A British man woke up one morning to find his 2016 Honda Civic had been stolen. After shelling out £20,000 to replace it with an identical model he found 70 miles away from his home, he eventually realized he repurchased his stolen car: he recognized a Mars bar wrapper, Christmas tree pine needles, and his parents’ address in the car’s navigation system. 

US stocks started yesterday’s session flat but then rose throughout the rest of the day as sentiment and positioning continued to repair with the absence of any negative headlines on global trade. The Nasdaq 100 advanced 2.8%, notching a third consecutive day of 2% gains — a hot streak it hasn’t seen since the dot-com bubble burst.

❓ Trivia time: take our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s the first Q:

As predicted by literally everyone, preorders for Nintendo’s Switch 2 in the US today were total mayhem, with customers reporting long wait times, broken websites, and canceled orders. The $450 console went on sale after the stroke of midnight online at Target, Best Buy, and Walmart, and sold out before most of the US woke up. GameStop waited until 11 a.m. to open orders and an onslaught of last-ditch hopeful buyers overwhelmed the site. 

While all this was frustrating for gamers, it was great for Nintendo’s stock, which got a massive power-up yesterday following Wednesday’s news that a new high score for preorders had been reached for the Switch 2 in Japan: 2.2 million. To put that in context, the original Switch sold less than a half a million units in its first month of sales in Japan in 2017. 

Despite all the talk of tariffs, cutbacks in consumer spending, and price hikes (including Nintendo’s breaking the software price ceiling), millions upon millions of people are more than willing to pay $500 for the bundled Switch 2, and “confirmed preorder” resale listings on eBay are already hitting $749. In the end, who can put a price on fun? Especially a vehicle for games that ultimately offers hundreds of hours (if not years!) of entertainment.

Another fun thing people are still spending money on? “Magic: The Gathering” cards. Hasbro reported earnings yesterday and while sure, toys are fun, it was the company’s Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming segment that really drove its stellar quarter.  

Call us nerds, geeks, or gamers, but a lasting legacy of nearly every kid like me who grew up glued to a keyboard or controller when not trading cards and laying down brutal beats on their friends is that we’re still doing it (with far more disposable income) as adults. Games from “The Last of Us” to Mario Bros. are essential parts of our cultural conversation, and as the culture continues to shift from seeing playing a game like “Magic” as a character flaw to a sign of possible genius, the money will shift as well. 

Big Pharma has failed to develop a disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis (DMOAD), leaving 365M+ people debilitated by knee OA pain globally. Temporary, palliative treatments don’t address the molecular root cause of OA — but Cytonics believes people deserve more than a band-aid solution.

Cytonics is the biotech innovator giving patients a new hope beyond Big Pharma. They’ve engineered CYT-108, a variant of the naturally-occurring A2M protein used in Cytonics’ first-gen FDA-cleared APIC therapy. With clinical trials underway,¹ CYT-108 has the potential to become the first disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis. 

Cytonics is getting straight to the roots in more ways than one. The development of CYT-108 is being funded by individual investors, with $2.4M raised in this round. 

Invest in Cytonics’ current raise², and help bring biotech innovation to the people that need it.

Google parent Alphabet smashed analysts’ estimates yesterday, posting first-quarter earnings per share of $2.81, versus a FactSet consensus estimate of $2.01, and revenue of $90.2 billion, versus the Street’s $89.17 billion projection. For Q1 2025, Alphabet’s revenue grew 12% year over year to $90.2 billion.

Let’s break down the results for Alphabet’s many divisions:

That said, not all is going splendidly over at the advertising juggernaut: it’s facing headwinds from its lost monopoly battles, which could potentially force the breakup of the company, and problems from tariffs, which indirectly affect its advertising business. Worse, how it fares is considered a harbinger of how other megacap tech stocks might perform this quarter.

The real worry, though? It’s probably not a coincidence that CEO Sundar Pichai harped on AI engagement, flogging the stat that Google was seeing 1.5 billion users per month interact with the tech. Google may be rich, with vast flows of coin coming in and a big moat called “Google Search,” but there are barbarians at the gate in the form of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the likes of Perplexity making a direct play for the search crown. Google has said it plans to spend $75 billion in capex this year, mostly to bolster its AI efforts.

Tesla announced that it’s testing a version of its upcoming ride-hailing service ahead of its public rollout in Austin in June (or maybe July). Exciting! But before you get too charged up about riding in CEO Elon Musk’s long-promised robotaxi, there are a lot of conditions to note.

*You can hail a ride if…

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, reported a whopping $40 billion loss last quarter.

Advertiser's disclosures:

1 See press release for more details. 

2 This is a paid advertisement for Cytonics Regulation A+ Offering. Please read the offering circular and related risks on the SEC website.

Investing in private company securities is not suitable for all investors because it is highly speculative and involves a high degree of risk. It should only be considered a long-term investment. You must be prepared to withstand a total loss of your investment. Private company securities are also highly illiquid, and there is no guarantee that a market will develop for such securities.

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