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Market Snapshot

📉 Banana Bits

• Wall Street hit fresh highs as the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq all posted strong gains.

• Brent crude climbed back above $100 after Iran attacked and seized ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

• GE Vernova surged 13.75% after raising guidance on booming data-center demand.

• Cannabis stocks rallied on reports that the U.S. may reclassify marijuana.

• Deutsche Telekom is exploring a merger with T-Mobile U.S. that could become the largest ever.

Market News

Earnings Beat Triple-Digit Oil

If you were waiting for Brent back above $100 to finally make Wall Street act a little less invincible, Wednesday was not your day.

The S&P 500 rose 73.89 points to 7,137.90, the Dow added 340.65 points to 49,490.03, and the Nasdaq jumped 397.60 points to 24,657.57, good for a 1.64% gain and another record close.

That is not the kind of tape you usually get when Middle East shipping headlines are getting worse, but this market keeps telling you the same thing: as long as earnings keep showing up, it is willing to tolerate a lot. 

And the backdrop was not exactly calming. Brent crude climbed 3.5% to $101.91 after Iran fired on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz and seized two of them, which kept the market focused on whether this turns into a longer supply squeeze instead of another ugly but brief spike.

The interesting part is what did not happen: Treasury yields barely moved, with the 10-year sitting around 4.30%, so the bond market never really validated a full inflation panic.

That let investors go right back to rewarding companies that actually had something useful to say. GE Vernova ripped after a blowout quarter and higher guidance tied to data-center demand. Boeing climbed after posting a much smaller loss, signaling its recovery still has traction.

Even cannabis names woke up after a Reuters report that the administration could reclassify marijuana as soon as Wednesday. The common thread was pretty simple: this market still prefers concrete revenue, orders, and cash-flow stories to hypothetical macro doom.

Peel Take: The market isn’t ignoring risk. It’s making risk prove itself first. A single ugly Brent candle gets filed under “headline noise” as long as yields behave and earnings keep clearing the bar, and right now both are showing up for work. What actually breaks this rally is Brent camping above $100 for a week, the 10Y climbing to meet it, and a CFO using the word “uncertainty” twice in one breath on an earnings call. Until then, concrete beats catastrophic every time.

What's Ripe

GE Vernova (GEV) 13.8%

• GE Vernova led the S&P 500 after reporting first-quarter revenue of $9.34 billion, lifting its full-year revenue outlook to $44.5 billion to $45.5 billion, and raising its free-cash-flow forecast to $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion.

• The big hook was data-center power demand: the company said its electrification unit booked $2.4 billion of data-center equipment orders in the quarter, more than it did all of last year.

• Investors are clearly buying the idea that GE Vernova is no longer just an “energy transition” name. It is becoming one of the cleaner picks-and-shovels ways to play the physical buildout behind AI.

• Peel Take: The AI trade is getting less cute and a lot more physical. Everyone wants to own the chip names, but the actual dollars are flowing into companies quietly building the plumbing, transformers, backup generators, and the unglamorous gear that keep server farms from turning into very expensive space heaters. GEV isn’t a bet on AI adoption. It’s a bet that the grid was never built for what Sam Altman is asking of it. You don't need to know which foundational model wins; you just need them all to keep plugging things in.

Boeing (BA) 5.5%

• Boeing climbed after posting a first-quarter net loss of just $7 million, a core loss of $0.20 per share versus expectations for a much deeper hit, and a revenue of $22.2 billion on 143 commercial deliveries.

• Management also said the backlog is approaching $700 billion, a figure that buys you a little patience from a market that usually has none. More importantly, the quarter read like a recovery update instead of another chapter in the endless crisis file, and that alone was enough to get investors back on side.

• Peel Take: Boeing doesn’t need to look perfect. It just needs to keep looking less broken. In a tape that has learned to pay up for “better than feared,” not-catastrophic is a credible catalyst, and Wednesday was the first quarter in a while where the story was about deliveries and backlog instead of door plugs and congressional hearings. The bar is embarrassingly low, which is exactly why there’s money to be made. A $700B backlog doesn't require a turnaround. It just requires Boeing to stop setting new precedents for how planes can fail.

What's Rotten

Best Buy (BBY) 4.6%

• Best Buy fell after announcing that CEO Corie Barry will step down on October 31, with longtime insider Jason Bonfig set to take over. On paper, this is an orderly succession. In practice, it lands in the middle of a still-soft consumer electronics cycle, which is not exactly when investors love management uncertainty.

• The market read it less like a smooth handoff and more like one extra variable for a retailer that still needs consumers to feel good about spending on non-essential upgrades.

• Peel Take: CEO transitions are a footnote when the consumer is healthy. They become a problem when the consumer is already quietly skipping the next OLED upgrade. Jason Bonfig’s resume isn’t the issue; the issue is that he’s inheriting a category where people are stretching the life of a four-year-old TV and calling it a financial strategy.

T-Mobile US (TMUS) 3.3%

• T-Mobile slid after Reuters reported that Deutsche Telekom is exploring an early-stage combination with T-Mobile US that could create a nearly $300 billion telecom giant and the largest-ever public merger. Huge headline, yes. But the market heard “governance mess, political risk, and years of regulatory paperwork” and sold first.

• It is a great story for deal junkies and a much murkier one for investors who were mostly showing up here for cash generation and relative calm.

• Peel Take: Telecom investors usually sign up for buybacks, cash flow, and a low-drama utility with better marketing. “Transformational merger” sounds exciting until you remember it usually means lawyers billing by the minute for the next two years. There may be strategic logic here eventually, but the market won't hand out points for it before the regulatory marathon even starts.

🧠 Technical Trip

Interview Q&A from Evercore

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📚 Lesson from the Library

🎥 Excel Modeling: Build Models That Actually Work

Build fast, clean, and professional financial models using Excel like a pro.

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🌟 WSO Academy Q1 Update

🧠 Improved Mentor Preparation Before Sessions

We’ve also upgraded the system to give mentors more context about students’ background + prior sessions. Ultimately, equipping them with all the information they need about you before your session begins.

Mentors now have easier access to:

• Notes and feedback from students’ previous sessions

• Students’ progress within the program

• Students’ recruiting goals and timeline

This allows mentors to pick up right where the previous session left off and give more targeted advice during each call.

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🦈 Deal Dispatch

M&A, IPOs, And Other Notable Transactions

• SpaceX locked up the right to buy Cursor for $60B later this year, or pay $10B to partner now. 

• Boost Run signed a $1.44B agreement with Dell to expand AI compute and storage capacity. 

• Merck teamed up with Google Cloud in an AI partnership worth up to $1B.

• Cboe is selling its Canada and Australia exchanges to TMX Group for an aggregate of $300M.  

📊The Daily Poll

Previous Poll:

With markets under pressure, what’s your mindset?

Stay calm: 38.6% // Look for opportunities: 38.6% // Get cautious: 11.4% // Sit on cash: 11.4%

Student Success Corner

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Banana Brain Teaser

Previous

Of 200 people surveyed, 80% own a cellular phone, and 45% own a pager. If all 200 people surveyed own a cellular phone, or a pager, or both, what percent of those surveyed either do not own a cellular phone or do not own a pager?

Answer: 75%

Today

If y is the smallest positive integer such that 3,150 multiplied by y is the square of an integer, then y must be?

How Would You Rate Today's Peel?

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

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