Coreweave Reports Results… And A Would Your Rather Retail Edition 11/10/25

0:02Live from the Nasdaq market, and in the heart of New York City's Times Square, this is Fast Money. Here's what's on tap tonight. Tech on the rebound, chips, software, the Max 7 and more charging higher. Is the potential end of the long government shutdown putting the market in a risk-taking mood once again? We'll debate that. Plus, a big-time retail, would you rather, ahead of next week's earnings and the holiday shopping feast, will break down Walmart versus Target. And later, what is behind the latest weighty moves in the weight loss stocks will go inside the numbers of Paramount Skydance's quarterly results.

0:33And casino stocks on a heater. Can you still play your bets on this group? I'm Melissa Lee coming to you live from Studio B at the NASDAQ. I'm the best tonight. Tim Seymour, Karen Feinerman, Dan Nathan, and Guy Adami. Well, Sox kicking off the week with the risk-on rally back on as hopes of an end to the government shutdown give the AI trade a boost. The NASDAQ surging more than 2 % higher today, led by some of the usual suspects, Palantir, NVIDIA, Broadcom, AMD, and Google among the top names in tech. Microsoft snapping an eight-day skid, its longest since 2011. As a whole, the MAG7 names added nearly$600 billion in market cap just today.

1:06We're on today's action in just a minute, but first we've got to get to CoreWeave out with results. The stock beating revenue and operating margins estimates in the third quarterly report as a publicly traded company. That earnings call just kicking off. Our Christina Parts Neblis has the very latest here on set. Christina. So on the earnings call, we're going to give guidance. So we didn't get that just yet, but I think one of the important numbers from this earnings report was the contracted backlog. So that number came in at$55 billion, which is quite higher than Q2, which was$30 billion. But we kind of already knew that, right?

1:34Throughout the quarter, they announced a deal with Meta, which was valued at$14 billion. They extended their deal with OpenAI,$6.5 billion. You had NVIDIA, Backstop, any unused customer offerings by 2032. That's worth about$6 billion. So you had all these announcements throughout the quarter. So perhaps that$55 billion number could have been a little bit higher. I did see some notes from Bank of America and I think it was Mizuho saying that it should have been around 60 billion. So perhaps maybe that was why we saw about a one and a half percent drop in this stock. But overall, this is a we know the IPO price is 40 bucks.

2:08And look at it where it is now. And it's considered an AI infrastructure play. They rent out their GPUs as a service or smaller than AWS, but they consider themselves, you know, much more nimbler. And I actually spoke to Mike, the CEO at GTC, and he said that they're sold out of all of even their older chips for NVIDIA. So if anybody's worried, even Hopper has incredible demand. They also added power during the quarter, 600 megawatts. I mean, it's fascinating all the deals that they've announced during the quarter since they reported the last quarter. But yet the stock was still down 28 percent going into the quarter.

2:43So the setup wasn't difficult going in, even with the backdrop of all these deals and the backlog increasing. Exactly, which is why you saw a lot of arguments that, hey, this is a great setup for the company heading into earnings. So why isn't why aren't we seeing the 16 percent implied options move, which is what to be expected? So perhaps on the call, we would expect a bigger number for 55 billion. Perhaps that'll be something. And obviously the guide. Good point. So it's a noisy quarter in some ways, though. I mean, so that's why I really want to hear the call. But the profitability, the margins were actually lower.

3:14Well, then you're saying a while ago it was 21 % for the operating margins, but better than what we expected for the quarter versus street. I was thinking gross margins. Oh, gross margins. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of color that we have to really wait to hear. That's why I'm a little hesitant. Maybe that's why the stock hasn't moved a ton, because there's a lot that we still need to know. But it came from, remember, it came at, what, 40? And then it traded up to the 160s? And then so it never should have been there, given where we are now. But this is still a pretty hefty valuation.

3:51How about just on the contracted power side and the announcements that ultimately I think people need to hear from companies like Corweave and others. But how much of that is weaving into at least do you think the outlook for them to be sustainable? Not only are we looking at the demand from the hyperscalers and not only looking at clearly what what seems to be this circular story, But to the extent that there's infrastructure required for all these folks to do what they need to do. Then I'd be answering the big question for the entire AI CapEx build out, right? Do they have enough power? Fair.

