Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving money and markets.
Wall Street's short sellers are nursing some fresh wounds this earnings season. A fresh batch of fifteen stocks that analysts had largely written off came in with results that blew past expectations, and when beaten-down names beat, the short squeeze amplifies the move sharply. These aren't momentum stories — they're conviction reversals, and those tend to have legs.
Turning to the infrastructure layer underneath the AI trade, Astera Labs had a standout first quarter that sent shares rocketing through May. The company sits in the critical connectivity layer of AI data centers, and with hyperscalers still spending aggressively on buildout, Astera is catching real revenue tailwinds rather than just riding sentiment. This is a name the market is beginning to take seriously as infrastructure rather than speculation.
And speaking of the AI spending cycle, Nvidia continues to anchor the conversation around what the Magnificent Seven's capital expenditure wave is actually producing downstream. The argument gaining traction is that the real millionaire-maker opportunity isn't in the spenders themselves but in the suppliers — the chipmakers and storage players whose order books are filling faster than the market has priced in.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
