The Rundown - CoreWeave Shares Pop as Revenue Doubles, Cava’s Strong Traffic Growth Ignites Investor Appetite

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Market update for Wednesday August 12, 2026Check out the Public app for incredible investing tools and to support the show (LINK)Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today’s episode, Zaid covers:July inflation cools to 3.4%CoreWeave’s revenue surges and backlog grows to $130 billion Cava’s strong traffic growth as customers keep spending on pita chipsLumentum surges on booming AI data-center demand, while On Holding recovers from historic selloffFun Fact: AI computing power is becoming a tradable asset class

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Wednesday, August 12th. In today's episode, we'll break down the July inflation report that just dropped this morning and what it means for the Fed. We'll also recap earnings from Corwee, Kava, and Lumentum. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how you'll soon be able to trade AI computing power like a barrel of oil. We got a great show for you today. Let's go.

Tuesday was another slow day for the markets. The S&P 500 fell 0.3%. And the NASDAQ dropped 0.6%. It was a relatively light volume day. I think traders were waiting for the July CPI report before making any big moves. And we got the numbers this morning. Headline inflation for the month of July was up 3.4% year over year, which was right in line with expectations.

and then on a monthly basis, prices were up just 0.1%. Core CPI, which strips out food and energy, rose 0.2% for the month and was up 2.5% from a year ago. Again, both those numbers were in line with expectations. So overall, this was a pretty tame inflation report. The big picture is that the energy shock from the Iran War continues to fade. Energy prices fell another 1.5% in July after dropping 5.7% in June. Now, gas prices are still much higher than they were before the war started, but, but they were lower on average in July than they were in June.

Now, keep in mind, inflation is still above the Fed's 2% target, not to mention oil prices are starting to tick back up again. But I think this report will take the pressure off the Fed to raise rates in September. Remember, there were three Fed officials that wanted to hike rates at the last meeting, but after this CPI report and the cooler than expected job report from last week, the market is now pricing in a 42% chance of a rate hike at the September meeting. And overall, investors seem to like what they saw. I'm recording this in the pre-market and stock.

futures are flashing green and treasury yields are falling too. The next big thing to watch will be what Fed Chair Kevin Warsh says at the Jackson Hole meeting later this month. That meeting starts on August 27th. I'm still waiting for my invite. I'm sure it's coming. We'll be staying on top of that, whether we're there in person or not, along with everything else happening in the market. So definitely get subscribed for the podcast and tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Corwee. Corweave reported earnings yesterday after the bell, and the stock is surging. The AI cloud company had a solid quarter.

Revenues more than doubled from a year ago to $2.58 billion. That slightly beat Wall Street estimates, but the company still isn't profitable yet. They reported a net loss of $626 million, which, to be fair, was smaller than what Wall Street was expecting. But I think the most important number to come from the earnings was the backlog. Corweave ended June with $104 billion of contracted future revenue. And since the quarter ended back in June, the company says they've already signed another $25 billion in customer commitments. Now, just a quick refresher on what CoreWeave does. They're one of these new Neo-Cloud companies.

Essentially, they build data centers packed with Nvidia GPUs, and they rent out that computing power to companies. Their customers include Microsoft, OpenAI, and meta. And right now, the demand is really strong. Management says that Corweave is effectively sold out for the rest of the year. Management also said that all the new deals that they're signing right now carry margins that are 5 to 10% higher than before because capacity is so tight that they can charge more. So on the surface, Corweave is doing great. But here's the catch. Building all this capacity and all these data centers is insanely expensive.

And unlike the hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, Corweave doesn't have an existing business that generates a ton of cash. So Corweave has to borrow a ton of money to pay for the buildout. Corweave has roughly $35 billion in debt on their balance sheet, which is a pretty heavy debt load for a company this size. Not to mention, Corweave expects to spend between $35 and $39 billion on capital expenditure this year, so their spending isn't slowing down anytime soon. But Wall Street seems to be ignoring the debt concerns for now, at least. Corewee's stock is up around 15% this morning in pre-market trading.

You know, personally, I just don't know how Corweeve will be able to be able to. to compete long term with the hypers. Like, they're not going to be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Not to mention all the money that CoreWeave is borrowing to build out their data centers probably carries a higher interest rate than what Google, Amazon, or Microsoft can borrow money for.

