Boeing Back in Business

✈️ Boeing is finally getting some good publicity with a $96B Qatar deal and a lift from China.

Author

Ankit Sinha
May 15, 2025

Silver banana goes to…




In this issue of the peel:

  • 🚀 Markets are really stretching out those gains, notching their sixth consecutive day in the green.

  • ✈️ Boeing is finally getting some good publicity with a $96B Qatar deal and a lift from China.

  • 💰 CoreWeave made a bag. The AI company had a 400% revenue increase in its first-ever earnings report as a public company.

Market Snapshot

Banana Bits

The Daily Poll

What’s your take on Qatar’s Boeing investment + plane order?

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Previous Poll:

What surprised you the most?

US-China truce: 27.7% // India-Pak ceasefire: 11.6% // $800B in a day?!: 25% // Nothing shocks me anymore: 35.7%

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Macro Monkey Says

Sky High Deals with Qatar

After years of straight drama and tea, Boeing’s week can finally be characterized as calm and peaceful, where management hasn’t woken up in the middle of the night with cold sweats. 

On the “glamorous jet-setting” side of things, Boeing just inked a major investment deal with Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which bought a minority stake in Boeing’s commercial aircraft division. This is part of a broader “Trump trade diplomacy tour,” which, depending on your political leanings, is either a masterclass in deal-making or an elaborate jet-fueled PR stunt. 

Former President Trump made a cameo in the drama—literally—by announcing that Qatar also agreed to purchase up to 220 Boeing aircraft, including widebodies and Dreamliners, in a deal reportedly worth close to $100 billion.

In short, this move gives Boeing a shot of much-needed investor confidence and a win for the administration in terms of deal-making. So, everyone is happy. 

On the other side of things, Boeing quietly reached a settlement with the family of John Barnett, a former quality control manager who turned whistleblower before tragically dying in March 2024. Barnett had long raised concerns about safety issues at Boeing’s factories—claims that gained serious traction after multiple high-profile manufacturing mishaps.

While the details of the settlement remain confidential, the payout signals Boeing’s desire to move past its recent PR nightmare without airing more dirty laundry in court.

The Takeaway?

Boeing’s week was basically the corporate version of “a little champagne, a little chaos.” On one hand, Qatar is backing Boeing with a royal flush of cash and plane orders. On the other hand, the company continues to reckon with the ghosts of its quality issues and whistleblower scandals. Investors are cheering. Lawyers are settling. And somewhere, a Boeing PR team is probably popping antacids by the fistful.

Career Corner

Question

Question on the connection between S&T and IBD: Is S&T involved in equity/debt capital raising for comps? My understanding is no, because S&T is more focused on institutional investors (HF, PF, etc.) rather than companies. Is it the financing side of a firm’s IBD that typically executes capital raising transactions?

Answer

There is a group that essentially sits between IB (insiders) and S&T (outsiders), called "Capital Markets". When IB has a transaction that involves investors, like an IPO, secondary offering, or bought deal, Capital Markets will quarterback the execution of the transaction, with S&T as the investor interface.

That can include everything from pricing an IPO to allocating orders. S&T is the customer-facing distribution network for "selling" the deal.

To your last question, ST executes the deal by soliciting and gathering orders from institutional investors for the debt securities being offered.

A fixed income sales person will regularly provide service to fixed income fund managers, who must decide whether or not to buy any of the issues... with help from their fixed income sales person (in ST).

Also, I wouldn't describe the divisions in terms of "public" and "private" because they all operate primarily in public financial markets. Rather, think client relationships: in IB, the client is a company, and in ST, the client is the institutional investor. They each serve their clients in different ways at different times.

I think the difference you are trying to capture is more "insider" and "outsider." IB is always "insider", since they will have access to material non-public information about their clients (i.e., are the thinking of M&A, issuance, bankruptcy, whatever), while S&T (and research) operates exclusively as an "outsider" with ONLY public information to recommend investment strategies, execute market trades, etc.

Head Mentor, WSO Academy

What's Ripe

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) 15.6% 

  • Tencent Music's stock jumped 15.6% to $16.99, following a strong first-quarter earnings report. The company reported robust revenue growth and improved margins, driven by increased paying users and strategic investments in AI technologies. This performance underscores Tencent Music's resilience and adaptability in a competitive market.

