…plus WrestleMania and Big Egg earnings
| r/cute mascot (Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images) | |
|
|
Last Week's Market Moves | | Dow Jones
39,807 (+0.84%) | S&P 500
5,254 (+0.39%) | Nasdaq
16,379 (-0.30%) | Bitcoin
$70,815 (+10.97%) |
| Dow Jones
39,807 (+0.84%) | S&P 500
5,254 (+0.39%) | Nasdaq
16,379 (-0.30%) | Bitcoin
$70,815 (+10.97%) |
|
|
|
Hey Snackers, It's April 1, so your inbox is already full of brands launching bottled hot-dog water and WiFi-connected tube socks. It can get tiring, so we'll only try to fool you once in this letter as we announce our rebrand from Snacks to Meals. Carry on in peace. The S&P 500 notched yet another record high over the short trading week — and closed out its best first quarter since 2019. On Thursday FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried got 25 years in prison, having been convicted of stealing $8B in customer funds. | Btw... Do you want to start getting Snacks daily? Or prefer to unsubscribe? Manage your subscription preferences here. | |
|
|
Investors upvoted Reddit's IPO, hoping AI deals could help the 19-year-old biz finally post a profit | The front page of the internet… and, lately, the biz section. The birthplace of many memes, Reddit recently went public on the NYSE (the first social-media IPO since Pinterest's in 2019). Reddit shares rallied after its listing last month but fell sharply last week, ending below their first-day close price. Despite its big cultural influence, Reddit's a guppy in the social ocean. It has 73M daily users across its 100K subreddits (community pages like r/funny and r/WallStreetBets). By comparison, Meta's Facebook has 2B+ daily users and Snap nearly 400M. r/aww: Reddit offered 8% of its IPO shares to thousands of its most "extremely online" users. It was an interesting but not unheard-of move (Etsy and Airbnb did it). From AITA to EBITDA: Reddit's not profitable. Its IPO filing said its loss narrowed to $91M last year, while revenue was up 21% from a year earlier.
One does not simply… walk into money. Reddit's main biz is advertising, but it's struggled with moderation and a largely ad-unfriendly environment. (NSFW subreddits aside, how many brands are dying to be near r/BreadStapledToTrees?) Investors seem to be hyped over a newer part of Reddit's biz: licensing access to data from its 1B posts to train AI models. Reddit mentioned "AI" 60+ times in its IPO filing, saying it expected to make $203M from AI data licensing deals over the next three years. Co-op: Reddit struck an AI partnership with Google that's worth a reported $60M/year. Analysts think an OpenAI deal could be next, partly because CEO Sam Altman owns ~8% of Reddit's shares. Lurker: Last month the FTC started investigating Reddit's data-licensing biz, which could slow down deals.
|  | THE TAKEAWAY |
| Money can change people platforms… Reddit users worry that quarterly-report pressures could cause execs to change the platform in ways that diminish its old-internet charm. And users have shown they're not afraid to disagree with corporate LOUDLY: last year thousands of popular subreddits went dark to protest API changes. Yet Reddit superusers' stake in the stock could curb urges to downvote profit-motivated moves. | |
|
|
| | Is Now the Time to Add AI to Your Portfolio? | No more guesswork: Dubbed "game-changing technology," RAD AI decodes the language of the internet into actionable, valuable insights. These findings deliver 3.5X ROI — and sometimes help brands avoid disaster. AIl eyes on AI…Nvidia, Walmart, Cisco and Reddit have all leaned into AI, creating billions of dollars in value. That's the market power of AI. For RAD AI, the potential is evident from the numbers… $27M raised from 6,500+ investors, including Fidelity, execs at Google, Amazon, Meta and is also backed by the Adobe Fund for Design. ~3X revenue growth from 2022 to 2023 — while landing major clients including Hasbro, Skechers, Sweetgreen and more. Invest now and get up to 15% bonus shares.* |
|
|
| Skippin' painted Easter eggs… because egg prices are no yolk. Cal-Maine Foods, America's largest egg producer, cracks open Q3 earnings tomorrow. In the same quarter a year ago, it was living sunny side up: its profit had 8X'd as egg prices soared (blame bird flu). This quarter might not go over as easy: the average US price for a dozen has fallen to $3 from $4.20 last year, and this January Cal-Maine reported a ~90% profit plunge. Cooling prices aren't all they're cracked up to be: eggs still cost nearly 2X what they did in 2021. Canadian-tux time… Levi Strauss drops earnings Wednesday as blue-jean spending buckles. The 171-year-old retailer is trying to stitch up its biz by pushing head-to-toe "denim dressing" (picture: $80 denim corset) and focusing on direct-to-consumer sales (less Macy's, more Levi dot com). D2C makes up 40%+ of Levi's sales, and it wants to boost that to 55% by 2027 as its wholesale biz sags. In January the jeans icon reported weak sales growth and planned to lay off up to 15% of employees. Analysts expect more denim distress ahead. | |