4:21See what you just did to me, Guy? Yeah, turn it on. It's ordinarily well. Tim, if I can answer that, I could, you know. Then I'd be not working here. No, I shouldn't say that because I thoroughly enjoy what I do. But I think an answer that I could say to that is think of Micron. It's a story that we didn't really cover today, but Micron was building a plant, or they said they were building a plant in Clay, New York. And they're delaying that for even more because of also power issues, environmental issues. So power is something that I think we're underestimating the impact that it's going to have on a lot of these names in the build out.

4:50And so to your point, perhaps it's not even enough. Yep. I think Karen's on to something and Christina can speak to this as well. I mean, 85 percent quarter over quarter backlog growth. But what's the earnings going to be on that revenue? And that's when margins start. So operating margins. OK, it's the it's the I guess it's the adjusted EBITDA margins that are disappointing people. It's 61 and a half percent, which is probably why the stock isn't moving, because on this quarter alone, better than expected loss. They beat on the revenue side, but the stock's not moving. I guess you've got to wait till the call.

5:22Yeah, just say this. I mean, two weeks ago, Satya Nadella was on Brad Gerster's podcast with Sam Altman, and he says, I got a bunch of GPUs lying around here. I can't plug them in because I don't have the power. So if everybody is complaining about the power that they can't get, if Micron is delaying, you know, Clay, New York is right outside my home. Yeah, Syracuse. Oh, we're in a half hours away. So I was thinking about going there. Let's do it. I go up every month to see my parents. I'm sure she'd love to go there. But I guess my point is, if this is what we keep hearing about access to power and we have all this demand for compute, at some point the rubber has to hit the road because these nuclear reactors, and that's the answer.

5:58It takes years. Yeah, it do take years. Easily. Christina, thank you. Keep us posted on that conference call. Christina Parts Nevelis. How does this feed into the AI trade, which apparently is pleased, if I can sort of humanize the AI trade, by the potential end to the government shutdown? I didn't realize that it had been, you know, depressed because of the government shutdown. But here we are. A lift. And add that to, you know, intraday lows on Friday when we started to get some sense that everyone was rushing to the table. Thanks, guys and gals. You've got a 3 % move in the S &P. And then from there, beta, depending on your overall kind of volatility.

6:34I think it's a story where the AI trade got the most benefit from the sense that actually people are going to go back to work again. What's fascinating about where we are now is we could have a September, the minute we actually get back to work, we could have a September jobs number that just comes kind of tumbling out there. It could be three days. It could be seven days. We don't really know. but there could be a series of data points that, you know, we're assuming they're OK. But at the same time, it's fascinating because we want more data. That seems to be where everyone is now focused. And it may not be the data one was asking for.

7:05Well, it'll be interesting because we might get that September report, but we will not get in October because the fieldwork wasn't done for October. So there is like a gap. We have this old data and then we're just going to be in purgatory when it comes to data. Well, we saw the challenge of data. So you can probably start drawing some lines. But Tim is right now. Now, we might be at a point in the market, given the Fed has turned quasi hawkish, that bad employment data could actually be good, because as much as Jerome Powell said December is not a foregone conclusion, bad jobs data suggests that it will be, which is exactly what the market wants.

7:34So, Bill, was it TSMC that sort of started a little bit of this going, right? Today. Right. I just mean today. And, you know, the space has been sold off so hard that a little bit of balance with the market balance. I don't read too much into this bit of a bounce. Yeah. So I don't know. We're still waiting for NVIDIA. That's, I think, going to be monumental. Right. Yeah. And I wasn't so sure that the market was discounting a shutdown. And basically, I mean, we hadn't been acting that way. I mean, we've gone through show after show over the last few weeks, not even mentioning the shutdown. Right.

8:08We've gone without talking about the data. I know there's been some private data. But the reason we were kind of choppy last week had nothing to do with the shutdown for the most part. Right. It had to do with what was going on in the tech market. And that's really the only discussion you need to have right now, because if I look around here and I look at some of the sectors that perform today, none of them performed nearly as well as the major hyperscalers. And I know that we're going to talk a little bit more about concentration. And you can say it's different this time. But last week, you know, we sold off because a lot of the biggest names in the markets sold off.

