Nelson Peltz's Wendy's bid is a vote of confidence in fast food that Wall Street can't ignore

Wendy's stock surged more than 14% and trading was briefly halted after the Financial Times reported that Nelson Peltz's firm is preparing a bid to take the burger chain private, backed by a consortium of investors, with a deal potentially weeks away.

Peltz has a long history of buying into brands he thinks are undervalued and pushing for change, and a private takeover would let him reshape Wendy's without the quarterly scrutiny of public markets - which may be exactly the kind of runway a 7,000-location chain needs to compete in a brutal fast-food landscape.

Cisco's AI networking business is growing fast enough to make the rest of its results almost irrelevant

Cisco beat expectations on both revenue and profit for the quarter and guided its full fiscal year above what Wall Street had penciled in, driven by billions in orders from the giant cloud and AI companies building out data centers at a furious pace.

For years Cisco was seen as a mature, slow-growth business, but the AI infrastructure boom has handed it a second act - and the guidance it issued suggests that boom is nowhere near cooling off.

Home Depot's CEO taking medical leave is the kind of uncertainty a stock does not need heading into earnings

Home Depot announced this morning that CEO Ted Decker is taking a temporary medical leave expected to last several months, with the company's head of U.S. operations and its finance chief splitting his responsibilities in the meantime.

The timing is particularly uncomfortable because Home Depot reports its quarterly earnings in just days, and analysts are already divided on whether the company's growth is real or just an accounting artifact of recent acquisitions - a question that now lands on a leadership team that did not expect to be answering it.