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Now, time for some of today's trending tickers. We're watching Nvidia, VF Corp, and Lowe's. First up, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called US chip export curbs a failure. Speaking at a conference in Taiwan, Huang said Nvidia's market share in China has decreased from 95% to just 50% in the past five years. Huang also praised DeepC, which built its AI model on Nvidia chips, calling it a gift to the world here. Well, shares of Nvidia right now, they are down by about, well, 1% here coming into the start of today's activity. And it wasn't a gift to shareholders, we do know in the immediate reaction that we saw for Nvidia shares after the DeepC announcements took place. But then it really was a changing round of the narrative as to how they are embracing more competition, which is going to come in the form of language learning models, more chip manufacturers, and that market share is perhaps going to continue to shrink, or at least some of the chips will fall off their table onto other manufacturers.

And this was the key question when the United States announced an easing of chip restrictions with the Saudis, the idea being, can that outweigh any weakness to come if Chinese buyers are locked out of the market. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang throwing cold water on that idea, saying directly that this furthers Huawei instead of hindering that company, and puts China in the front seat when it comes to winning on AI here. The company also saying that China alone will account for a $50 billion opportunity by 2026. If American tech companies like Nvidia aren't allowed in, local customers will spend that money elsewhere, and that could be a benefit to those Chinese tech companies that these chip curbs aim at curbing.

Well, next up, shares of apparel and shoemaker VF Corp falling over 10% after forecasting a larger than expected loss in the current quarter of $125 million. The parent company of Vans and Timberland saying it is rushing products to the US before the 90-day pause on country-specific tariffs expires. It also plans to raise prices on merchandise due to tariffs. The stock down 16%. This isn't the first time over the past few years we've heard about weakness with Vans, VF Corp, I should say, and I recently took a look at the cost of Vans online. It's really affordable shoes. So I'm not surprised to hear them talking about raising prices. The question is, is the consumer demand already in question? And then what is a higher price shoe going to do to that demand?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is not the first that we've heard from at least one of the footwear companies. Under Armour is signaling something similar, trying to figure out exactly how much of that cost, and this is going to be the major calculus that all of these brands have to run. How much of that cost do they ultimately have to pass on to consumers, and for how long a period of time until they actually start to see that show up in their overall wholesale orders that are being bought by their retail partners, as well as what they're able to sell through on the inventory side. So if we start to see inventory pile up, that is perhaps as clear an indicator as you can get that consumers are pushing back on price. In addition to the fact that there's still going to be future seasons that they have to try and design and forecast, and ultimately run their own modeling around how much of that inventory in future they'll be able to sell through, too, as we're seeing kind of a pullback from much of the direct-to-consumer emphasis that a lot of manufacturers had put on themselves, and now trying to, you know, re-engage with many of those retail partnerships. Nike, one of those main players, but VF Corp also has a large retail and wholesale distributor outside proportion of their sales, too, to be considered within this as well going forward. But shares right now taking a hit, down 16, 17%.

Finally, here, shares of Lowe's, this one is one of our top trending tickers this morning, rising this morning after reporting earnings for the first quarter that beat the street's expectations. That's despite a decline in same-store sales and a larger exposure to the DIY consumer than its rival Home Depot, which confirmed in its earnings call that it's not going to raise prices due to tariffs. Shares right now of Lowe's, they are seeing a little bit of a move higher, up by about 4/10 of a percent. They did reiterate, I believe, is what we saw within their forecast as well. They did reiterate their full-year expectations, and that is something that did catch the attention of the street here as well.

Yeah, basically better than the worst-feared result when it comes to Lowe's here, and we're getting some headlines in from the CEO speaking on the earnings call here, Marvin Ellison, talking about efforts to speed up supply chain diversification. As you know, Brad, this is something we also heard about from Home Depot, who said they'd get no more than 10% of their supplies from each country, which I think is a really telling stat that these companies just don't know which countries they can trust amid this pending trade war and all the uncertainty that that holds.

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