Earlier this week, options traders started making bullish bets on Cisco meme-mania-style, anticipating a strong earnings report on the heels of its AI-fueled comeback strategy. It turns out the retail crowd’s instincts were on the money: Cisco popped 13.41% today after the company reported a stellar Q1:

• The company beat top and bottom line expectations.
• AI infrastructure and hyperscaler orders surged past projections, helping raise full-year order forecasts from $5 billion to $9 billion.
• Management emphasized that the forecast hike was due to booming hyperscaler demand that shows no signs of stopping.

Zoom out: The dot-com-era darling became the world’s most valuable company in 2000 by selling internet routers and switches. Shares plunged after the bubble burst, but like many old tech giants looking to learn new tricks, it’s following the AI zeitgeist by becoming a—you guessed it—datacenter infrastructure provider. The stock finally caught up to its millenium-era high in December, and has jumped 49.98% in 2026.

The AI race is a marathon

Cisco isn’t the only legacy tech company that’s getting an AI-era makeover. Intel also surpassed its pre-crash dot-com high last month as it embraced the cash cow that is AI chips. Then there’s Corning, which has revived itself as an AI infrastructure darling.

For those of you who were around for the dot-com crash, the resurgence of these three names may remind you of a film you’ve seen before—and don’t want to watch again. After all, there are plenty of parallels between today’s market and the dot-com boom: New technology is promising to be transformational for the economy, tech companies are leading the broader market’s bull market, and valuations have reached eye-popping levels.

Yet most analysts aren’t warning of a crash, at least not yet: “We view the AI cycle as durable for the foreseeable future and expect sustained strong orders and accelerating revenue to drive further stock appreciation,” wrote Bank of America research analyst Tal Liani in a note today.—LB

🟢 What’s up

• Nvidia advanced 4.39% as the US approved sales of its H200 AI chips to a handful of Chinese firms.
• YETI Holdings gained 6.13% on an earnings beat fueled by strong US demand for drinkware and coolers.
• StubHub climbed 13.7% after topping Wall Street expectations on both revenue and profitability while reaffirming full-year guidance.
• BNPL company Klarna jumped 20.19% after swinging to a quarterly profit on 44% revenue growth tied to expansion into larger-ticket purchases.
• POET Technologies surged 43.15% after unveiling an optical networking deal worth up to $500 million.
• Ford rose 6.63% as Morgan Stanley highlighted the automaker’s battery technology and energy storage business as a potential long-term advantage.
• Cerebras Systems soared 68.15% in its Nasdaq debut as investors bet on its AI chips competing with Nvidia.

What’s down

• Boeing declined 4.73% after investors were disappointed by a smaller-than-expected aircraft order tied to President Trump’s China visit.
• Biogen fell 6.43% as investors remained skeptical about the company’s latest Alzheimer’s drug push.
• Medical networking platform Doximity plunged 23% on weak full-year revenue guidance and concerns about rising AI-related costs.
• Jack in the Box dropped 14.15% after missing Wall Street expectations on both revenue and earnings.
• Photonics company Lightwave Logic slipped 18.03% as ongoing operating losses overshadowed modest revenue growth.

Sometimes cars backfire. Sometimes business strategies do, too.

Honda just reported its first annual loss since it went public in 1957. The problem was the Japanese carmaker’s decision to invest heavily in its electric vehicle lineup after the Biden administration implemented stringent emission standards. Honda even pledged to stop manufacturing gas-powered cars by 2040.

But sales stumbled after President Trump cancelled the $7,500 tax credit for EVs in the US, and 25% import tariffs against Japanese automakers only made the pain worse. Honda’s management team decided the time has come to pivot away from EVs, but they’ll pay a serious price: The company will write down ¥1.57 trillion, or $9.9 billion, to restructure its EV business. That expensive about-face forced Honda to report a net loss of ¥423.9 billion ($2.7 billion) for its fiscal year ending in March.

Honda shareholders were willing to look past the company’s first loss in nearly 70 years—shares rose 5.36% today—considering the company warned them about this months ago. In fact, they applauded Honda’s promise to unveil 15 new hybrid cars by the end of 2030, as well as its forecast of a ¥500 billion profit this year, and a rapidly growing motorcycle business.

It helps that Honda is far from alone: Ford had to write down $19.5 billion last year due to EV expenses, and GM wrote down $7.6 billion. The EV downturn is a tough break for carmakers across the market, but the cruel irony is that surging gas prices have car buyers turning to the EV market in droves these days.—MR

The future of cancer treatment looks very different from the past—and Wall Street is already placing bets on potential winners.

There’s a pharmaceutical revolution underway as companies make strides in cancer treatments, and Revolution Medicines is at the center of it. The biotech company is focused on therapies for pancreatic cancer (one of the deadliest cancers), and investors cheered after the company reported that its daraxonrasib pill nearly doubled survival rates compared with chemotherapy in a late-stage trial.

The drug works by targeting RAS mutations, which appear in roughly 90% of pancreatic tumors. But RAS mutations also drive cancers in the lung and colorectal areas, and RevMed is already generating promising early data there too, opening the door to a much larger opportunity. Shares have surged 87.66% YTD.

There’s also Natera, which doesn’t treat cancer, but keeps it at bay: The company builds personalized blood tests that look for cancer recurrence, and it has a near-monopoly over the minimal residual disease (MRD) testing market. Shares have soared 292% over the past three years.

A long road ahead

For companies like these, the path forward is often murky. Natera still has significant room to grow, with Leerink Partners estimating MRD testing could become a $20 billion market in the US alone. But maintaining its rapid growth will likely be a long and expensive process.

That’s why the pharma industry often follows a familiar pattern: Small biotech firms specialize in innovation and develop breakthrough drugs, then large pharmaceutical giants with the manufacturing, regulatory, and distribution scale needed to commercialize treatments acquire their smaller peers. This cycle is accelerating as Big Pharma companies feel the pressure of major patent expirations, which could lead to a loss of $300 billion in annual drug sales by the early 2030s.

But as shares of biotech companies like Revolution Medicines and Natera surge, they are becoming too expensive to acquire. Revolution Medicines reportedly explored talks with Merck and AbbVie earlier this year at roughly a $30 billion valuation, but after the stock’s recent rally, a takeover would now likely cost more than $40 billion.

That’s led some on Wall Street to think that Revolution Medicines will remain independent, and are betting that the biotech company will grow into a leader in the cancer treatment space. It would be a long, bumpy road to get there, but the long-term returns could prove healthy.—SY

• Meet the company accused of ruining youth sports.
• Xi Jinping told a group of visiting American CEOs, including Elon Musk and Tim Cook, that “China’s door to the outside world will only open wider.”
• Crypto bros are embracing a privacy-focused, “more secret bitcoin” and sending it soaring.
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that China will use its influence over Iran to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
• Interactive Brokers is jumping headfirst into the wacky world of prediction markets.
• Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE spent millions of dollars backing Jared Kushner’s private equity firm. Now they’re pissed off.

Economic reports: It’s all about the production side of the US economy tomorrow, with highlights including the May Empire State manufacturing index and the April industrial production and capacity utilization report.

Earnings announcements: Nothing worth mentioning, if we’re being honest.

Everything else: We’ll say farewell to a legend, as Jerome Powell concludes his term as Fed Chair.