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Retail giants win GLP-1 market as 6% of employers drop coverage
Edgen Stock·Aug 01 2026, 13:17Share to
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[1] As Americans go direct with GLP-1 prescriptions, Walmart, Costco, Amazon will be big weight-loss winners (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/01/glp-1-prescri ...)[2] America on a GLP-1: A Field Guide to 2030 (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-h ...)[3] A 'gray market' of GLP-1 drugs is growing on TikTok, new analysis alleges (https://mashable.com/tech/glp-1-drugs-tiktok- ...)
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Aug 01 2026, 15:19
GE Vernova up 8x from 2024 low on AI power demand
GE Vernova shares have surged more than eightfold from their $122.46 April 2024 low, driven by power demand from AI data centers and cloud infrastructure. The company's Q1 2026 earnings showed earnings per share of $17.44 versus a $1.67 consensus estimate, a 944 percent beat, with revenue of $9.3 billion up 7 percent year over year, according to the company's earnings release. GE Vernova operates three core businesses: Power, which accounted for 55 percent of 2025 orders; Electrification at 33 percent; and Wind at 13 percent. Orders rose 7 percent organically in 2024, then accelerated to 34 percent growth in 2025. From 2025 to 2028, analysts expect revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at compound annual rates of 17 percent and 60 percent, respectively. The stock trades at 40 times this year's adjusted EBITDA with an enterprise value of $252 billion. A $5,000 investment at the April 2024 low of $122.46 would be worth more than $40,400 today, an eightfold return that reflects the market's appetite for companies supplying power to AI infrastructure. **Power and Electrification Lead the Charge** The Power and Electrification segments have grown rapidly since the company's April 2024 spin-off from General Electric to meet demand from power-hungry cloud, data center, and AI markets. That growth has offset softness in the Wind segment, which has grappled with supply chain issues. GE Vernova's stock has traded in a 52-week range between $530.16 and $1,195.94, according to Investing.com data. The stock has traded around $900 to $990 in recent sessions, well above its debut price of $143 per share on April 2, 2024. The company raised its annual revenue forecast on data center demand, according to its Q1 2026 earnings release. Orders surged 71 percent in the first quarter, according to the same release. The company's gas turbines and grid equipment are in high demand as utilities and hyperscalers race to add capacity. **Valuation and Outlook** With an enterprise value of $252 billion, GE Vernova is not cheap at 40 times this year's adjusted EBITDA. But the company's strong growth rates could support that premium valuation, according to the source material. The stock's performance reflects a broader theme: companies supplying power to AI data centers are commanding premium valuations as hyperscalers including Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet race to secure electricity for their expanding AI infrastructure. GE Vernova's order book growth suggests this demand is translating into tangible revenue. The company's growth trajectory is closely tied to the pace of AI infrastructure buildout. Nvidia's GPU shipments and data center capital expenditure from cloud providers will be key indicators for GE Vernova's order pipeline. If AI infrastructure spending continues at current levels, GE Vernova's Power and Electrification segments are positioned to capture a significant share of the demand. Investors will watch whether GE Vernova can sustain its order momentum as AI infrastructure spending continues to expand. The company's next earnings report will provide the clearest signal on whether the growth trajectory remains intact. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Aug 01 2026, 14:17
Alphabet's $205B AI capex vs Microsoft's $175B sets up Q3 showdown
Alphabet's Q2 capex of $44.9 billion pushed free cash flow to negative $5.86 billion, while Microsoft's $41 billion spend kept FCF positive at $19.6 billion — the sharpest divergence yet in hyperscaler AI funding. "We have the flexibility to adjust our spending based on market conditions," Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said on the earnings call, a contrast with Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi's guidance that 2027 capital expenditure will rise "significantly" beyond the current $195 billion to $205 billion range. Alphabet's Google Cloud revenue grew 82 percent year over year to $24.77 billion, with operating margin expanding from 20.7 percent to 35.6 percent, while Microsoft's Azure grew 43 percent and Intelligent Cloud revenue reached $39.3 billion. Alphabet's contracted cloud backlog stands at $514 billion, and its stock fell 7 percent on July 23 after the company disclosed its first negative free cash flow quarter in 22 years. The divergence matters because J.P. Morgan estimates AI capital expenditure now consumes 93 percent of hyperscaler cash flow from operations, up from 33 percent in 2023. Alphabet trades at roughly 16 times trailing earnings against 82 percent Cloud growth, while Microsoft's disciplined spending has kept its stock near record levels — setting up the next quarter as a referendum on which approach investors reward. ## The Capex Gap Is a Margin Story Alphabet's $44.9 billion quarterly capex — roughly 37 percent of revenue — funded custom Tensor Processing Units that now deliver a 35.6 percent Cloud operating margin, up from 20.7 percent a year ago. The company deploys