Nvidia night is here 🤖

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

Stocks are limping into Nvidia earnings tomorrow night.

The S&P 500 slipped to 7,403.05 on Monday and the Nasdaq fell 0.51% to 26,090.73 (a second straight day of declines) as the 10-year Treasury yield punched above 4.60% for the first time in roughly a year.

The Dow bucked the trend, adding 159.95 points to 49,686.12. Tomorrow night's print from arguably the most important company on the planet will tell us whether the AI trade keeps the bull market alive, or whether rising yields finally crack it.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

🤝 NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy unveiled an all-stock megamerger Monday morning valued at roughly $67 billion, with Dominion shareholders getting 0.8138 NextEra shares for each Dominion share. The combined company would serve about 10 million customers across Florida, Virginia, the Carolinas, and become the largest regulated electric utility in the US — a direct play on AI data center power demand. Dominion jumped 14.3% in premarket.

💵 Publicis Groupe agreed to acquire LiveRamp for $2.5 billion in an all-cash deal announced Sunday, paying $38.50 per share (a roughly 30% premium to LiveRamp's May 15 close). The French ad giant is buying its way into "agentic AI" data infrastructure, betting that first-party data and identity resolution become the moat as AI agents start placing ad budgets. LiveRamp surged 27% Monday.

🔼 The 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 4.60% on Monday (its highest level in roughly a year) while the 30-year pushed to about 5.13%, a level last seen in 2007. Traders have now fully priced out any Fed rate cuts in 2026 as the Iran-war oil shock keeps inflation hot. Small caps absorbed the rate pain, with the Russell 2000 underperforming as long-duration assets reset.

🔻 Bitcoin slid below $77,000 on Monday, trading near $76,800 and triggering more than $657 million in crypto liquidations over 24 hours, with longs accounting for roughly 89% of the wipeout. Rising Treasury yields, fading Fed-cut hopes, and renewed Iran headlines all weighed on risk assets. Ethereum followed BTC lower. The flush is one of the largest single-day crypto liquidation events since the spring.

🔽 Regeneron tumbled around 12% Monday after its experimental melanoma combination of fianlimab and cemiplimab failed to show a statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival versus Merck's Keytruda. Shares fell to about $612, wiping roughly $9 billion in market value, and at least 10 brokerages cut price targets - including Leerink, which downgraded to Market Perform and dropped its target to $641 from $792.

🛢️ Oil pushed higher early Monday, with WTI crude trading near $106 and Brent above $110 in morning action, as Trump warned Iran "the clock is ticking" on a peace deal. A drone strike Sunday near the UAE's lone nuclear power plant (which authorities called an "unprovoked terrorist attack") added to the geopolitical premium. Iran reportedly conveyed an amended set of peace terms via Pakistani mediators over the weekend.

🏦 Japan's two largest online brokerages, SBI Securities and Rakuten Securities, are building in-house Bitcoin and Ethereum investment trusts, targeting a Q4 2026 launch pending regulatory approval. Combined, the two firms have roughly 24 million brokerage accounts, opening a massive new on-ramp for retail crypto exposure in Japan. SBI is targeting ¥5 trillion (~$32 billion) in crypto AUM within three years of launch.

🛒 Target reports Wednesday before the bell with consensus calling for roughly $24.5 billion in revenue and $1.41 EPS, while Walmart steps up Thursday with the Street looking for $174.6 billion and $0.66 EPS. The two prints land into a consumer backdrop where confidence has slid to historic lows under the weight of Iran-war gas prices — and where Placer.ai foot-traffic data shows Target visits actually rose for three straight months into April. Whether the consumer is bending or breaking gets answered this week.

Nvidia reports first-quarter fiscal 2027 results after the bell Wednesday, with the conference call at 5 p.m. ET.

The Street is looking for roughly $78 billion in revenue (up ~78% year-over-year) and $1.77 in non-GAAP EPS, with data center revenue near $73 billion.

Sell-side desks are running hotter: Morgan Stanley models $79.26 billion and $1.72 EPS, Goldman sits near $80 billion, and UBS is at roughly $81 billion.

The options market is pricing an 8–10% move on the print, which would swing Nvidia's market cap by hundreds of billions of dollars in either direction.

KeyBanc bumped its price target to $300 from $275 on Monday, citing estimated quarter-over-quarter Blackwell GPU shipments of 150,000 to 200,000 units.

Nvidia is the keystone of the AI infrastructure trade. Blackwell now drives the majority of data center compute, and Jensen Huang has guided to roughly $1 trillion of combined Blackwell-plus-Rubin revenue across calendar 2026 and 2027.

Nvidia has rallied roughly 20% just since May 5, and 57 of 61 covering analysts now rate the stock a buy or strong buy (meaning a clean beat is largely priced in).

The setup is unfriendly: yields at one-year highs, an AI-capex bubble debate getting louder, and a stock that has already done a lot of work into the print.

What to watch:

• Gross margin (anything below ~75% rattles the bull case)

• Q2 guidance (the Street is parked near $86.6 billion, with a whisper closer to $90 billion, and Huang's guide will set the tone for the whole AI complex)

• And China commentary. Nvidia's current quarter assumes zero China data center revenue, so any update on H200 export licenses or a reopened framework with Beijing matters more than the headline beat. If Nvidia clears the bar AND guides above, the bull market gets another leg.

If margin or China disappoints, expect the broader AI trade (and a tape already wobbling on yields) to take it on the chin.

 RATE TODAY’S EDITION

⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.