8:41and if there are fundamental concerns, like we're looking at this CoreWeave right now. You know, Microsoft Azure, well, let's just say Microsoft is maybe 60 plus percent of CoreWeave's revenue. Okay. We just talked about what Satya Nadella said about the chips that they bought and their inability to use them. We know what Microsoft Azure's margins are. Their gross margins are probably 68 percent or something like that. We just saw the operating margin. I didn't see the gross margin for CoreWeave. They're much worse. So if Microsoft's got a bunch of GPUs sitting around that they can't use, can you imagine what's going on with a company like CoreWeave that contracts with a company like Meta to get that business?

9:18They can only compete on price. That's it. And so a company like this, I don't know why you would buy CoreWeave when you could just buy Microsoft or you see an acceleration in AWS's business, one of the reasons why it rallied so hard. So that's my take. I know we're not doing, Tim, would you rather right now, but it's kind of an easy one. I like how you did that, and sometimes you follow the rules and sometimes you don't. But, you know, ultimately, Melissa does seem to reel us all back into a place where, if I'll just respond to where I think we were going with this conversation, I would just get to, after a 3 % rally off of the intraday lows on Friday, we're within 1.5 % of all-time highs.

9:51I mean, I'm not all that concerned. I think for all the concern about this market is over its skis, I would just get back to, unfortunately, that's not my phone. Is it yours? It's not my phone. It's not my phone. Don't look at it. No, don't do that. It's not my phone. Can we just establish that I was not guilty? Maybe David Zervos is here. Maybe it's him. No, he's saying it's not his. He's saying it's not his. Somebody else's phone. But I would get back to the concern people have about the hyperscalers and all those capex that we have going on. I would just bring it back to these are the most – we've talked about the debt and the debt issuance.

10:26These are some of the most cash flow generative companies in the world. I'm not that concerned about them throwing good money after bad. And in fact, at this point, if anyone should be doing this, it's this part of that market cap of the S &P. Are you concerned? I'm always. I mean, yeah, I know. But no, to Tim's point, it's pretty remarkable. Now, here we are. We're in the middle of November, basically. We're through earnings, except NVIDIA, which could be a market mover. Let's just say, you know, they'll come in in line and the market won't react. There's a lot to say that the momentum is just going to continue in the year end.

10:57I mean, what is going to derail this thing at this point? We're through the government shutdown. down, people are chasing. And you see it manifesting itself in these high beta names. All right. So really quickly, Oracle. Do you see how poorly this stock traded today? Right. So you talk about these big hyperscalers and their ability to finance these products with their cash flow. Oracle's not one of them. Oracle's not one of them. We're going to get a bit more discerning. It gapped up on that huge deal of 300. Then it went to 350. Now it's trading at 240. Filled in the entire gap. They have like debt to equity of 500 percent.

11:28And sooner or later, we're already seeing Meta put this build out of Louisiana in an SPV, getting funding from Blue Owl, going through, you know, KKR and all that sort of stuff. It's getting a little confusing here. Well, I was going to say, to the point of differentiation, Meta, which is only up 1.6 percent compared to the NASDAQ 100, it was an underperformer. So the market is sort of sussing out the stories that they are still willing to back and the stories that they still have a question mark about. Right. So for the Googles, the AWSs of the world, it's a cleaner story, right? Right. So Meta doesn't really has a tangential bit of that.

12:01And I think that's why it's been damaged the most. It's actually now the cheapest of the Mag 7, having been the best performer, now the worst performer. But so when I think about it, I look at from top to bottom, it's$400 billion of market cap lost on what actually was a very good quarter. So we do know that part of AI, which is what is generating the gains, the really, really good quarter in their advertising business, that is having an effect. What we don't know, right, is what this enormous llama spend and the lack of, I don't know if discretion is the right word. It's just all, you know, he is out guns blazing to spend no matter what it takes.