approximately nine TPUs for every NVIDIA GPU it uses, paying NVIDIA's margin on only about 10 percent of its AI compute. That silicon advantage is why Cloud operating income more than tripled to roughly $8.8 billion in Q2 alone, and why Alphabet now sells TPU capacity directly to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta. Microsoft took a different path. Its $41 billion quarterly capex — two-thirds allocated to CPUs and GPUs — went largely to NVIDIA hardware, but the company still generated $19.6 billion in free cash flow. Azure surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue, and Microsoft 365 Copilot reached 30 million paid seats. Hood maintained full-year capex guidance at $175 billion, an adjustment accounting for a shift in lease classifications, and projected Q1 capex above $50 billion. ## What the $514 Billion Backlog Changes Alphabet's $514 billion cloud backlog — contracted but not yet recognized revenue — represents more than five years of Cloud revenue at current run rates. Ashkenazi told analysts that "cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet the demand," meaning the constraint has been compute capacity, not customer demand. The $195 billion to $205 billion capex program is, in management's framing, an acceleration in capacity delivery to meet contracts already signed. The question for the next quarter is whether Alphabet's negative free cash flow is temporary — as Phillip Securities analyst Serena Lim Yi Qi argued when she upgraded GOOGL to Buy on July 27 with a $425 price target — or the start of a structural shift. Alphabet has raised roughly $84.75 billion in equity since June 2026, including a $10 billion private placement with Berkshire Hathaway, and long-term debt has climbed from $46.5 billion to $98.2 billion. Share buybacks, which consumed more than $346 billion over the prior decade, are suspended. Microsoft faces no such constraint. Its free cash flow of $19.6 billion, despite aggressive AI investment, gives it the flexibility to fund the buildout internally. The company's maintained capex guidance and positive cash generation have kept investor confidence intact, even as Meta raised its full-year capex to $125 billion to $145 billion and Tesla reported negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion after $25 billion in AI spending. For investors, the next quarter's earnings calls will determine whether Alphabet's aggressive spending converts its $514 billion backlog into margin-accretive revenue quickly enough to justify the 16 times trailing earnings multiple — or whether Microsoft's disciplined approach, trading at a premium for its cash generation, becomes the template the market rewards. Alphabet's Q3 earnings in October will be the first clean read on whether the capex acceleration produces the operating leverage the bull case requires. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
Aug 01 2026, 13:17
Hyperliquid HYPE trades at 15x earnings as Grayscale sees $1B revenue
HYPE traded near $55, down 0.3 percent in 24 hours, as Grayscale Research called the token cheap at 15 to 18 times forward earnings. The firm's new "earnings per token" framework, modeled on earnings per share for equities, projects the decentralized derivatives exchange could generate roughly $1 billion in annual revenue by 2027, a gain of about 20 percent over 2025. "On that basis, we think it looks cheap," Grayscale said, citing a rebound in crypto trading volumes and a new stablecoin partnership tied to Hyperliquid's Aligned Quote Asset version 2 (AQAv2) infrastructure as the main drivers. Hyperliquid does not issue shares; it uses trading revenue to reward token holders through mechanisms such as fee burns. Grayscale estimates HYPE's circulating supply of approximately 270 million tokens will reach 270 million to 310 million by the end of 2027, depending on how quickly core contributors unlock vested tokens. Those unlock at roughly 550,000 HYPE per month, a pace the firm's model multiplies up to five times in its higher-supply scenario. Combined, the projections imply an earnings-per-token figure of $3.25 to $3.75. The bullish call lands a day after a pricing anomaly in an SK Hynix-linked perpetual contract on Hyperliquid triggered over $80 million in liquidations across nearly 1,000 accounts, according to on-chain analyst LookOnChain. The incident began when a single SK Hynix share traded at a discount of about 30 percent to the stock's previous close in South Korea's thinly traded pre-market session Tuesday. That erroneous print was reflected in xyzSKHYNIX, a perpetual built by Trade.xyz under Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework, sending the contract down nearly 18 percent within minutes even as the underlying stock recovered most of its value shortly after. **The $80 million liquidation event** Trade.xyz said on X it would "cover liquidation losses attributable to the anomalous portion of the move," a response that shows the risks of Hyperliquid's fast-growing market for stock-linked perpetual futures. Grayscale flagged weaker-than-expected network revenue growth and faster-than-expected token supply growth as the key risks to its forecast, noting "Hyperliquid, the breakout success story in perpetual futures, is not a traditional business." On Stocktwits, HYPE was among the top trending tickers, with retail sentiment in the 'Bearish' zone and chatter at 'high' levels over the past day. One user argued that selling HYPE is like selling Apple stock into a buyback, since it flows back to Hyperliquid, and made the case that leveraged on-chain perpetuals represent the future of trading given 24/7 markets and no weekend gap risk. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.