stock is higher so far in overtime. Christina Partsenebola is back with the numbers. Christina. Thanks, John. Well, adjusted EPS, this is a loss per share of $1.49. We're not going to compare because this is the actual first quarter. This company is showing their earnings as a public company. Revenue is of $182 million. Sorry, I should say $982 million, which is higher than what the street anticipated.

So that's great. That's 400% increase year over year, incredible growth continuing for this company. On the call, they will be providing guidance. So that's going to be a key and provide information about the AI infrastructure space as a whole. The revenue backlog number, again, we can't compare, but they're saying it's about $25.9 billion strong. Most of that does come from OpenAI, about $11.2 billion. And then there is in here, they mentioned their major strategic deal with OpenAI as well as other customer wins.

They only mentioned IBM. I still wonder if there's going to be any announcements of new customers. There's some rumors going around about Google, et cetera, but none of that is in the release thus far. So again, we are saying that it's a revenue beat, but we won't compare Q1 EPS loss for the quarter and shares are reacting positively. Yeah, at this point, they have just about doubled off of the lows of about three weeks ago. Christina Parts-Nevelis, thank you.

And don't miss the first on CNBC interview with CoreWeave's CEO. That is tomorrow 930 a.m. again on Squawk on the Street. Now coming up, we're going to dig deeper into Cisco's results with that stock trading up about 3% in overtime. Plus another big day for tech stocks as the NASDAQ closes higher for the sixth straight session getting back to levels not seen since the end of February. We'll talk to a guest who says investors should stay defensive though and shares of cash back rewards company Ibotta jumping here in overtime after beating

earnings estimates and in line second quarter sales guidance up 11 and a half percent. Overtime is back in two. Welcome back to overtime. Shares of Supermicro continuing their run up 16% for the second straight day after earnings. We spoke to a bullish analyst on yesterday's show who initiated with an outperform and saw a more than 20% rally ahead, almost there. But remember, it's still nearly 50% lower than it was a year ago. Let's get another check now on Cisco,

that stock moving higher here in overtime, up 3.5% after reporting a beat on the top and bottom lines moments ago. Let's bring in Evercore ISI, Senior Managing Director Amit Dharanani, he has a buy rating on the stock, $67 price target. We're knocking on the door there. I'm not sure which is more interesting here.

The stats that we got on the AI-related outperformance or the fact that despite that, the revenue still, you know, is a beat, but not a dramatic beat. Yeah, you know, it's all a sign in the right direction, which is, you know, growth for Cisco, for example, is up double digits and aggregate for the first time in a while up 11%. And for what it's worth, the core networking business actually went from being down a couple of points in the Jan quarter to being up 7%, 8% this quarter.

So I think you've seen the underlying mechanics show some acceleration on the traditional enterprise networking business. AI, you know, listen, they actually got to their target of a billion dollars a quarter ahead of time, but a billion dollars on a $50 billion revenue run rate, it's two, three percent revenues, right? So I think AI would show up, but the message out of this I feel is more

the traditional enterprise networking recovery continues to hold up rather well for them. Well, that's good. At the same time, I think about IBM, right? Which for a long time people were counting out. It was seen as old tech. It's been on a really nice run so far. I know you've got a price target on that. You guys at Evercore up around $275. Are these comparable in the sense that they're both benefiting from tailwinds that are helping some of the older line names. Is that just true in general,

or is this their strategies playing out to the extent where you think this improvement might be really sustainable even beyond these current price targets? Yeah, I mean, Johnson, IBM has gone from trading at 10, 12 times earnings to 25 times earnings. So we've seen a really good re-reading there. As IBM has really moved into a more higher value,

higher margin business over time. AI for example, is a $6 billion book of business for them today, just a much bigger piece, right? I think Cisco is starting the same journey in a comparable manner. What they do have though is at this point, a better cyclical tailwind on the networking side. The big focus will be, you know,

do we have a campus, a great product next year, which would kind of extend this into a multi-year cycle, and then AI will layer on, but the hope on Cisco, the expectation of Cisco would be, it's a five, six, seven percent mid-signal revenue growth story, and AI can add a couple of points to the growth. So it becomes a bit more of an amplifier,

