U.S. stocks climbed Thursday and finished near session highs as megacap tech carried the comeback.

The S&P 500 cleared 7,700, eight sectors gained, and Financials led. Bitcoin jumped above $80,000 after Fed Governor Christopher Waller eased rate-hike fears, sending Strategy and Robinhood higher. Treasury yields kept climbing ahead of Friday’s jobs report. It was weird to see oil and the market rise all at once.

Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for nearly $13B, and Tesla rallied into its Cybercab event. Lululemon supplied the after-hours hangover with falling sales and another guidance cut. OpenAI announced its newest model, Astra, in a weird launch event where the main announcement link went down right away. The new model can browse a desktop computer and do things like set up appointments quickly (which anyone with hands can do, too.)

OpenAI President Greg Brockman called it the AGI era, or AI as smart as humans called Artificial General Intelligence. LOL sure buddy.

Stocktwits traders piled into Lululemon during the plunge, while Strategy rode Bitcoin higher. None of Thursday’s blue-chip leaders cracked the community’s top five. Retail was busy elsewhere.

Today's Briefing: Powered by Stocktwits Community API.

Lululemon, the athletic-apparel retailer, plunged after Thursday’s earnings exposed another quarter of shrinking demand and an uglier outlook. A big earnings beat could not hide the sales problem.

The RIP: $LULU ( ▲ 1.42% ) fell -14% after hours. EPS reached $2.92 vs. $1.79 expected, while revenue fell 4% to $2.42B vs. $2.46B expected. Comparable sales dropped 9%.

Even the profit beat came with an asterisk. Lululemon received $134.5M in tariff refunds plus $4.1M in interest, adding $0.86 per share and 560 basis points to gross margin.

The company now expects full-year revenue of $10.35B to $10.50B, down 5% to 7%, with EPS of $9.48 to $9.73. Third-quarter guidance calls for another 10% to 11% revenue decline.

The Americas remain the sore spot. Regional revenue fell 8%, and comparable sales dropped 12%. International revenue grew 4%, but that business is not large enough to cover the hole at home. Incoming CEO Heidi O’Neill starts next week with a turnaround already waiting on her desk.

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💰 US Diesel Hits Four-Year High as Wars Strain Global Supplies

📺 US trade deficit in July tops highest level since before 'Liberation Day'

Gloria Steinem, defining symbol of women’s movement and eloquent advocate for equality, dies at 92

📰 Will Trump’s beef plan actually lower prices for consumers

🌎 Yen soars as Bank of Japan tipped to raise interest rates

💰 Zscaler stock rises on earnings beat, upbeat guidance

📊 TSLA Stock Up 7% Ahead Of Cybercab Launch Event — Fund Manager Sees Selloff Ahead, Citing Past Patterns

🤖 CLS Stock Jumps 12% As Broadcom AI Call Sparks Switch Rally

Nvidia, the dominant maker of AI accelerators, agreed Thursday to buy Hugging Face, the open platform where developers share models, datasets, and tools. Nvidia promised to keep the platform open and continue supporting competing chips and cloud providers. The platform, one of the first I used to generate AI images way back when, was recently hacked by rouge AI’s.

The RIP: $NVDA gained +1.8% to $228.45. The deal values Hugging Face at $12.93B, including up to $1B in stock-based retention awards, and is expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.

An AI model that OpenAI was testing broke into Hugging Face recently. OpenAI later acknowledged it could have responded sooner to prevent the intrusion, as the agents searched for ways to get around a test the company was running. That makes Nvidia’s promise to preserve openness, safety, and support for rival hardware more than just lip service.

More than 18M developers and 200,000 companies use Hugging Face to access over 3M models. Owning that distribution hub gives Nvidia a stake in nearly every flavor of AI, including models that compete with its largest customers. It also paid almost three times Hugging Face’s $4.5B valuation from 2023. Cheap insurance for a $5.5T company is still expensive insurance.

The Community Read: The $NVDA room is split on whether $12.9B buys control or insurance ->

Tesla will show off its steering-wheel-free Cybercab Thursday evening as it tries to turn years of robotaxi promises into an actual business. The stock ran ahead of the presentation, set to start around 5:45et. Only one major problem with whatever Muskie is about to trot out: Waymo self driving cars are already around, and no one really cares.

The RIP: $TSLA ( ▲ 5.42% ) climbed +5.4% to $376.37. Tesla had 420 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas as of Wednesday, including 45 Cybercabs. Waymo had 988.

Waymo’s nationwide commercial fleet has already topped 4,000 vehicles. Tesla began Cybercab production in April, but Elon Musk warned the initial pace would be “very slow.” Reuters also found limited availability, long waits, and inaccurate downtown drop-offs while testing Tesla’s existing robotaxi service in Dallas and Houston.

Then there is safety. An independent IIHS study found Waymo’s driverless vehicles had 68% fewer police-reported crashes than comparable human drivers. Par for the course. But Tesla’s supervised FSD system remains under federal investigation over crashes involving traffic violations and reduced visibility. If you haven’t seen the video of the Tesla blinded by a sunset and hitting a line of traffic built up, don’t look for it.

FSD is not Cybercab’s unsupervised system, but Tesla has not produced a comparable driverless safety record yet, and cool doors will only get you so far. Fleet size, paid rides, production volume, and safety data would give investors something they did not get at Tesla’s 2024 Cybercab reveal, if tonight’s show has any of that.

10.2K WATCHERS · 75% BULLISH · NORMAL ACTIVITY

Summit Therapeutics surged after partner Akeso said ivonescimab produced a statistically significant overall-survival benefit over Keytruda in a Phase 3 lung-cancer study conducted in China. The full survival figures remain under wraps until a medical conference. Ivonescimab is still investigational in the U.S. and Europe.

82.9K WATCHERS · 55% BULLISH · NORMAL ACTIVITY

Strategy ripped as Bitcoin crossed $80,000 after Fed Governor Christopher Waller eased rate-hike fears. The company also launched a seven-city AI forum series with Google Cloud, but the crypto move did the heavy lifting. The Stocktwits split was nearly even for a stock that gained almost 17%.

Bearish 🐻 | Bullish 🐮 | It’s Complicated 😵‍💫

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Macro: Nonfarm payrolls (8:30 AM ET), State Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report (9:00 AM ET), FOMC Press Release (9:00 AM ET). 📊
Pre-Market Earnings: $ZENA ZenaTech Inc.. ☀️
After-Market Earnings: $PLCE Childrens Place Inc. 🌙

P.S. You can listen to all of these earnings calls on Stocktwits.

Want to see some change? Email me, Kevin Travers, with feedback, and follow me on Stocktwits. Send me charts and ideas! Refer a friend for this quarter’s edition of The RIP Forecast 😎

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