Market Forecasts, Nvidia Saves the World, Reddit Preps for IPO

Vonetta Logan's weekly recap of the big business, news, markets, political, cultural and viral trending stories featured this week on Daily Dose

What’s up tastynation! Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekly Dose! Each week, I recap the top stories that I covered on Daily Dose. If you missed any eps of Daily Dose you can catch up on them here. 

I’m back! I took some much-needed time off last week and had the pleasure of traveling to one of my favorite places: Utah. Something about that fresh mountain air just leaves me rejuvenated.

I also go there to stock up on my yearly supply of fry sauce. Idk why people in Utah are obsessed with a condiment, but I’m here for it. 

Let’s get to this week’s recap. 

Get out your crystal ball

You may have chosen the wrong week to stop sniffing glue, but it was the right week to upgrade a stock index.

To start the week, Goldman Sachs raised its year-end target for the benchmark S&P 500 to 5,200, reflecting roughly a 4% upside from current levels, citing an improved earnings outlook for the index companies. Haha, the joke’s on them because we damn near hit that number by Friday.

Of course, the market’s eye watering new highs are driven by the dominance of the Magnificent 7 stocks- Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA).

Here’s a new fun fact for your next cocktail party: Deutsche Bank analysts highlighted that the Magnificent 7′s combined market cap alone would make it the second-largest country stock exchange in the world. Is this frightening? Exciting? Well, whatever it is it was validated this week because after Nvidia dominated earnings (see more below) the entire global economy rallied.

Also, Mag 7 member Amazon, heads into the Dow starting Monday, replacing Walgreens (WBA). European shares rose to a record high on Thursday, boosted by a rally in global stocks that also saw Japan's blue-chip Nikkei index hit an all-time high.

The S&P, Dow, and Nasdaq all rallied to new all-time highs this week. But one index is notably absent from the party and that’s the Russell 2000. The small-cap index had a shaky start to the near and has had several days with at least 1% swings in either direction. 

Nvidia props up the entire global economy 

What a difference a day makes. In this case the difference was 24 little hours and a few hundred billion dollars.

On Tuesday, Nvidia had its worst day since October 2023, a day before the company was set to report quarterly earnings. On Tuesday morning, its stock price was $741 per share, with a market cap of $1.83 trillion (ahead of Amazon’s $1.75 trillion and Alphabet’s $1.78 trillion at market open).

Then, Nvidia shares plunged as much as 8.6%, sending its market cap as low as $1.67 trillion before the company’s stock began to recover. People were wringing their hands and writing think pieces about how AI was dead and how the economy was gonna collapse.

On Wednesday, Nvidia reported earnings and we basically learned that Nvidia is the Taylor Swift of tech companies. Everything it touches instantly goes platinum. Nvidia’s total revenue rose 265% from a year ago. It also forecasted revenue of $24 billion in sales for the current quarter.

Nvidia’s quarterly results are now mimicking what it used to report for the full year. The stock shot up 16%, adding $277 billion in market cap (the entire market cap of Netflix (NFLX)) overnight. Nvidia has dethroned Tesla as the most traded stock on Wall Street. The company is now worth north of $2 trillion, worth more than Amazon and Google.

Nvidia is also worth more than the GDP of Canada. WHAT IS HAPPENING? Not only did Nvidia lift the entire global economy (see above), but chip stocks were en fuego this week as well. Nvidia’s chip peers like AMD (AMD), SuperMicro (SMCI), ARM (ARM) and SMH (SMH) also posted bonkers numbers this week and they didn’t even do anything. Way to contribute to the group project you guys. 

If 4chan had a Bloomberg terminal, then went public 

This week, the so-called front page of the internet, Reddit, filed for IPO. Its market debut would mark the first major tech initial public offering of the year and the first social media IPO since Pinterest (PINS) went public in 2019.

Reddit raised about $1.3 billion in funding and has a post valuation of $10 billion, according to deal-tracking service PitchBook. Reddit also serves as the origin story for meme stock lore, r/wallstreetbets, HODL, tendies, diamond hands, and to the moon, all the stock trading lexicon we love to hate started on Reddit.

Because of its unique relationship with its content posters and moderators, Reddit plans to sell a chunk of its IPO shares to its platform's users. It aims to reserve an as-yet-undetermined number of shares for 75,000 of its most prolific so-called redditors when it goes public next month.

Another fun fact disclosed in the SEC filing is that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a decently sized shareholder. Entities affiliated with Altman hold 8.7% of Reddit’s outstanding shares. Well, I hope he makes some cash during the IPO because he’s still looking for $7 trillion to fund his AI fantasies.

But even in its fillings, Reddit warns that its own users on r/wallstreetbets could wreak havoc on the stock. The company warned potential investors that one of its subreddits, the infamous r/wallstreetbets, could make its stock price and volume extremely volatile—and there’s little Reddit can do about it. The apes are calling from inside of the house. While no one knows what the future holds, it will be great to have another liquid underlying to trade in the tech/social space. 

Random chicanery 

These are my favorite funny stories of the week

•  Come hang out at the Orlando Airport for funsies! 
• Men want nipples like Beckham 
• KFC (YUM) unveils the Chizza (no one asked for this) 
• Will Tom Eat It? Trader Joe’s Lobster Bisque Pasta 

That’s it for this week! See ya next week! 

Vonetta Logan has more than a decade of markets experience and has been a trader for five years. She is an on-air personality, creative writer and news correspondent at tastylive. Vonetta appears Monday-Friday on Daily Dose and contributes to Luckbox Magazine. @vonettalogan

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