versus the only part of the thesis that you make. Is Cisco buying enough? IBM did HashiCorp a while ago and that sort of gives it not only a DevOps but a hybrid cloud story that's a bit different. Cisco is well positioned as they should be? Listen, you could certainly do more acquisitions. I would argue if you're Cisco, maybe on the core AI networking, so if you look at a name like Arista for example,

that's doing 20 percent revenue growth plays very well in the hyperscale. Cisco doesn't have that kind of weight in it yet. So I'd say that place and then on the security software side and observability would make a lot of sense for them to get more aggressive on M&A. Some of these companies generating a lot of free cash flow, they're digesting Splunk. But I would agree that IBM has a more mature string of Pearls M&A strategy almost when it comes

to the software deals they do, versus what Cisco does right now. Pearls, classy. I'm at thank you, I'm at Dario Nani. Thanks. As tech stocks rally for the sixth straight day, investors are selling bonds, and that's sending yields higher.

The 10 year above 4.5%, we talked about that yesterday, the 30 year back near five. Up next, Mike Santoli is gonna weigh in on why this slow upward moving yields remains the key story for stocks. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Welcome back to Overtime. Shares of nuclear power startup,

Oklo, soaring today up 15.5% after the country's last year's global warming. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Welcome back to overtime. Shares of nuclear power startup, Oklo, soaring today up 15.5% after the company reported a narrower than expected loss of seven cents versus an expected 11 cents a share.

The company also reiterating full year guidance. Stock is up in total 30% week to date. Also up 10 year yield, back above 4.5%, as Fed rate cuts look less likely. And attention turns to the deficit implications of the tax package. Senior markets commentator Mike Santoli here with me now to give his take on Treasuries. Mike? Yeah, John, threatening to break out to the upside. Here's the 30-year yield.

It's reapproaching 5%. That's a level we've only just touched and barely a couple of times over the last two years. October 2023, that was a pretty big kind of recession scare. The stock market was in a correction, made a big low right around there as yields came down. Then, of course, earlier this year we got there as well. In fact, just about a month ago in April, the 30-year was approaching 5% as the dollar was falling and there was that whole flight from US assets that maybe led to President Trump kind of in doing the initial 90-day pause on those

reciprocal tariffs so I do think you have to pay attention here now it's a good thing if it means recession risk is coming down in terms of investor perceptions and maybe the Fed has to do less. But obviously if it's about supply and deficit implications of that tax package, then you have to be aware that it can impinge on equity valuations. Take a look at stocks versus bonds, S&P 500 relative to the long-term treasury ETF, the TLT.

What's remarkable about this is as stocks were going down, you only got really the briefest period where bonds really benefited from that. A very short period of time where yields came down a lot and then they started going up again. So now, stocks relative to bonds are almost back at their highs, less than 2% from there. At some point, they could end up becoming

overstretched relative to bonds, although I think it much more says that there's not a lot of interest in owning bonds that it means that the stock market itself in a vacuum is getting overdone. Mike, how much higher can the 10-year go from here before it stops reading as, oh we're excited that we don't need a rate cut to something more ominous? I think everybody has their own threshold. 4.6, I think, is the kind of breaks the trend here a little bit. We're at 4.54 right now, so pretty close. I do think that we have to be aware that we can sort of build up calluses to these moves.

Over time, there was, you know, a couple years ago, it seemed like 3.5. I don't know if the economy can handle it. What is it going to mean for mortgage rates if we hang around 4 for a while? So I think there's a way for the economy to adapt around it. If it happens in a hurry, though, that's always when people get a little bit skittish, because it implies it's not just the bond market sniffing out some slow-moving economic trend. It looks like something a little more ominous. Skittish this year?

Never happened. Yeah, imagine. Mike Santoli, thank you. Well, now time for a CNBC News update with Bertha Coombs. Bertha. John, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council. It comes weeks after the council wrote an assessment that undercut President Trump's

legal reasoning for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. A spokesperson for the director said Gabbard is working to, quote, end the politicization of the intelligence community. Lawyers for the Wisconsin judge, who has been accused of obstructing immigration agents, are seeking to dismiss the federal charges against her. In a court filing today, Judge Hannah Duggan's lawyers claimed that she has judicial immunity for official acts

and that prosecuting her would be unconstitutional. The judge was indicted on Tuesday by a federal grand jury for allegedly obstructing agents seeking to detain an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom. And Harvard University said its president, Alan Garber, will take a 25% pay cut for the academic year starting July 1st. It comes as the federal government this week cut another $550 million in grants to the school on top of $2.2 billion that is already frozen. I don't know if that's going to make up all of the shortfall there.