12:43He'd rather overspend than underspend. That is the moment that Meta is in. And I think the question, too, is and we've had this discussion in the car home as we do often. That's a fascinating car ride home, by the way. Complain about the husbands and talk about hyperscaler spending. That really is what happens. Why does Meta have to spend as much as the hyperscaler in CapEx? It wants Lama to be. Because of Lama. Right. It wants. I don't know if that story is as clear in terms of the return on the investment. as opposed to Google making the same investment and having Google Cloud and all these other services that it has.

13:20Well, so if I'm if I'm allocating a dollar to one of the Mag seven at this point after the sideways action and Meta, I actually think Meta is kind of interesting and not that you asked me, but then followed by Amazon, followed by Google. I think the more important story is the other four ninety three. And I think their earnings profile is rising, not falling here. And I think that's where the market is starting to broaden. Right. All right. Let's get to the developing story that we have on our hands. The government shutdown developments there. Senate vote on a deal could be just hours away. CNBC's Emily Wilkins is on Capitol Hill with the very latest.

13:51Emily. Hey, Melissa. Yeah, the Senate could be voting this evening to pass a bill to reopen the government at least for a few more months. You know, the details are still being worked out on this agreement. But there is a confidence that the shutdown is going to end this week. And we know that Speaker Mike Johnson in the House told his members today to get back to D.C. They're likely going to be needed to have a vote at some point on Wednesday. And attention is already shifting onto the next battle for Congress here, which is whether to re-up those health care premium tax credits, the ones that Democrats really made this shutdown about.

14:27Now, all they got from here was a promise. Senator John Thune promised Democrats a vote in mid-December, which means now Democrats and Republicans have to try to find some common ground for a potential bill. And we know that a group of Republicans actually met today on those tax credits in a wider health care discussion. It included Senator Ron Johnson, who said that any solution can't just be about the tax credits, but also needs to deal with the larger Affordable Care Act. From my standpoint, I think Democrats have really stepped on it here or stepped in it. By raising this profile, it's just giving certainly a guy like me the ability to describe exactly the reality and how Obamacare has failed miserably.

15:11Several other senators in the meeting mentioned incorporating an expansion of health saving plans as a potential path forward and letting tax credits for higher earners expire. Of course, we have a long way to go here before the end of the year. But in terms of getting the government back open, Melissa, we are expecting to see that in the next couple of days. All right, Emily, thank you. Emily Wilkins. Our next guest says the backdrop for stocks looks, quote, amazing. CNBC contributor David Zervos is the chief market strategist at Jefferies. David, it's always good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on set.

15:43So nothing has changed. I mean, the last time we saw you, you thought it was amazing, too. Nothing has changed in terms of the impact of the government shutdown. That's what we're having about the AI trade. Everything's status quo amazing. I even tried to say it was pretty good back in April, I think, which was the hardest one of the year. So I think I've stayed pretty steadfast. I think the outlook for earnings, returns on capital, growth all look amazing. For the capital side of the equation, it's looking incredible. What I have a little worry about is labor, and I'm seeing cracks. I think we're all seeing some cracks, the challenger data.

16:18but also just the confidence. People are getting inundated with statements every day about AI taking jobs, and people are looking at that and getting a little nervous. And I don't know when that feeds into the consumer. The consumer's been okay. But I think, you know, I really hope the Fed takes notice of that and starts to put a little bit more weight on what's happening in these labor markets that have been weaker and got revised in the last two or three months, significantly weaker. Remember, we've revised away almost a million and a half jobs that we thought were created in 2024 and the beginning of 2025.

16:54This is not a strong labor market driven growth. This is a productivity story. And that's the thing that's getting me a little nervous. And I said it in a piece today, Melissa, I said, you know, maybe that's even a little bit about the politics of what we saw on Tuesday, that there's a little bit of a shift and a little nervousness in the voting public that, you know, I'm sure this administration is watching pretty closely. David, people like Guy Adami, third person, by the way, have their hair on fire, you know, market breadth, decliners, winners. You pointed out that's been a red flag for a year.