|
|
| Tragedy strikes… Baltimore's Key Bridge collapsed last week after a container ship struck it, killing six people. As crews clean up the wreckage, America's ninth-largest port remains closed. The port's shuttering will halt $15M/day in economic activity, with Carnival saying its cruise earnings could take a $10M hit. The port is one of the biggest in the US for car shipments and coal exports, and both industries could face costly reroutes. On the ground, Maryland residents are stuck with longer commutes. It could take years to rebuild the bridge. That's capitalism's music… WrestleMania 40 piledrives into Philly this weekend. The WWE event is People's Elbowing its way onto NBCUniversal's Peacock for the last year before heading to Netflix for the next 10 (in a $5B deal). It's a slam for WWE — some two-day tix are going for $24K. WWE sold 90K tickets in one day, breaking the prior year's $22M total sales. Behind the scenes, scandal has rocked WWE parent TKO Group's board: WWE founder Vince McMahon resigned this year amid sexual-assault allegations. He's sold $1B+ of TKO shares, but the stock's up this year. | |
|
|
| Call time on tax season with 20% off | |
|
|
What else we're Snackin' | BrainGame: The first human patient of Elon Musk's brain-computer company Neuralink said he used the wireless implant to stay up all night playing "Civilization VI." Neuralink had gotten FDA approval for clinical trials last year. TD: The NFL pulled an audible, slotting two games on Christmas Day, backtracking on its no-Wednesday-games stance. Holiday games have been a hit for football fans, with viewership jumping 29% last year from 2022. Blink: Sam Altman's Worldcoin hit another roadblock after Portuguese authorities ordered it to stop collecting "proof of personhood." The eye-scanning orb and token have faced growing opposition over privacy concerns.
|
|
|
Want your Snacks daily? |  | The Daily Newsletter |
| Get fresh takes on financial news every week day. Try a sample: | | |
|
|
Snack Fact Of the Day | The average US tax refund so far this year is $3.2K | | |
|
|
This Week | Monday: Easter Monday. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index. Earnings expected from PVH Corp. National Poetry Month begins. World Coal-Carrying Championship. April Fools' Day Tuesday: February job openings. Earnings expected from Paychex, Cal-Maine Foods, and Dave & Buster's. International Fact-Checking Day Wednesday: Initial jobless claims. Earnings expected from Blackberry and Levi Strauss. World Party Day Thursday: Earnings expected from Conagra, Lamb Weston, and Simply Good Foods. 75th anniversary of NATO formed Friday: US unemployment rate. F1 Japanese Grand Prix weekend begins
Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Alphabet, Carnival, Comcast, Lamb Weston, and Snap *RAD AI disclosure: This is a paid advertisement for RAD AI's Regulation CF offering. Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.radintel.ai. Equity crowdfunding investments in private placements, and start-up investments in particular, are speculative and illiquid. They involve a high degree of risk and those investors who cannot afford to lose their entire investment should not invest in start-ups. **TurboTax disclosure: As the leader in tax preparation, more federal returns are prepared with TurboTax than any other tax preparation provider. Visit http://turbotax.intuit.com/lp/yoy/guarantees.jsp for TurboTax product guarantees and other important information. Limited time offer for TurboTax 2023. Discount applies to TurboTax federal products only. Actual prices are determined at the time of print or e-file and are subject to change without notice. Terms, conditions, features, availability, pricing, fees, service and support options subject to change without notice. Intuit, TurboTax and TurboTax Online, among others, are registered trademarks and/or service marks of Intuit Inc. in the United States and other countries. | |
|
|
Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate... See more | |
|
|