John? All right. Bertha Coombs, thank you. Well, the S&P is up more than 22% since its April lows with some big names posting some big rallies. But our next guests see some risks to this recent legs of that rally. They're going to tell us what those risks are ahead when overtime comes right back. Welcome back to overtime.

Tech stocks continuing their rally today. The Nasdaq higher for the sixth straight session up nearly 10% so far in May. And some Mag-7 names with huge gains. Week to date, Nvidia up 16, Tesla too, and Meta up 11%, it's only Wednesday. And let's check on the reports we got at the top of the hour. Cisco is up about 3.5%, CoreWeave higher nearly 5.5,

and check out the boot scooting boogie that Boot Barn's doing. It is up 11% despite missing on earnings and revenue, but it is buying back $200 million of stock. It's a lot of boots and cites the resilience of its core customers despite the market conditions. Well, now, despite this week's bounce back, our next guests are wary of the economic uncertainty and say it could continue to weigh on this market.

Joining us now are Bob Dahl from Crossmark Global Investments and Barbara Duran from BD8 Capital Partners. Guys, welcome. Bob, is your concern reflected in the 10-year we were just talking about? Yeah, I heard your comments there is the ten year approaches that that magical four sixty other the uh... thirty year uh... toward that uh... five percent number uh... you know last time you're at these s and p five hundred label levels ninety

days ago uh... rates were lower thirty forty basis points lower on the uh... on the thirty year uh... so that's, I think, problematic. We've got to watch it. But also, earnings estimates are down six or so dollars from when we were at this level before. At that point, we were talking about, gee, when's the Fed going to cut?

Now we're not so sure. So the fundamentals are less certain. The soft data in the last 90 days has collapsed, hard data weakened a bit, I think there's more weakness to come. So put that all together, we're a little cautious back at these elevated levels. Now, Barb, you had an iron stomach when it comes to tech and big tech, Nvidia in particular,

but you weren't so eager around the prospect of buying more before. Have things calmed down enough? Is there enough certainty for you to start changing your mind? Yeah, no, I was very cautious, certainly not least because of all the uncertainty with tariffs. I mean, how much would the worst case stick there? But I think you've had a number of things happen, particularly with NVIDIA and AI.

I mean, you saw, for instance, Core Weave today, that demand for GPUs is continuing, or Cisco, almost a doubling of their AI products, which is small for them, but it's an indication of the demand. And plus in Nvidia, you have the Trump administration looks intent on peeling back the restrictions on exporting to different countries for our high-tech GPUs and things like that. And also the order out of Saudi Arabia, because that's been part of the story that we Haven't seen come to fruition yet. That's about the sovereign demand, you know in addition to the hyperscalers and corporate demand So yeah

I think things have changed and as you know I've held on to it through all of this because I do believe in the long-term story But it was tough to buy when things were so uncertain and And of course, I think things remain uncertain. Yes, the worst case tariffs is off, but right now the blended rate is about 17.8%. And as Bob said, that is going to slow growth and it's going to be inflationary. Whether it's a one-time adjustment or gets embedded, that is impossible to know right now. But there's still, the tariffs are still a very big risk and the ball is already rolling

in that direction. Bob is Washington still the tail whacking this market and if so is it more about these ninety-day tariff pauses in their couple of them rolling or congress in the budget uh... all of the above uh... no question about it the budget is getting more and more attention appropriately as is the tax bill uh... none of us want to see the largest tax increase in US history

on December 31st if they can't get their act together. So that will be front and center. But as Barb just mentioned, the tariffs are still a big uncertainty. You know, we feel better that with China, it's, you know, 10, 30 instead of twenty five hundred forty five depending which side of the coin you were on but that's still a lot higher than where we were that's the case for tears in general so yes less bad that it was but um... we still have a lot of fighting to get through

barb core we've is now off i think well let's see about eight and a half nine percent here in overtime this comes after some excitement about perhaps loosening restrictions around NVIDIA, AMD. We've got NVIDIA earnings coming up. Are those a catalyst for this market that might cut through some of these concerns we've been talking about?