And you know, if we ever see a slowdown for AI compute, a company like CoreWeave could be one of the first to take the biggest hit. So you guys could probably tell how I feel about Neo Clouds. I just don't know how they're going to be competitive in the long term. I could be wrong though. If you're someone that's bullish on CoreWeave in the Neo Clouds,

space in general. Let me know in the comments on what I'm missing. Let's shift gears from AI and talk about food. Kava, the Mediterranean restaurant chain, reported earnings last night and they served up another strong quarter. No pun intended. Revenues grew more than 30% from a year ago to $368 million. That beat Wall Street expectations. And the number that really stood out to me was that same store sales jumped 9%. That means that people are coming back frequently to the local Kava spot. In fact, guest traffic increased 5.3% last quarter. To me, that's pretty impressive considering that a lot of restaurant chains these days have been struggling to get people through the door. Kava says that their new menu items are helping bring people back. Their

pomegranate glaze salmon has been popular. And apparently people really, really like their flavored pita chips. It's become a popular add-on to orders. I'm personally a big fan of the pizza chips. In fact, when the CEO of Kava was on the rundown a few months ago, I asked them what they were putting in those chips because I'm addicted to them at this point. So yeah, overall, Kava had a really impressive quarter and they continued to expand their footprint. The company opened 17 net new restaurants last quarter, bringing their total to 476 locations. Now, the earnings weren't all great.

Margins did slip from a year ago, partly because salmon costs more and wages are going up. And Kava also said that sales slowed in mid-July, likely from the lettuce parasite outbreak. But Kava said that their supply chain has not been impacted. Overall, investors like what they heard, and Kava stock is up around 10% this morning in reaction to the earnings. And if you zoom out on the stock chart, it's been a pretty wild year for Kava. Coming into these earnings, the stock was down 4% on the year and down more than 35% from its peak back in April. So this is a much-needed post-earnings bounce by the stock. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today.

Lumentum shares are jumping this morning after the company reported another monster quarter. Lumentum is a company that makes optical components that help move data between servers inside AI data centers, and business is booming right now. Revenues more than doubled from a year ago to just over $1 billion, and adjusted earnings came in at $3.23 a share, which was well ahead of estimates, and way up from the $88 to share last year. is exploding for the company. Adjusted operating margins jump to 36.6% up from the 15% a year ago. So the AI boom has been huge for Lumentum's business. The company said the demand for its

newest 1.6 terabyte optical transceivers and high-powered lasers continue to surge as AI data centers get bigger and more complex. Lumentum stock is up around 8% this morning at the time in this recording. And if you zoom out on the stock chart, it is ridiculous. The stock has doubled this year and has gone up more than 500% in the last 12 months. Now, on the flip side, let's talk about on holdings. The Swiss shoe company got hammered yesterday. The stock fell 19% for its biggest one-day decline on record after reporting disappointing earnings. Now, sales were up 13% to about $1.05 billion, but that missed Wall Street expectations. On top of that, the company slightly lowered their full-year sales growth outlook. And what's interesting here is that some of the slow

down was intentional. The sneaker market in the U.S. has gotten very promotional with brands discounting their shoes to clear inventory. On Cloud, on the other hand, basically said they'd rather sell fewer shoes than sell them at a discount. Now, On wants to be seen as this premium brand and not one that discounts all the time. Personally, I don't hate this strategy from On, but investors didn't love it, and that's why the stock got hammered. The stock is recovering a bit this morning after yesterday's sell-off, it's up around 1% at the time this recording. But overall, though, it's been a tough year for On. The stock has lost about 35% and is near 52-week lows.

They make great shoes, though. I got to give them that. Their shoes are fantastic. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. AI computing power is officially becoming a tradable asset class. Starting on October 5th, you'll be able to trade AI computing power like it's a barrel of oil, the CME group, which is the biggest futures exchange. in the world is partnering with a startup called Silicon Data to launch the first ever futures

contract tied to GPU rental prices. And you know, there's actually a practical reason to do this. If you're an AI company and you think that compute prices are going to skyrocket next year, you can buy these futures contracts and lock in a price today. And then on the other side, a company like Corweeb, which sells computing capacity, could hedge against rental prices falling. It's basically the same way that airlines hedge against jet fuel prices. And Silicon Data CEO thinks that the computing futures market could eventually become bigger than the oil futures market. So yeah, we are increasingly seeing the financialization of GPUs and AI computing. I talked about on yesterday's show how Wall Street firms are beginning to issue debt and use the GPUs themselves as collateral.

And by the way, once these futures contracts start trading, I mean, there's going to be ETFs and inverse ETFs and leverage ETFs all tied to these things. So you know how everyone for the last couple years talked about how, data was the new oil. Maybe it turns out that GPUs are the new oil with the way that Wall Street is starting to commoditize it. Let's just hope that we don't look back two to three years from now and talk about how there were signs that this was the top. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did, and you have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast, all of that engagement really does help us out. And it helps other people.

find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.