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Spending Spikes While Savings Shrink
9:25 am
The Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation gauge, the PCE Price Index, rose 0.4% in February, pushing the annual headline rate to 2.8%. While core inflation — which excludes food and energy — edged down to 3%, the monthly heat surpassed expectations, which may force the Fed to keep interest rates “higher for longer.” This data reflects an economy already warming up before the recent Iran conflict spiked energy costs. The odds of a summer pivot are fading as stubborn service costs and resilient consumer demand keep price pressures well above the central bank’s 2% target.
- The Consumption Paradox: Personal spending jumped 0.5% despite a 0.1% dip in income, suggesting households are cannibalizing their savings to sustain lifestyles — a trend that historically precedes a pullback in discretionary stocks.
- Disposable Income Drain: Real disposable income saw its sharpest decline since early 2024, falling 0.5% after inflation adjustments, which may soon squeeze margins for retailers like Walmart (WMT +0.92%) and Amazon (AMZN +2.23%).
Opening Bell
9:35 am
The S&P 500 retreated Thursday as the initial euphoria over a U.S.-Iran ceasefire faded. Despite the Dow’s 1,300-point surge yesterday, skepticism returned after Iran’s parliamentary speaker accused the U.S. of violations. Consequently, West Texas Intermediate futures jumped 5% back toward $99 as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed to oil tankers. While some strategists view this as a buying opportunity, the lack of energy traffic and President Trump’s warning of a “military response larger than anything seen before” if compliance fails is keeping risk premiums high.
CoreWeave Secures $21B Meta Pact Through 2032
8:15 am — CRWV +5.20%, META +1.42% in pre-market trading
CoreWeave (CRWV +0.25%) announced a massive $21 billion expanded agreement Thursday to provide Meta (META +3.06%) with dedicated AI cloud capacity through 2032. The deal deepens an existing partnership as the social media giant aggressively scales infrastructure to support the increasingly complex workloads required for its generative AI roadmap. Under the terms, CoreWeave will deploy specialized compute across multiple locations, including some of the first installations of Nvidia‘s (NVDA 0.26%) next-generation hardware. This long-term commitment underscores the intensifying arms race for high-performance processing power as big tech players move from experimental models to industrial-scale inference and deployment.
- Capital Intensity Signals: The sheer scale of the $21 billion commitment indicates that Meta’s management sees no immediate plateau in AI infrastructure spending, prioritizing guaranteed hardware access over short-term capital expenditure reductions.
- Rubin Platform Adoption: The inclusion of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform in this rollout suggests that CoreWeave is successfully positioning itself as the primary gateway for enterprises to access the most advanced silicon before it reaches broader public cloud availability.
Today’s Change
(0.25%) $0.22
Current Price
$89.12
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$47B
Day’s Range
$88.88 – $92.60
52wk Range
$33.52 – $187.00
Volume
700K
Avg Vol
26M
Gross Margin
47.77%
Anthropic Takes Direct Aim at Enterprise SaaS
8:00 am
By Andy Cross
Motley Fool CIO
In an otherwise impressive rebound day for stocks (with the market up more than 2%), software moved the opposite way, with the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV 1.68%) falling nearly 1%. Once again, the cause points toward Anthropic. Its latest salvo is the release of its Claude Managed Agents (CMA), which is likely to pile on the competitive threats building against software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
In simple terms, CMA offers a full cloud platform for created agents. In reality, running a bunch of agents in a corporate environment at scale is highly complex. It involves all kinds of tools, data feeds, security, testing, and so forth. CMA hopes to lower the barriers to building and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) agents by providing an out-of-the-box environment to developers (at business clients).
This includes a so-called “harness,” which is software that handles a lot of the grunt work of running a bunch of agents in a real environment. The goal is for clients to move from testing to application in days or hours, rather than weeks.
It’s yet another example of how Claude (run by Anthropic) is attacking the heart of software applications. It is now giving enterprise clients a way to more easily create, test, validate, and run their agents to do things that, in some cases, software by design is meant to do. Claude is building a vertically integrated platform for managing those corporate agents.
This Morning’s Breakfast News
7:30 am — DIS -0.22% in pre-market trading
The WSJ reports Disney (DIS 1.49%) is planning to cut up to 1,000 jobs in the near term, as it continues to try and streamline and cut costs as it adjusts to lower box office income and higher streaming competition. The stock was little changed ahead of market open.
- Most job losses to be in the consolidated marketing team: The cuts would build on the 8,000 cumulative redundancies made since the start of the last transformation in 2022, although is still relatively modest when compared to the 231,000 total employees from the end of the fiscal 2025 year.