Well, it certainly has been helpful. As we know, the AI trade and mega-cap technology has been critical in leadership phase in the last couple of years. And certainly for the last six months, there's not been much happening there because there's sources of profit taking, particularly when times are uncertain. But I think the AI trade is important to this market because again, it's the MegaCap names, the MegaCap tech especially that have led the market and were such a big percentage

of the gains in 2023. So yes, i think it's an important support for this market but it does not it does not be a change the tariff story for many other companies what we're gonna see in the economy as a whole yeah okay so bob what do you buy for safety i think you have to own some of the uh... a i stories look i'd rather own the low lower levels and i'm taking video we've been talking about it that's not was in the one the 130s a few months ago.

It got down in the 90s. That's when you buy it. At 130s, I'm a little more neutral again. So thankfully, we've had a lot of volatility. So for traders, it's been a great opportunity. All right. Bob Doll, Bob Duran, thanks to both of you. Well, talk about a bull to full debut.

Up next, a closer look at eToro's big bow and what it could mean for the IPO market. Plus shares of AI infrastructure play core weave higher. As we just mentioned, after reporting revenue grew 420% year over year. Up next, a shareholder is going to tell us what he wants to hear from management on that call, which begins at the top of the hour.

Be right back. eToro bucking any skeptics today in its market's debut. The company sold nearly six million shares at $52. That's above the expected range, raising $310 million. Its first trade was nearly at 70 bucks, and with today's gain, the market cap is now $5.4 billion. eToro rival Robinhood closing lower today in a mostly up market for tech. Well, sticking with newly public companies, CoreWeave shares higher after reporting a revenue beat.

They're up 9% so far in overtime. The CEO is saying demand is robust and accelerating. Joining us now is Mark Klein, CEO of SuRow Capital Group, which owned CoreWeave before it came public, continues to be a shareholder. Mark, my sense is that CoreWeave is a potential beneficiary, especially of this hyperscaler spending that we heard about from Meta and some others, and that cutting restrictions on foreign buying

would be a plus for them. What else could color the sense of momentum in this report? Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you for having me on. I don't think it'd be underestimated. The concerns that folks had is we're in the end of Q1 about where AI infrastructure spend and AI spend would be. I think the reiteration of commitment to spending

from Microsoft's and the Metas and Amazon's and Alphabet's of the world, aggregating $325 billion for this year and all in aggregate spending of close to $400 billion in spending in AI and AI infrastructure is an extreme catalyst for a company like CoreWeave. When you put that on top of the government commitments that you've heard, whether it was Stargate, the EU initiative, and now the news out of Saudi,

you have a backdrop for what is considered the platinum provider of services, and AI services, and AI infrastructure services. So all of that, yes, I'm sorry. How does an investor measure that? Because we got CoreWeave, got Supermicro out there, it's an infrastructure play, Dell, of course, still. What are the metrics that investors should look to

to sort of verify that platinum status? Well, it's clear by the ongoing commitment and contracts that they're receiving that they are the preferred provider. And when you see all these different companies, contracts that they're receiving, that they are the preferred provider. When you see all these different companies, OpenAI awarding an $11.9 billion contract to them, the top of the pile of AI companies are looking to CoreWeave as they're providing services.

NVIDIA not only as an initial investor, NVIDIA as investing in the IPO, they're a preferred vendor of NVIDIA. All of that leads to the fact that CoreWeave is the company that folks want to do business with. Yeah, I mean, is there a sense that there's going to be a sort of Netflix of this market kind of content provider-wise and then the other streamers that are trying to compete but maybe don't have the same kind of economics? Does CoreWeave have an economic advantage or do you think it's a technology advantage

that they're going to end up winning with? I think they have both. I think they've had extreme access to capital that they've been able to deploy against their strategy, which puts them significantly far ahead of those behind them, obviously, of the super hyperscalers that are spending a lot of their time and energy on their own work. So they are the preferred provider. And they have proven time and time and again that their technology, their ability to execute the fact that they don't have downtime in their systems is a competitive advantage for them, one question.

