Thursday, May 28
Kohl's and Best Buy surge on surprise earnings beats
Two retailers that Wall Street had largely written off delivered their strongest quarterly signals in years, sending shares flying and forcing a rethink of the consumer spending narrative.
Top Stories
The Kohl's turnaround is real, not a one-quarter statistical accident
Kohl's posted a first-quarter earnings loss far smaller than feared, with comparable sales at their fastest pace in four years and proprietary brands up 6%, prompting at least one analyst to upgrade the stock to Buy on stabilization momentum.
The significance here is not just one good quarter but the pattern: management reaffirmed full-year guidance rather than pulling it, which means the stabilization story now has a floor under it that skeptics can no longer easily dismiss.
Anthropic's near-trillion-dollar valuation makes every AI competitor's funding round look like a rounding error
Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, simultaneously launching Claude Opus 4.8 with new parallel subagent capabilities at unchanged pricing, even as Elon Musk clarified that SpaceX's compute deal is only a 180-day lease, not the multi-year arrangement the company's S-1 had implied.
The valuation is staggering on its own, but the SpaceX lease clarification is the detail that matters most: Anthropic's revenue runway through 2029 just got meaningfully shorter than the market had been pricing in, and that tension will follow the company all the way to its IPO.
Caesars going private signals casino operators are worth more away from public market scrutiny
Tilman Fertitta's Fertitta Entertainment agreed to acquire Caesars Entertainment in an all-cash deal at $31 per share, with Fertitta assuming roughly $11.9 billion in debt to take one of Las Vegas's largest operators private.
The structure of the deal, all cash plus a debt assumption that dwarfs the equity price, suggests Fertitta believes the company's real value is locked inside its balance sheet in ways a quarterly earnings cycle has never let it express.
Also Today
- Best Buy's gadget demand beat lifts earnings and outlook
- Ferrari defends $640,000 electric car price after Tuesday's stock drop
- IBM's $15 billion bet on quantum computing and AI cybersecurity
Takeaway
Today's session was defined by retail's refusal to die quietly, with Kohl's and Best Buy both delivering results that reframe the consumer spending debate heading into the back half of the year.
Watch whether Costco's membership miss gets revisited next week as investors decide if the warehouse giant's inflation warning is a one-quarter blip or an early signal that value-seeking consumers are finally hitting a ceiling.
