OhmZ/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Airbnb ( ABNB ) reported +15% (FXN) revenue growth in 1Q’26 which was its highest topline growth over the last eight quarters. It is particularly impressive given the backdrop of the Iran war. Airbnb mentioned growth accelerated from January to February but then experienced a “slight deceleration” in March due to cancellations across the EMEA and APAC regions...
OhmZ/iStock Editorial via Getty Images Airbnb ( ABNB ) reported +15% (FXN) revenue growth in 1Q’26 which was its highest topline growth over the last eight quarters. It is particularly impressive given the backdrop of the Iran war. Airbnb mentioned growth accelerated from January to February but then experienced a “slight deceleration” in March due to cancellations across the EMEA and APAC regions once the war started. Airbnb estimates Nights growth would have been 10% (vs. the reported 9%) in the absence of the war. Source: Company Filings, MBI Deep Dives, Daloopa The reported revenue growth by region appears much more impressive in regions outside North America, but FX had a substantial impact on such regions. I would focus on Nights & Experiences (N&E) growth and Average Daily Rate (ADR) on an FX neutral basis to assess the underlying growth. Source: Company Filings, MBI Deep Dives, Daloopa Geographically, North America’s Nights growth finally moved upwards from the LSD-MSD range to HSD in 1Q’26. APAC region Nights growth also accelerated from mid-teens in the last four quarters to high teens in 1Q’26. First-time bookers accelerated to 10% growth (which was the highest since early 2022) primarily due to growth in expansion markets such as Brazil, India, and Japan. Source: Company Filings, MBI Deep Dives For the second consecutive quarter, origin nights booked from India grew 50% YoY and in Brazil, it maintained over 20% growth for three consecutive quarters. First-time bookers in India increased 75% YoY. Airbnb’s success in Brazil is particularly encouraging; I think such success has offered Airbnb a bit of a playbook that they now need to replicate and execute in other expansionary markets. Moreover, demand from the Airbnb app is growing much faster than the overall business. In 1Q’26, nights booked on the app accelerated to +22% YoY (vs. +17% in 1Q’25 and +20% in 4Q’25). The Airbnb app accounted for 63% of total nights booked in 1Q’26 (vs. 58% in 1Q’25). Origin...
primeimages/iStock via Getty Images By Lynn Song , Chief Economist, Greater China Exports cool in April mostly on slower computer exports Taiwan's export growth slowed to 39.0% YoY in April, down from 61.8% YoY in March, and falling well short of market forecasts on the month. By product, Taiwan's semiconductor exports moderated to 40.5% YoY, which was down only slightly from March's 45.7% YoY gro...
primeimages/iStock via Getty Images By Lynn Song , Chief Economist, Greater China Exports cool in April mostly on slower computer exports Taiwan's export growth slowed to 39.0% YoY in April, down from 61.8% YoY in March, and falling well short of market forecasts on the month. By product, Taiwan's semiconductor exports moderated to 40.5% YoY, which was down only slightly from March's 45.7% YoY growth, as AI chip demand remained strong. The computer and accessories category, which has been one of the leading subcategories in recent months, saw exports slow from triple-digit growth to 76.5% YoY. The broader machinery and electrical equipment category, which accounts for around 84% of Taiwan's total exports, grew 48.7% YoY in April, decelerating from the 66.6% YoY growth we saw over the first quarter. Most of Taiwan's other export categories continued to see relatively sluggish growth, leading to the softer headline export growth. By export destination, exports generally slowed across the board. However, exports to the US slumped sharply to 63.8% YoY, down from 124.0% YoY in March. While this growth certainly is still very impressive, the drop is a major factor behind the export data miss. Exports to the US fell from 35.6% to 31.8% of the total. Exports to Mainland China & Hong Kong, the second-largest destination, saw a more modest 15.8% YoY gain. One area where Taiwan is continuing to see positive signs is the export price index, which continued to accelerate for an eighth consecutive month to 18.0% YoY, reaching a multi-year high. As long as the demand for top-end AI chips remains robust, Taiwan's trade prospects remain bright. Imports miss too but higher oil prices start to appear in data On the other side of the trade equation, imports grew by 29.2% YoY in April, down from 38.3% YoY, also falling short of market forecasts. Taiwan's petroleum imports rose 18.3% YoY in April, bringing the year-to-date levels up to -14.6% YoY. The oil import price index began to capt...
In a filing, ABC accuses the Trump administration of trying to chill its constitutionally protected free speech. The point of contention: "The View," and whether it's subject to equal time rules. (Image credit: Gabriela Passos)
In a filing, ABC accuses the Trump administration of trying to chill its constitutionally protected free speech. The point of contention: "The View," and whether it's subject to equal time rules. (Image credit: Gabriela Passos)
Robert Way/iStock Editorial via Getty Images For twenty years, the market learned to value tech through software instincts: users, APIs, developers, distribution, network effects, gross margins. But AI breaks that mental model because AI is not just software. AI is throughput. And throughput is physical. You do not scale frontier AI with a better landing page, in fact, you scale it with power, sub...