What happens when and if investors start to be concerned about profitability for a younger scaling company like CoreWeave versus some of these other infrastructure names? I think what you're gonna, you wanna see is continued revenue growth. As you said on the top of the show, they beat revenue, they were 980 some odd million as opposed to 859 million in Q1. I suspect they will give some level of guidance on their conference call later

and that will probably be encouraging as well. And I suspect they will give some level of guidance on their conference call later. And that will probably be encouraging as well. They'll probably go into their RPOs or sort of their forward-looking contracts. All of that, I think, will bode quite positively for the public. I think this company has been a bit misunderstood. I think they came public during a really tumultuous time in the market. And they've now showed that they do, they are quite productive.

They are clearly at the top of the pile. They are the premier provider. And I think that's what the public will realize. Speaking of turbulence in the markets, there's been a rush over recent days for this IPO window. Do you think that lasts? Yeah, look, I was one who came in this year and was looking forward to the so-called IPO parade that would start with core weave and continue.

Obviously, the tariffs and some of the economic news led to extreme volatility in the marketplace. You now have a more bullish backdrop. As you said, eToro came public and was well received. Chime recently flipped to a public offering. I think you will start to see the IPO market reemerge again, and we're looking forward to it. Okay. Mark Klein, thank you.

Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. And up next, Mike Santoli is going to look at why the concerns about the consumer are being overblown. And speaking of the consumer, Walmart, that's a big one, reports earnings before the bell tomorrow, and we have got a top analyst on what we should expect. Overtime's back in two. back in two. Welcome back to overtime. Some big movers in the consumer space today.

Shares of Burberry surging after announcing it's cutting more than a thousand jobs as part of its turnaround efforts. The company's fourth quarter sales fell slightly less than expected. Another winner is PVH posting its best day since early April after Jeffries upgraded the stock to buy from hold, raising its price target to 105 bucks from 70. The analyst citing an expected return to low single digit sales growth

and multiple expansion could come from potential resolution of those China related risks, including tariffs. And American EGLE closing lower after the retailer withdrew its full-year guidance. It plans to write off $75 million in spring and summer merchandise as the company deals with slow sales, steep discounts, and uncertain economy.

And as retailers worry about the economic backdrop, Mike Santoli's back to explain why the consumer might have some support. Mike? Yeah, John, obviously you've seen the consumer confidence surveys really plunge recently. Some pockets of weakness retailers are reporting, but there are at least the means, it seems,

in aggregate for consumers to maintain their spending. And this is the average hourly earnings of non-supervisory workers. So rank and file workers, year over year change against the CPI the consumer price index So right now you see we have a pretty good spread there where average hourly earnings are above 4% still CPI Reported yesterday was 2.3 pretty unusual to have it gap out that way and it does suggest that there is this reserve of spending power That's building up at the moment as long as the job market holds together

You can see some other periods in the past, some of them associated with ongoing recession where you did see this gap and it kind of pulled the economy out of it as inflation did go down. So maybe a little bit of a counterweight to some of those big picture concerns that are coming across. We're getting retail sales reported tomorrow morning. And that's the sense Mike is that it was the continuation of a pretty strong sense, Mike, is that it was the continuation of a pretty strong employment picture for workers that despite the increasing debt levels and even default levels in some cases, it's going to keep this humming, right? Yeah, that you can kind of work your way through. Obviously, there's going to be deceleration in some areas and it's not spread evenly,

but in terms of the macro numbers that we all look at to determine whether the expansion stays on track, it does seem as if the consumer is in better shape than often ahead of a recession. Things like household leverage and things like that. You have student loan defaults are kicking in again and all the rest of it. But it's not really an across the board amount of pressure that's being felt by the consumer. And despite the headlines, we haven't seen in the data a real increase in layoffs on employment. That's right. Exactly.

Not yet. We get weekly jobless claims tomorrow. We'll see if that's changed at all. All right. Always looking. Mike Santoli, thank you. Well, Walmart headlines, a big day of earnings tomorrow. Up next, an analyst with a buy rating on that stock is going to discuss what the numbers

could mean for the rest of the retail industry and don't forget you can catch us on the go by following the Closing Bell Overtime podcast on your favorite podcast app. Be right back. Welcome back to Overtime, well retail earning season kicks off tomorrow with Walmart set to report Q1 results before the bell. Let's set you up ahead of those numbers with our next guest, Corey Tarlo of Jeffreeds. He's got a buy rating on the stock, $120 price target. Corey, I'm looking at Walmart up I think around 6.5% year to date.