Reddit (RDDT) 11.1%

  • Here’s a fun one. Reddit surged 11% yesterday on no real discernible news. When your stock’s ripping more than 5% just because, that’s when you know you’ve reached meme-lord status.

What's Rotten

Global-E Online (GLBE) 19.1%

  • GLBE reported earnings and got everything right except the only metric that matters at the end of the day: The stock price. Shares fell despite reporting a 30% year-over-year revenue increase and a 34% rise in gross merchandise value to $1.24 billion for Q1 2025. 

  • The decline appears to be driven by investor concerns over increased competition in the third-party merchant-of-record space, following the company's renewed partnership with Shopify, which now allows additional providers in this segment.

Klaviyo (KVYO) 7.1%

  • Although Klaviyo ripped the band-aid off its earnings report last week, the stock is still facing an avalanche of investor selling, even after the company reported a 33% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 and surpassed analyst expectations. 

  • The culprit might just be plain old profit-taking and concerns over the company's valuation, as well as a recent price target reduction from Needham, which lowered its target from $56 to $45, citing market conditions.

Thought Banana

CoreWeave Earnings Debut 

CoreWeave just dropped its first earnings report as a public company, and Wall Street no longer has an excuse to sleep on this company. They went public in the midst of AI/GPU but stumbled a bit on the IPO in March. Day 1 trading was less than stellar, but investors started paying attention in the weeks following.

As a refresher, they essentially are Nvidia's distributor of choice. They purchase older Nvidia chips that are hard for customers to get their hands on, and then flip those chips for a markup. The issue was that pretty much 70% of their revenue came from one customer: Microsoft. 

Well, despite the revenue concentration, CoreWeave reported $981 million in revenue for the quarter, a 400% increase over the same quarter a year ago and beyond the $853 million expected by Analysts. That’s insane when you consider the scale they've already been able to amass. 

This isn’t some boiler room startup based out of some random guy’s garage, being able to increase revenue from $100 to $500. This is a real company with billions of dollars in revenue, growing 400%. Pretty impressive, and led to an immediate 11% pop in after-hours trading

CoreWeave still posted a net loss of $314 million (or $1.49 per share). But here’s the thing: this is Silicon Valley math. As long as you're growing fast and saying "AI" in every third sentence, red ink is just a spicy line on a chart.

So, let’s ignore earnings for now. Back to revenue, the company announced that its revenue backlog (think: future money, already spoken for) hit $25.9 billion, thanks in large part to a blockbuster $11.2 billion deal with OpenAI. Not bad for a company that started as an Eth*reum mining outfit in a New Jersey warehouse a few years ago.

This quarter marks a major milestone in CoreWeave's transition from scrappy GPU specialist to AI cloud heavyweight. Riding the generative AI wave, the company has positioned itself as the go-to infrastructure provider for model training, inference, and other computer-hungry use cases. 

Its IPO earlier this year was a bold swing—a $35 billion valuation—and so far, they’re backing it up with numbers, not just buzzwords.

That said, competition looms. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and, of course, Nvidia (which happens to be a major investor in CoreWeave) are all vying for dominance in the AI cloud arms race. 

CoreWeave’s play? Stay niche, stay nimble, and keep racking up long-term deals while the hyperscalers fight over who has the prettiest cloud. Additionally, some people wonder about the sustainability of a business model that relies 100% on Nvidia to sell you their GPUs when they can stop that flow anytime they want.

The Takeaway?

CoreWeave may still be in the red, but it’s growing fast and carving out a niche for itself within the AI space. With monster revenue, a massive backlog, and a killer partnership with OpenAI, it's proving it's more than just another tech IPO. 

Sure, it’s not profitable yet—but in this market, "profitable" is just a five-letter word you worry about after your valuation triples.

The Big Question: Is betting your business on one supplier (Nvidia) and one customer (Microsoft) visionary—or a future facepalm waiting to happen?

Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

If the circumference of a circle inscribed in a square is 25π, what is the perimeter of the square?

Answer: 100

Today

Set X consists of 8 consecutive integers. Set Y consists of all the integers that result from adding 4 to each of the integers in set X and all the integers that result from subtracting 4 from each of the integers in Set X. How many more integers are there in set Y than in set X?

Send your guesses to [email protected]

❝

The desire to perform all the time is usually a barrier to performing over time.

Robert Olstein

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Happy Investing,
Chris, Vyom, Ankit, Mithun & Patrick