Robert Way/iStock Editorial via Getty Images For twenty years, the market learned to value tech through software instincts: users, APIs, developers, distribution, network effects, gross margins. But AI breaks that mental model because AI is not just software. AI is throughput. And throughput is physical. You do not scale frontier AI with a better landing page, in fact, you scale it with power, substations, cooling, fiber, lasers, HBM, packaging, networking, data halls, permits, financing, and customers willing to absorb gigantic compute commitments. That is why these NVIDIA ( NVDA ) deals matter. The Corning ( GLW ) deal is NVIDIA saying: if fiber becomes the choke point, the GPU roadmap slows down. So NVIDIA pre-funds the choke point before the market even understands it. Corning is expanding optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by roughly 10x and fiber capacity by more than 50%, helped by a multi-billion-dollar NVIDIA prepayment and equity-linked support. Same with Lumentum ( LITE ) and Coherent ( COHR ). These are not random optical names catching an AI halo. NVIDIA put $2B into Lumentum and $2B into Coherent, alongside purchase commitments and capacity-access rights, because large AI clusters increasingly become networking and optics problems, not just GPU problems. That is the hidden shift. The market keeps asking: “How many GPUs can NVIDIA sell?”The better question is: “What has to exist for NVIDIA to sell the next trillion dollars of systems?” And Jensen’s answer seems to be: I will finance whatever has to exist. OpenAI ( OPENAI ) needs 10GW of AI systems? NVIDIA is willing to invest up to $100B progressively as those gigawatts are deployed. Anthropic ( ANTHRO ) needs future compute optimized around Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin? NVIDIA commits up to $10B and supports a path toward 1GW of compute capacity. CoreWeave ( CRWV ) needs demand confidence to fund AI cloud capacity? NVIDIA gives it a $6.3B backstop for unsold cloud capacity. IREN has power-ri...
Robert Way/iStock Editorial via Getty Images For twenty years, the market learned to value tech through software instincts: users, APIs, developers, distribution, network effects, gross margins. But AI breaks that mental model because AI is not just software. AI is throughput. And throughput is physical. You do not scale frontier AI with a better landing page, in fact, you scale it with power, sub...
Robert Way/iStock Editorial via Getty Images For twenty years, the market learned to value tech through software instincts: users, APIs, developers, distribution, network effects, gross margins. But AI breaks that mental model because AI is not just software. AI is throughput. And throughput is physical. You do not scale frontier AI with a better landing page, in fact, you scale it with power, substations, cooling, fiber, lasers, HBM, packaging, networking, data halls, permits, financing, and customers willing to absorb gigantic compute commitments. That is why these NVIDIA ( NVDA ) deals matter. The Corning ( GLW ) deal is NVIDIA saying: if fiber becomes the choke point, the GPU roadmap slows down. So NVIDIA pre-funds the choke point before the market even understands it. Corning is expanding optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by roughly 10x and fiber capacity by more than 50%, helped by a multi-billion-dollar NVIDIA prepayment and equity-linked support. Same with Lumentum ( LITE ) and Coherent ( COHR ). These are not random optical names catching an AI halo. NVIDIA put $2B into Lumentum and $2B into Coherent, alongside purchase commitments and capacity-access rights, because large AI clusters increasingly become networking and optics problems, not just GPU problems. That is the hidden shift. The market keeps asking: “How many GPUs can NVIDIA sell?”The better question is: “What has to exist for NVIDIA to sell the next trillion dollars of systems?” And Jensen’s answer seems to be: I will finance whatever has to exist. OpenAI ( OPENAI ) needs 10GW of AI systems? NVIDIA is willing to invest up to $100B progressively as those gigawatts are deployed. Anthropic ( ANTHRO ) needs future compute optimized around Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin? NVIDIA commits up to $10B and supports a path toward 1GW of compute capacity. CoreWeave ( CRWV ) needs demand confidence to fund AI cloud capacity? NVIDIA gives it a $6.3B backstop for unsold cloud capacity. IREN has power-ri...
Robert Way/iStock Editorial via Getty Images For twenty years, the market learned to value tech through software instincts: users, APIs, developers, distribution, network effects, gross margins. But AI breaks that mental model because AI is not just software. AI is throughput. And throughput is physical. You do not scale frontier AI with a better landing page, in fact, you scale it with power, sub...