Costco is up a little more, but Walmart has done much better over 12 months. How is Walmart managing through this tariff uncertainty? We're expecting some impact to profits, but are they gaining share? Thanks so much for having me, John. It's a really difficult environment, I think, for a lot of retailers to navigate, but the good news for Walmart is that two-thirds of what they sell is food, and they sold a

lot of food, and they're the world's largest grocer. So that's on the positive, and that's actually a really good thing for the upcoming quarter that we have tomorrow. Now, the negative to that is that they've sold a lot of food, and that comes as a little bit of a lower margin. So that's where we do see a little bit of potential weakness in the quarter. But then on the outlook, to your point on tariffs, there is a lot of uncertainty. And we do think that because of tariffs, they're going to have to invest in price to try to

drive market share gains, to your question, which might mean a little bit of uncertainty in terms of the profit outlook for this year for the company. Now, what about the omnichannel strategy, sort of digital driving both in store, pick up at store and deliver to home commerce, and the idea that they had been picking up some business from the $100,000 and above households? Is that perhaps sticky? When will we know?

And does that end up benefiting Walmart in the longer run? It's a great question and it's really critical to our buy rated thesis, especially because about 75% of the share gains that Walmart's realized over the last 12 months are coming from these households that earn $100,000 plus a year in household income. And these households are coming to Walmart for value because they're tired of inflation.

But the reason that they're staying is because of the convenience. And Walmart's really elevated the convenience that they offer to your question by offering buy online pickup in store, buy online ship to home, or ship to home via drone in 10 minutes, or even Walmart in home where a Walmart associate will or ship to home via drone in 10 minutes, or even Walmart in-home, where a Walmart associate will walk into your home and put in your purchased groceries in your refrigerator and freezer for you. At a certain point, do they start to bump into Costco?

Well, certainly their Sam's Club division, which has done very, very well, will start to grow stores and potentially bump into Costco. So you do have, to your question, Sam's Club's now opening stores. They have about 600 stores today in the U.S. Costco has a similar number, but Costco's for years has been growing

at a rate of 20 to 30 stores a year, and Sam's Club for about the last six or seven years has not. But we're at a really critical juncture for this business. It's $100 billion in revenue, and it's now going to be accelerating growth over the next three to five years. And you typically wanna buy retail stocks ahead of accelerating growth,

and Sam's Club is a really critical part of that. So because of that, might you argue that the grocery business and that scale make Walmart a bit of a haven from tariffs, even though you might think the other way about all of the non-grocery stuff that's coming over, a lot of it from China? I think that's very fair. And I think that Walmart is probably the best positioned within the retail landscape to

navigate this today because they're scaling a lot of these higher margin recurring revenue streams that other retailers simply do not have. Advertising revenue, fulfillment services, membership with Walmart Plus and Sam's Club and their data ventures business. These elements are going to allow them to invest in things like lower prices, invest in higher wages and still drive margins higher. As a stock analyst, that is something that's really attractive. Okay. Kicking off retail earning season with a big one, and you got us ready for it.

Corey, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Well, Walmart is not the only big name on tomorrow's earnings calendar. Alibaba and Deere also going to report before the bell. And then during overtime, we'll get results from applied materials on the chip equipment side. Tick2 two interactive in gaming, and kava there in food.

And on the economic front, investors are gonna digest the weekly jobless claims, which Mike Santoli mentioned, as well as the April producer price index, retail sales, and industrial production reports. Before we wrap up, let's get one more check on Cisco following its earnings report. That company announcing its CFO is retiring.

The stock is up right now nearly 4%. It was also a big session, as we mentioned, for CoreWeave in its first report. As a public company, that stock remains higher. Looks like it's up about 7%, between 6 1 2 and 7% here so far in overtime as we await that call. And of course that's a precursor along with Supermicro to Nvidia earnings,

but you're gonna be coming up in overtime before too long. Now that's gonna do it for overtime today. Fast Money starts now.