17:28Jeff Richards, I don't know if you know Jeff. Yeah. Notable capital. He did the same thing in a tweet today. Why should I not make a big deal out of the fact that the markets continue to be driven by 15 or 20 names? I love the idea of leaders. I don't think we want an S &P that has 500 stocks that are all up 14 % on the year. That's like the participation trophy we hand out at the kindergarten soccer game. I want some 100s and some 200s, and I want some bankruptcies. That means we're growing. That's an economy that is fortified with technological advance. I love it. So I'm all about that. I think where it gets me nervous is when we start to see that not being something that everybody's participating in, in the labor market.

18:13And we have huge technological advances that sort of creatively destruct a bunch of labor. That's a dangerous story. David, does it concern you of all that technological advance? It's all going after the same thing, right? So this year, we're going to have a half a trillion dollars in CapEx. It's all going after the same thing. They're all building out this data center. They all want the power. They all want to get to AGI and then superintelligence. And when they get there, what happens? It's going to be absolutely the same thing. They're all going to have it, and then it's going to get really commoditized.

18:42So I guess my point is if like 90 percent, I think Jason Furman said this recently at Harvard, that 90 percent of GDP growth year over year is coming from this spend. Does that concern you? Because it's all like one big thing if you think about that MAG-7. Throw Tesla in there, too. I think we're all probably, you know, going to benefit from this spend, whether those individual stocks are the ultimate gainers from this or whether it's society that's a gainer from this. I don't know. History says that it's hard to pick those winners. It's hard to know which capital ends up being the capital that really participates.

19:19But as we make those investments, as we go into telecoms or we think back to railroads or anything else, just the sort of externalities that are positive that come from that are great for society, for labor, and they're great for other businesses as well. We also have stock market crashes after every single one of those. We do. And look, I'm not saying that we're not going to ever have a pullback of meaningful caliber going forward. That's the nature. We get booms and busts all the time. I just I look at the potential for returns here and generating real productivity gains, real technological advance.

19:54And I'm excited about it. I'm very excited about it. So drilling down on that notion further, you have big productivity gains for a I don't know how big a swath of the market. And then you have some real hurt in other parts of the market. Right. With the labor problems. And is it that the economy can handle that because the big is so much bigger that they would end up supporting that, which I think is probably not in the cards for additional spend that way? How do you think about those two things? Do you want to avoid part of the market where the lower end consumer who may or may not have job security will just not be spending as much?

20:31Well, I forget the exact statistic, but I think the secretary of the Treasury said something like, you know, 88 percent of the stock market is owned by 12 percent of the folks out there, which is kind of a scary number. I think you want to widen that out. That should be a policy goal, whether it's these new accounts that every young kid that's born gets a thousand dollars. And all those things seem great to me. And we should have more of that. I love it. But I will say one thing, Karen, and I think this is important. This year is dominated by retail. the average little guy getting it right and a bunch of professionals kind of missing the boat and just getting off the boat at the wrong time.

21:08So there is that silver lining that maybe we did have more participation in this in a broader sense. And that the average Joe that's just tuning in tonight to kind of get a few stock tips and figure out where to go, they've done pretty well. I'm pretty happy for them. And I think the too smart for their own good crowd kind of got all twisted up. And you know what? That's OK with me. So good for the 10 percent. But still to Karen's question, there's that there's this, you know, looming question of what happens right now as those little guys, little babies with the thousand dollar accounts grow.

21:45You know, that's fine. But right now, a lot of people do not own stocks and they are feeling left behind. And you noted the election on Tuesday. We talked about that on Wednesday, about how this is a message. Yeah, there is real discontent. There's real feeling that people are being left behind and can't make ends meet. No, I think it's true, Melissa. I think Tuesday was a big message. So doesn't that translate to the market at some point in some way? Or no, maybe it doesn't. I think it's a message to the current policymakers. I don't think that went unnoticed in Washington. And I think there's a lot of head scratching and thinking about, do we need to redirect housing policy a little?

22:19Do we need to think about energy policy a little more aggressively? Do we need to think about electric bills and housing over the next year as they go into a pretty tough midterm. I wouldn't be surprised to see some fairly aggressive turns that focus in on Main Street a little bit more than on Wall Street. That said, having Main Street, you know, spending some money is never a bad thing for Wall Street either, at least for many of the stocks we look at. So I remain optimistic, but I hold up that glimmer of worry. I don't like to bring those on very often. I usually like to be your beacon of optimism.