Rainmaker

There are 13 reasons why almost everyone expects Nvidia ($NVDA) to beat earnings estimates: it’s done exactly that for the last 13 quarters. This time’s no different. Nvidia is still making it rain. The company beat estimates with US$81.6B in Q1 revenue, up 85% YoY. Its gross margin stayed at 75%, proving profits stay intact even as the cost of components rises.

A big earnings beat doesn’t always imply positive price action. Despite higher forward guidance of US$91B for Q2 and a US$80B share buyback, $NVDA shares fell after hours. But on the earnings call, CFO Colette Kress confirmed that Vera Rubin CPU demand is still red hot, and will deliver 35x higher inference than its Blackwell chips.

The AI king wasn’t the only focus for investors this week. SpaceX’s widely anticipated IPO just got a lot closer to reality. SpaceX made its IPO filing public, revealing revenue numbers for the first time. The company had a US$4.69B in Q1 revenue, with US$619M from its Space segment and US$3.26B from Connectivity, which includes Starlink. The company also plans a 5-for-1 stock split to bring the share price down from US$526.59 to US$105.32. 

It would make the most valuable IPO in history more accessible to retail investors, who have mostly taken cues from their institutional counterparts. Last Friday, 38 hedge funds dropped their 13Fs – filings that reveal long equity positions from Wall Street’s rainmakers in the last quarter.

Berkshire Hathaway boosted its Alphabet ($GOOGL) position by 204% to US$15.6B, funding it by selling US$7B of Chevron ($CVX) along with a full exit from UnitedHealth ($UNH) and Amazon ($AMZN).

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square ($PS) did the opposite, rotating out of $GOOGL and into Microsoft ($MSFT) and $AMZN. Stanley Druckenmiller got the ‘sell $GOOGL’ memo too. His Duquesne Family Office sold all 385,000 shares of $GOOGL, but also cut 99% of its $AMZN stake. Where did it go? New semiconductor positions: Broadcom ($AVGO), Intel ($INTC), Micron ($MU) and Arm ($ARM). 

The wildcard 13F this cycle was Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP. The former OpenAI researcher’s US$13.68B fund has one of the most watched books. In Q1, he took on US$8.5B of notional put exposure against semiconductors, while doubling down on AI infrastructure names like CleanSpark ($CLSK), IREN ($IREN) and CoreWeave ($CRWV).

The forecast on Wall Street hasn’t changed: it's a spending storm for chips, compute and power. It makes the AI trade look less like a bubble, and more like a weather system.

This is not financial advice nor a recommendation to invest in the securities listed. The information presented is intended to be of a factual nature only. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. The value of your investments can go down as well as up and you may receive back less than your original investment. As always, do your own research and consider seeking financial, legal and taxation advice before investing.

Samy Sriram

Markets Analyst

Samy is a markets analyst at Stake, with seven years of experience in the world of investing, working across roles in private banking, venture capital and financial media. She has a Master’s degree in Finance and Data Analytics from The University of Sydney Business School.