Good morning, you're listening to Markets Desk.
Starbucks is showing early signs that Brian Niccol's turnaround is taking hold. The CEO told analysts that customers across every income bracket are responding to a more personal, experiential approach — what he called a little touch of luxury. Traffic trends are improving, and Wall Street is watching closely to see whether margin recovery follows the foot traffic.
Shifting to the AI space, all eyes are on tonight's earnings wave from Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft — and OpenAI is casting a long shadow over every one of those calls. The company reportedly fell short of its internal target of one billion weekly active ChatGPT users by year-end, landing closer to nine hundred million as of February. With six hundred billion dollars in planned compute spending by twenty thirty, the revenue-to-investment gap is the question every analyst wants answered tonight.
And in the options market, a notable bearish trade surfaced in the SPDR Gold ETF ahead of the Federal Reserve's decision. A trader sold upside call exposure while simultaneously buying downside puts — a structured, two-pronged bet that gold's recent run may be overextended. With the Fed meeting in focus, that kind of hedging activity signals at least one large player is bracing for a reversal.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