- Waiting for direction under new CEO Josh D’Amaro: Having taken over last month, D’Amaro is expected to reveal his priorities shortly, but will likely include a push for different divisions to collaborate more quickly and efficiently.
ICYMI: Wednesday’s Scoreboard
7:00 am — MELI -0.42% in pre-market trading
MercadoLibre (MELI +0.21%) was the subject of the latest Scoreboard video.
Top of the Morning
6:30 am — STZ -0.83% in pre-market trading
By Morning Show host Emily Flippen, CFA
Team Rule Breakers
Constellation Brands (STZ +5.32%) wants you to think its future is outside of its control and that everything within its control is perfectly fine. Management wants investors to look at its fourth-quarter earnings and its guidance for the next year and see a story of stabilization, of an underdog outperforming a cyclically weak industry. Management wants investors to see the silver lining, not the dark clouds. But what Constellation Brands seems to have forgotten is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re outperforming in a dying industry. The industry is still dying.
I say this as a Constellation Brands shareholder (and an investor who enjoys her fair share of wine). I am not rooting for this business to fail. And there were bright spots in the quarter. As the business continues to divest its wine and spirits portfolio, beer sales have managed to maintain their lead as the No. 1 dollar share gainer domestically, with beer depletions finally turning positive and net sales growing in the quarter after a year of declines. Newer lines, like Pacifico and Victoria, are legitimately performing well in an otherwise decimated category.
But no matter how silver the lining is, when I zoom out, I am still incredibly uncomfortable. Modelo Especial, which has not just been Constellation’s best-performing brand but also the crown jewel of beer in America, saw depletions fall 3% in the fourth quarter. Corona Extra was down 7%. The reality is that the alcohol industry is declining, and no amount of new product launches or category share gains will change that.
FedEx Ends 5-Year Pilot Dispute With 40% Rise
6:00 am — FDX -0.17% in pre-market trading
FedEx (FDX +0.72%) and the Air Line Pilots Association reached a breakthrough tentative agreement Wednesday, potentially ending a five-year labor dispute. The deal features a massive 40% hourly wage increase in 2026, followed by 3% annual raises through 2030, and up to $150,000 in retroactive pay for senior captains. This resolution is a critical pivot for management after pilots rejected a smaller 30% offer last year over outsourcing fears. While the deal still requires Master Executive Council approval and pilot ratification, it provides much-needed stability as the company integrates its air and ground networks to boost efficiency.
- Competitive Labor Pressure: The significant pay bump follows aggressive contract wins at rivals like United Parcel Service (UPS +0.11%), signaling a new era of higher structural costs for global logistics providers.
- Operational Stability: Securing the world’s largest cargo air fleet allows FedEx to focus on its upcoming spin-off of FedEx Freight, slated for June 1, without the looming threat of industrial action.
Today’s Change
(0.72%) $2.70
Current Price
$376.13
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$89B
Day’s Range
$370.91 – $376.37
52wk Range
$199.85 – $392.86
Volume
5.5K
Avg Vol
2M
Gross Margin
22.04%
Dividend Yield
1.55%
Ackman Eyes New Fund to Bet on Complacency
5:15 am
The FT reports Pershing Square Capital founder Bill Ackman is looking to launch a spin-off fund to try and exploit investor complacency via large concentrated macro trades.
- Potential to boost company fee earnings from “asymmetric” fund: The strategy behind the new fund would aim to make wagers against the prevailing narrative in the markets at any given time, mimicking his profitable trade from the start of the pandemic that yielded a $2.6 billion windfall.
- Added publicity ahead of likely IPO: Ackman is preparing to take his main hedge fund public along with a separate new closed-end fund, aiming to raise between $5 billion and $10 billion in the process.
Before the Opening Bell
5:00 am
Stock futures retreated Thursday as the newly minted U.S.-Iran ceasefire showed immediate signs of strain, threatening to reignite the Middle East conflict. While markets initially rallied on hopes of a “complete” lifting of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, Tehran has restricted passage to coordinated military transit, and recent Israeli strikes in Lebanon have further destabilized the 14-day truce. Investors are now shifting focus to the February Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index–the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation metric–to gauge how sustained energy price spikes are filtering through the broader economy.
- Monetary Policy High Stakes: Persistent volatility in crude prices poses a direct challenge to the Fed’s inflation targets. If the “war premium” remains embedded in energy costs, it may force a more hawkish stance on interest rates, hurting high-growth tech valuations.
- Supply Chain Fragility: The halting of tanker traffic through Hormuz despite the truce keeps insurance premiums elevated and transit times uncertain. This creates a difficult operating environment for global logistics players and manufacturing sectors dependent on stable energy flows.