In This Article:
Market Domination hosts Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton cover today's trending tickers.
Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) is making a $2.4 billion move to acquire Foot Locker (FL), aiming to boost digital sales and expand globally.
Deere (DE) stock hits a record high after topping earnings expectations, despite trimming its full-year profit outlook.
CoreWeave (CRWV) stock swings after disclosing a new $4B agreement with OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
Now time for some of today's training ticker, sponsored by tastytrade, we're checking in on the big deal of the day between Dicks and Foot Locker, as well as earnings reaction to Deere and Corwee. First up, let's talk about Dicks sporting goods. It is buying Foot Locker in a $2.4 billion deal aimed at expanding international reach and boosting Foot Locker's digital presence. The deal has shares of Foot Locker soaring today, Dicks going down by quite a lot here. Now, you tend to see an acquirer dinged. But there are a lot of questions from analysts about this deal and whether it was the right one for Dicks. Foot Locker has been struggling to some extent. Some analysts saying Dicks has been on good footing, and they're really questioning whether this is the time to make this deal.
Yeah, I saw, I think it was city here, uh, saying Dicks is proven operator. They do say Foot Locker has opportunity to be run better, says they could have, uh, more buying power with key brands combined, have around, looks here around 30% of Nike's wholesale business. I also saw analysts at Bloomberg weighing in. Foot Locker's in the midst, they say of a challenging turnaround. It needs the buyout from Dicks versus the other way around, validated, they say by week preliminary Q1 results for Foot Locker, a contrast, they say to Dickspeat.
Yeah, I also thought it was interesting Jonathan Comp over at Berard saying that this deal is a leveraged bet on Nike's turnaround. As we've talked about in the past, Foot Locker is very overindexed to the likes of a Nike, and that relationship has sort of, uh, been hot and cold over the past couple of years as Nike sort of went with a more direct to consumer strategy, then came back around to using Foot Locker as a channel. So it's going to be real interesting, and we're going to talk more about this with Sam Poser, who's longtime footwear analyst later in the show.
Sam. Sam is the man to talk to on this story, for sure. Shares of Deere hitting an all-time high. That's after topping earnings expectations. The earnings beat comes even as profits fell 22 versus 22% compared to the same period last year. So, uh, beat estimates. Net income did drop 22% for the year earlier to 664 a share, but the street expected 557. So that's good enough. They did trim their profit outlook for the year. They're now looking for between 4.75 and 5.5 billion.
Yeah, basically the shares are trading at a record. Did you say that already? Forgive me if you did. The shares are The shares are in a record. Um, and it seems like there's a lot of optimism about the farm cycle sort of inflecting higher from here. Um, over at Jeffries, there was an analyst there who said, we see nothing in today's results that calls into question the thesis that 2025 should mark a bottom in the egg cycle. So it's as much about today as it is about that sort of view that things are going to get better from here.
And I see analysts at City Citi say, less dire than feared tariff impact outlook. So less dire, that's good enough, too.
Yeah, and the shares up about 20% this year. Uh, Corweve getting a boost today after regulatory filings showed an additional agreement with Open AI in which the chat GPT maker has committed to pay Corweve up to $4 billion through April 2029. It also comes after the company issued its first earnings report since going public via an IPO in March. Now the shares initially fell, then this filing came out. They went up. It looks like they're back down again. I don't know if we got that intraday chart to show that sort of back and forth that we've been seeing in the shares today. There it is. So you saw the shares initially down, then up, then down again. I mean, there was this optimism around this deal. There was already an existing agreement here. Corweve had, um, already signed with Open AI a five-year contract worth about $12 billion. So this is then an additional $4 billion on top of that. But the company's operating income forecast was below estimates.
Uh, so that Corweve disclosed a deal in the earnings call yesterday, but then didn't name the party. So now now we know. Uh, by the way, Brentilla Jeffries telling his clients, we know Brent, friend of the show, longtime smart analyst. He says, we see no sign of AI compute tail winds easing up soon and see Corweve as a multi-year winner. He took his target to, it looks like 80. Well,
But then on the flip side of that, we got DA Davidson cutting it to underperform from neutral. Its price target Is that I'm not sure if it's gonna As I'm reading this, I'm not I'm not sure if it's Gil, but the price target there is 36. We are fans. So who do choose your fighter? Um, Whoever I I'm gonna check it, but whoever said it says they conf it confirms our concern that Corweve is not a business worth scaling.
So All right. It does.