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📉 Banana Bits

• Markets ripped: S&P 500 +1.45%, Nasdaq +2.01%, Dow +604 as peace hopes and AI earnings gave Wall Street the green light.

• Oil got crushed: Brent fell 7.8% to $101.27, and WTI fell 5.5% to $95.15, as traders priced in a possible U.S.-Iran deal. 

• AMD went bananas: Shares up 18.57% after Q1 revenue jumped 38% to $10.25B, and Data Center sales rose 57%.

• Corning caught the AI bid: Stock +11.99% after Nvidia tapped it to 10x U.S. optical capacity and build three new plants. 

Market News

The Market Bought The Ceasefire Rumor

Wednesday was not subtle. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closed at records, the Dow moved back within arm’s reach of 50,000, and the whole tape basically ran on four words: oil down, AI up. Not elegant, very effective.

The numbers matched the mood as the S&P 500 gained 1.46% to 7,365.09, the Nasdaq climbed 2.03% to 25,838.94, and the Dow rose 1.24% to 49,910.59. That’s an actual risk-on day, not just a mega-cap optical illusion; semis led, but the relief trade had enough breadth to make the move feel less like one AMD candle wearing an index costume.

Oil was the real macro event. Brent settling down 7.8% at $101.27 mattered because the market has spent weeks trying to rally with a crude-oil ankle monitor on. Reports that the U.S. and Iran were close to a short memorandum to end the Gulf war gave traders permission to pull some inflation risk out of the tape, and the 10-year fell to 4.35% gave growth stocks the room they needed.

AMD also gave the AI trade some support from actual numbers. Revenue climbed 38%, Data Center revenue rose 57%, and Q2 guidance beat expectations. The story was not about AMD overtaking Nvidia, but about continued hyperscaler spending and an AI investment cycle that is still moving forward.

The day’s other AI winners made the same point in a different font:

• Corning caught a bid after Nvidia signed on to a major optical infrastructure expansion.

• Hut 8 ripped on its AI data-center lease. 

• Super Micro and Nvidia rallied, too.

The market is beginning to understand that AI infrastructure is more than GPUs. It requires huge investments in power, networking, cooling, and physical infrastructure to support the demand.

The labor data helped by not being strange. ADP’s 109,000 private-payroll gain was strong enough to suggest the economy still has a pulse, but not strong enough to shove the Fed back into inflation-crackdown mode. That is exactly the kind of “fine, but not too fine” data equity bulls wanted.

Peel Take: Wednesday was the market’s dream combo meal: lower oil, lower yields, better AI earnings, and a labor print that didn’t immediately summon Jerome Powell from the bushes. But the keyword is dream. Brent is still above $100. Gold still rose. The geopolitical “all clear” has not actually been issued; Wall Street just started pricing the first draft. The real lesson is that this rally does not need everything to be perfect. It needs oil to stop bullying inflation expectations and AI capex to keep turning into revenue.

What's Ripe

Hut 8 (HUT) 35.3%

• Hut 8 closed at $108.94 after signing a 15-year, $9.8B lease for its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Texas. The first phase is expected to provide 352 megawatts of capacity for an undisclosed customer using the site for large-scale AI training and operations.

• The old Hut 8 story was cr*pto mining with a power bill. The new one is a power-first digital infrastructure with an AI customer attached. That is a much cleaner pitch, especially when the contract has an actual duration rather than “numbers go up” energy.

• Peel Take: HUT’s move was not just about one lease. It was about the market changing the question from “is this a crypto miner?” to “is this an AI-infrastructure landlord with scarce power?” That is a much better multiple if the contracts are real.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 18.6%

• AMD rose to $421.39 after reporting Q1 revenue of $10.25B, up 38% year over year, with non-GAAP EPS of $1.37. Data Center revenue hit $5.8B, up 57%, driven by EPYC CPUs and the continued ramp in Instinct GPU shipments.

• This was the quarter AMD needed. Not because it proved Nvidia is vulnerable tomorrow morning, but because it made the “Nvidia has no real competition” take feel a little stale. In AI, second place is still a very large address when the customer list includes every company trying to build a small country’s worth of compute.

• Peel Take: AMD did the most valuable thing an AI stock can do in 2026: it turned narrative into an income statement. The market is not paying 18% more because Lisa Su said “agentic AI” into a microphone. It’s paying because the Data Center is now the primary growth engine, guidance accelerated, and hyperscalers are still spending as their CFOs have been replaced by momentum traders.

What's Rotten

Arista Networks (ANET) 13.6%

• Arista fell to $147.06 even after reporting Q1 revenue of $2.709B, up 35.1% year over year, and adjusted EPS of $0.87. The problem was not demand. It was due to supply constraints and margin pressure, with management pointing to shortages across components such as memory, wafers, silicon, and optics.

• That is a brutal way to get punished: beat the quarter, guide well, and still lose double digits because the market decides your bottlenecks are more important than your backlog.

• Peel Take: Arista is the reminder that AI infrastructure is not one giant buy button. Demand can be incredible, and the stock can still get wrecked if margins wobble. ANET did not say the AI networking cycle is broken. It said the bottleneck tax is real. At 50x-ish earnings, “real but messy” gets you sent to timeout.

Devon Energy (DVN) 8.6%

• Devon fell to $46.60 as oil’s war premium faded from the tape. Brent’s 7.8% drop was great news for inflation and consumers, but not for E&Ps that had been benefitting from the geopolitical crude spike.

• Energy stocks were not suddenly broken. Their catalyst softened. That is the difference between owning cash-flow durability and owning a headline premium.

• Peel Take: Energy bulls got rug-pulled by diplomacy. Lower crude is great for consumers, for inflation expectations, and for growth stocks. But for E&Ps, it turns the conversation back to the boring stuff like breakevens and capex discipline. Wednesday was risk-on for the market and risk-off for anyone who needed the war premium to stay inflated.

🧠 Technical Trip

Interview Q&A from Goldman Sachs

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📚 Lesson from the Library

🎥 Quant Finance Interviews Course: Solve Problems at Market Speed

Master probability, coding logic, and brainteasers used in top quant interviews.

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🌟 WSO Academy Q1 Update

🔁 Feeling Stuck After On-Cycle Recruiting?

If you’re feeling discouraged because the first wave of on-cycle recruiting has passed, don’t worry, this is extremely common. Many students secure internships through:

• Off-cycle recruiting later in the year

• Boutique investment banks

• Networking opportunities that arise throughout the semester

In other words, missing the first wave of recruiting does not mean you missed your opportunity.

The most important thing now is to continue building momentum by improving your resume, technical preparation, and networking strategy. The mentors and the Academy team are here to help you navigate the next steps.

Apply to WSO Academy

🦈 Deal Dispatch

M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions

• Bayer agreed to acquire Perfuse Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $2.45B, including $300M upfront. 

• Bullish agreed to buy Equiniti for $4.2B, giving the crypto exchange a regulated transfer-agent platform. 

• Western Midstream agreed to acquire Brazos Delaware II for approximately $1.6B, split evenly between cash and equity. 

• Cerebras is targeting a valuation of up to $26.6B in its U.S. IPO, offering 28M shares at $115-$125 each. 

📊The Daily Poll

Previous Poll:

GameStop chasing eBay; what's your take?

Bold move: 23.1% // Desperate move: 30.8% // Interesting play: 12.8% // Makes no sense: 33.3%

Student Success Corner

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Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

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?

Answer: 20%

Today

Water consists of oxygen and hydrogen, and the approximate ratio, by mass, of hydrogen to oxygen is 2:16. Approximately how many grams of oxygen are required in 144 grams of water?

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

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