If you thought Knicks fans were intense, Wendy’s loyalists are playing a whole different ballgame.

The fast-food chain jumped 25.74% today after retail traders on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets forum decided the Baconator needed a helping hand. One viral post titled “We need to save Wendy’s” rallied users with a simple pitch: “If this company goes bankrupt, we’ll all be out of a job!”

For the uninitiated, it’s an inside joke on r/wallstreetbets that anyone who blows up their portfolio with losses ends up working at Wendy’s to make ends meet.

The sudden social media stardom helped turn Wendy’s into the latest meme stock today, buoyed by the fact that it’s a recognizable consumer brand with a nostalgic following. Plus, shares are heavily shorted by Wall Street, and the stock has struggled for a while—sinking 66% over the past five years.

Beyond Reddit

The Reddit post quickly gained traction, with users sharing screenshots showing thousands of Wendy’s shares purchases. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the thread was eventually removed after moderators accused the original poster of using the viral campaign to promote a crypto project, warning Redditors, “If you buy that thing, you will likely lose all your money.”

Wendy’s fundamentals don’t exactly reveal a compelling investment, either: US same-store sales fell 8% last quarter, net income dropped 42%, and analysts expect revenue growth of less than 1% this year.

Still, some investors see a turnaround story. Wendy’s trades at just 11 times expected 2026 earnings, and the company recently tapped former Potbelly Sandwich Works executive Steve Cirulis as CFO and chief strategy officer, after he helped Potbelly’s stock soar 500% during his tenure there.

This market runs on vibes

Wendy’s rally may sound absurd, but the stock market has been operating on some very strange logic lately:

SpaceX loses billions and becomes one of the world’s most valuable companies. Chipmakers beat earnings expectations by a mile, then get punished for not beating them by two miles. And let’s not forget Allbirds, whose stock surged after deciding it would rather sell AI infrastructure than sneakers.

Up next at Wendy’s: Rebrand as WendyAI, announce a partnership with Nvidia, and see if investors will pay 50 times earnings for square hamburgers.—SY

🟢 What’s up

• KB Home gained 16.65% as investors focused on management’s upbeat housing demand outlook despite an earnings miss.
• Builders FirstSource rose 11.31% as lower Treasury yields and progress on a bipartisan housing bill boosted sentiment across housing-related stocks.
• Sunrun jumped 12.57% on a partnership with Tesla and Renew Home aimed at using residential energy systems to support datacenters.
• ICON plc climbed 10.86% after the clinical research company topped Wall Street expectations in the first quarter.

What’s down

• Cerebras Systems fell 19.54% as strong quarterly results failed to clear lofty investor expectations.
• Hertz Global tumbled 41.01% after warning that soft demand would pressure earnings; unveiling plans for new stock and debt offerings didn’t help.
• Qualcomm slipped 3.33% despite deal activity, including talks to supply AI chips to ByteDance and the acquisition of AI software company Modular.
• Principal Financial Group dropped 5.07% following a Bank of America downgrade that cited slowing profit growth.
• FedEx fell 0.13% as costs tied to its freight spinoff and restructuring efforts drove quarterly profit lower despite higher revenue.

Move over Nvidia, there’s a new chipmaker in town—and it’s the very same company that was buying all the semiconductors in the first place.

OpenAI and Broadcom revealed their first homegrown custom chip today, dubbed Jalapeño, designed specifically for LLMs and built to provide improved performance per watt compared to other chips. Jalapeño “expands OpenAI’s full-stack platform, from products to models and now to chips,” according to the company’s announcement.

OpenAI has long relied on Nvidia to provide the hardware powering its software, but the company has recently broadened its supplier base to include AMD, Amazon, and Cerebras. This is OpenAI’s first foray into creating its own silicon, and future OpenAI shareholders will likely applaud the company’s decision to reduce its reliance on outside vendors altogether.

But this is just more bad news for the rest of the AI trade. While OpenAI and Anthropic have remained privately held, publicly traded companies like Nvidia have acted as AI-adjacent proxies that were all too happy to take investors’ money. Now, with those two AI startups preparing to go public, investors could soon shift their funds out of the Mag 7 stocks that were once the only way to access the AI trade, and into the AI companies themselves.

In other words, not only will OpenAI steal some of the attention from the rest of the AI trade when it makes its debut, it is also working hard to rid itself of relying on the very chipmakers that have profited from its rise to fame. That’s a spicy combination that may make even the staunchest Nvidia shareholders wince.—MR

Wall Street is picking up its controller and logging on to Grand Theft Auto VI.

The next installment in the mega franchise has been highly anticipated for years, but multiple delays made fans wonder if it would ever hit the market. Now, the day is nearly here: Preorders begin at midnight tonight, and gamers will be skipping work on November 19 when it finally arrives.

Wall Street, however, is more concerned with ordering stock in GTA’s publisher, Take-Two: According to data compiled by the Wall Street Journal, 30 analysts rate Take-Two bullishly (Buy or Overweight) compared to just two Holds and one Underweight.

Investment firm BTIG just issued a Buy rating and $290 price target on the stock (a 23% premium from today’s close) arguing that GTA VI will “catalyze a sustainable, multi-year improvement in earnings power for the enterprise.”

Bank of America also reiterated its Buy rating, and raised its price target for Take-Two to $368, 57% above today’s closing price. BofA analyst Omar Dessouky argues that the next version of GTA Online, the multiplayer version of the game, could make nearly twice as much money as its predecessor.

“We think the next GTAO should monetize at least as well as Fortnite ($60 per active user annually) because its ‘pay-to-progress’ model should incentivize higher average player spend than Fortnite’s purely cosmetic model,” Dessouky wrote.

Driving growth and cashing in

It’s hard to understate just how big of a deal GTA VI will be: It’s expected to not only be one of the biggest games ever made, but one of the most lucrative entertainment launches of all time.

Some estimates say preorders alone should generate roughly $1 billion in revenue before the game even launches, and it could generate over $3 billion just in its first year.

If those figures sound too good to be true, just take a look at GTA V, which was released in 2013:

• GTA V broke a record by making $800 million in its first day, and reached $1 billion in sales just three days after launch.
• Despite the fact that GTA Online is 13 years old, it still earns Rockstar Games about $9.6 million every week.

It’s only a matter of time until the famous Brew Markets annual stock market game starts putting up those kinds of numbers.—LB

• The CEO of Kalshi said the company is considering going public, but won’t this year.
• Robot maker Agility is going public via SPAC in a $2.5 billion deal.
• Everyone is buying the dip on Wall Street—here’s why that might be a red flag.
• JPMorgan raised its S&P 500 target to 7,800 by the end of the year, but warns that it’ll be a volatile path to get there.
• Alphabet is joining the Dow, replacing Verizon.
• SK Hynix, the most valuable company in South Korea, is planning to list on the Nasdaq.
• The White House just subtly gave Kevin Warsh permission to raise interest rates.

Earnings announcements: The earnings well is running dry, though announcements from the likes of BlackBerry, McCormick, and Darden Restaurants should make for fun reads.

Economic reports: While earnings are few and far between, there’s plenty of reports worth watching tomorrow, including weekly initial jobless claims, the third and final estimate of Q1 GDP, and the monthly report on durable goods orders. But the big one to keep an eye on is the May PCE reading. Here’s what economists are expecting to see.

Everything else: The US plays its final group stage game against Turkey tomorrow in Los Angeles.