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Market Snapshot

📉 Banana Bits

• Wall Street edged to another record as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq posted modest gains.

• Brent crude rose above $101 as the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed.

• Verizon reported its first positive Q1 phone subscriber growth since 2013.

• Domino’s shares fell 8.9% after weak earnings and sluggish U.S. sales.

• Sun Pharma agreed to acquire Organon for $11.75B in cash.

Market News

Still Climbing Somehow

Monday’s tape didn’t so much rally as politely clear its throat, post another record, and pretend nothing was on fire in the background.

The S&P 500 rose 8.83 points, or 0.12%, to 7,173.91, and the Nasdaq added 50.50 points, or 0.20%, to 24,887.10, both fresh records. The Dow was the one adult in the room not invited to the photo, slipping 62.92 points, or 0.13%, to 49,167.79. Not a face-ripping move, but at this altitude even a green candle gets framed.

The macro backdrop was not exactly whispering sweet nothings.

• Brent for July delivery rose 2.6% to $101.69.

• The June Brent contract settled at $108.23 as the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed to tanker traffic.

• The 10-year Treasury yield ticked up to 4.33% from 4.31% Friday. That isn’t a bond-market fire alarm, but it’s enough to remind everyone that oil shocks and rate-cut fantasies don’t usually carpool well.

Equities held their composure because Monday wasn’t really about Monday. The Fed lands Wednesday with traders pricing in no change, and the earnings calendar is the kind of week that sets the tone for the next quarter: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all report Wednesday, with Apple Thursday. 

Under the hood, the tape was selective.

• Verizon rose after delivering its first positive Q1 postpaid phone net adds since 2013 and raising EPS guidance.

• Domino’s got smoked after its soft sales and a weaker consumer read-through.

• Nvidia added another 3.98% and pushed its market value above $5.3T, because apparently the AI trade still has plenty of room to run.

The market is not buying everything. It is buying companies with either earnings proof, AI leverage, or enough pricing power to survive $100 oil without immediately reaching for the word “uncertainty.”

Peel Take: The interesting thing about Monday isn’t what the indexes did. It’s the disconnect between what the tape is doing today and what it’s quietly bracing for by Thursday. On a one-session view, this is a market posting records into a $100 oil print, which sounds insane until you remember half the S&P 500’s market cap reports earnings in 72 hours. On a one-week view, every dollar parked in equities right now is a bet that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple all walk in with capex numbers big enough to make geopolitics look like background noise. That bet has been right for six straight quarters. Whether it’s right a seventh time gets answered on Wednesday at 4:01 pm, not Monday at the close.

What's Ripe

Veradermics (MANE) 47.6%

• Veradermics shares rose after reporting positive topline data from its Phase 2/3 Study 302 for VDPHL01, an extended-release oral minoxidil formulation for male pattern hair loss.

• The trial enrolled 519 patients, met all primary and key secondary endpoints, and showed non-vellus hair count gains of 30.3 hairs/cm² with once-daily dosing and 33.0 hairs/cm² with twice-daily dosing, versus 7.3 hairs/cm² with placebo at month six.

• The company also said there were no treatment-related serious adverse events and no cardiac adverse events of special interest.

• Peel Take: Hair loss isn’t a niche disease state; it’s a global subscription business wearing a lab coat. The risk is still binary, but Monday’s data gave MANE something rare for small biotechs: a story investors can understand without three acronyms per sentence.

Nvidia (NVDA) 4.0%

• Nvidia added another 4.0% to $216.61, lifting its market cap to roughly $5.3T as the AI hardware trade kept dragging the broader tape higher.

• The move came ahead of a monster Big Tech earnings week, where every hyperscaler will effectively be asked the same question in slightly different fonts: how much more money are you wiring to Jensen?

• Peel Take: Nvidia at $5.3T is now the most consensus long in the market. “AI capex disappoints” doesn’t break it as long as four hyperscalers are openly competing to spend more than each other; what breaks it is one CFO on Wednesday saying the ROI math on training runs is getting harder to defend. Nobody expected that this week. Which is exactly when it would matter most.

What's Rotten

POET Technologies (POET) 47.4% 

• POET got cut in half after announcing that Marvell, which acquired Celestial AI, canceled all purchase orders POET had received from Celestial AI.

• The company said Marvell cited alleged confidentiality breaches tied to purchase-order and shipping disclosures, while POET tried to soften the blow by pointing to a separate $5M purchase order from another tech customer. Traders were not in the mood for footnotes.

• Peel Take: POET’s actual problem isn’t the canceled orders; it’s that the canceled orders revealed how much of the equity story rode on a single relationship the acquirer never agreed to inherit. Customer concentration is the risk that gets written about in 10-Ks in the most boring possible language and shows up at the most inconvenient possible time.

Domino's Pizza (DPZ) 8.9%

• Domino’s slid after reporting Q1 EPS of $4.13, down from $4.33 a year ago, with revenue of $1.15B and U.S. same-store sales growth of just 0.9%.

• Management cited March consumer uncertainty, inflationary pressures, weather, and heavier competitor discounting, while international same-store sales slipped 0.4%. The company still has $1.29B authorized for buybacks, but investors didn’t feel like paying up for pizza math with a side of macro excuses.

• Peel Take: Even great operators can’t outrun a customer suddenly doing mental gymnastics over delivery fees. The concerning part isn’t that people stopped eating pizza; it’s that when the cheapest meal on the menu starts missing, the rest of the discretionary food chain isn’t far behind.

🧠 Technical Trip

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📚 Lesson from the Library

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🌟 WSO Academy Q1 Update

📚 Course Development

We’ve continued expanding the Academy curriculum to give students broader coverage across industries, roles, and technical topics.

Check out the recently released WSO Academy Renewable Energy Project Finance Course. Model, structure, and evaluate real-world renewable energy deals from start to finish.

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🦈 Deal Dispatch

M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions

• Shell agreed to buy ARC Resources for $16.4B, turning $100 oil anxiety into a Montney shale shopping spree.

• Sun Pharma is buying Organon for $11.75B, vaulting into women’s health and biosimilars at a global scale.

• Lilly is acquiring Ajax Therapeutics for up to $2.3B, keeping Big Pharma’s blood-cancer shopping spree alive.

• Thermo Fisher is selling its microbiology business to Astorg for $1.075B, trimming non-core lab assets while PE gets another carveout.

📊The Daily Poll

Previous Poll:

Big Tech results this week, what’s your bet?

Markets go higher: 55.8% // Markets pull back: 23.3% // Mixed reaction: 20.9% // Too close to call: 0%

Student Success Corner

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Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

Leona bought a 1-year, $10,000 certificate of deposit that paid interest at an annual rate of 8% compounded semiannually. What was the total amount of interest paid on this certificate at maturity?

Answer: $816

Today

A store reported total sales of $385 million for February this year. If the total sale for the same month last year was $320 million, approximately what was the percentage increase in sales?

How Would You Rate Today's Peel?

Happy Investing,
Chris, Vyom, Ankit, Mitchell, Fernanda, Nick, & Patrick

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