Robert Way/iStock Editorial via Getty Images For twenty years, the market learned to value tech through software instincts: users, APIs, developers, distribution, network effects, gross margins. But AI breaks that mental model because AI is not just software. AI is throughput. And throughput is physical. You do not scale frontier AI with a better landing page, in fact, you scale it with power, substations, cooling, fiber, lasers, HBM, packaging, networking, data halls, permits, financing, and customers willing to absorb gigantic compute commitments. That is why these NVIDIA ( NVDA ) deals matter. The Corning ( GLW ) deal is NVIDIA saying: if fiber becomes the choke point, the GPU roadmap slows down. So NVIDIA pre-funds the choke point before the market even understands it. Corning is expanding optical connectivity manufacturing capacity by roughly 10x and fiber capacity by more than 50%, helped by a multi-billion-dollar NVIDIA prepayment and equity-linked support. Same with Lumentum ( LITE ) and Coherent ( COHR ). These are not random optical names catching an AI halo. NVIDIA put $2B into Lumentum and $2B into Coherent, alongside purchase commitments and capacity-access rights, because large AI clusters increasingly become networking and optics problems, not just GPU problems. That is the hidden shift. The market keeps asking: “How many GPUs can NVIDIA sell?”The better question is: “What has to exist for NVIDIA to sell the next trillion dollars of systems?” And Jensen’s answer seems to be: I will finance whatever has to exist. OpenAI ( OPENAI ) needs 10GW of AI systems? NVIDIA is willing to invest up to $100B progressively as those gigawatts are deployed. Anthropic ( ANTHRO ) needs future compute optimized around Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin? NVIDIA commits up to $10B and supports a path toward 1GW of compute capacity. CoreWeave ( CRWV ) needs demand confidence to fund AI cloud capacity? NVIDIA gives it a $6.3B backstop for unsold cloud capacity. IREN has power-ri...
Chinese energy imports fell sharply in April, as the near-halt to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz choked a vital channel for crude oil and natural gas. Crude cargoes dropped about 20% year-on-year to 38.47 million tons, the lowest since July 2022, while gas fell about 13% to 8.42 million tons, according to Chinese customs data on Saturday. Oil imports were also lower than the previous month...
Chinese energy imports fell sharply in April, as the near-halt to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz choked a vital channel for crude oil and natural gas. Crude cargoes dropped about 20% year-on-year to 38.47 million tons, the lowest since July 2022, while gas fell about 13% to 8.42 million tons, according to Chinese customs data on Saturday. Oil imports were also lower than the previous month, which included shipments that had already begun their journey from the Persian Gulf before the US and Israeli air strikes against Iran on Feb. 28. The Middle East typically accounts for about half of China’s crude imports and nearly one-third of its liquefied natural gas. The initial batch of monthly customs figures don’t differentiate between seaborne LNG and gas delivered overland via pipelines, but ship-tracking data from analytics firm Kpler indicates that LNG purchases fell to an eight-year low in April. China’s April Energy Exports and Imports Data: Customs China’s April Agriculture Exports and Imports Data: Customs China’s April Metals Exports and Imports Data: Customs Fears that oil could run short in the world’s biggest energy buyer have pushed the government to prioritize refined items such as diesel and gasoline for domestic use. As a result, oil product exports in April plunged about 38% from last year to 3.12 million tons, the lowest in nearly a decade. The disruption to gas supply has lifted demand for alternatives such as coal. However, Chinese purchases fell about 13% to 33.08 million tons, the lowest since June last year, as the country leaned on its vast domestic output instead of seeking higher-priced imports. The Persian Gulf is also a major supplier of aluminum. But China’s status as the world’s leading producer has allowed it to fill some of that gap , with exports rising about 15% to 598,000 tons, the highest since November 2024. Steel exports, however, fell about 9% to 9.5 million tons, in part because of the recent emergence of the Middle East as ...
If in 1980 you looked at a list of the best-performing places to put your assets over the previous decade, the US stock market would not have been on it. That’s because it hadn’t actually gone up. The 1970s weren’t like 1929. If 1929 felt to investors like being pushed off a 60-story building, said one commentator at the time, the slow decline of the ’70s was more like “drowning in a bubble bath.”...
If in 1980 you looked at a list of the best-performing places to put your assets over the previous decade, the US stock market would not have been on it. That’s because it hadn’t actually gone up. The 1970s weren’t like 1929. If 1929 felt to investors like being pushed off a 60-story building, said one commentator at the time, the slow decline of the ’70s was more like “drowning in a bubble bath.” The second might sound less scary, but the result was much same. By the end of the decade, investors who had stayed in had lost 50% of their purchasing power. Might something as horrible as that happen to markets again? There are plenty of similarities between now and the end of the 1960s. For one, there’s the concentration. Historically, any time the proportion of one asset class or sector hits 40% of an index, a crash soon follows. In the ’70s it was the Nifty Fifty (40%). In 2000 it was tech and telecoms (41%). Today, says Bank of America, Big AI makes up 41% of the S&P 500. There are the valuations. The US market entered the ’70s on a forward P/E of around 19 times, but with many of the mega caps (the aforementioned Nifty Fifty) at more like 40 times. Today the forward P/E is closer to 22 times and Nvidia is on a P/E of 43 times. There are the IPOs. My colleague John Stepek just looked at this , pointing out how the dotcom bust was sparked by a series of initial public offerings (and hence equity oversupply), and worrying about the wave of IPOs on the way in the US this year (SpaceX and the like). Look back to 1969 and you will see the same thing. There was a wave of new issues during the year, more than 700 against about 360 the year before. The former were mostly “unprecedented outpourings of issues of the lowest quality,” Benjamin Graham said in Intelligent Investor at the time. Then, finally, there’s inflation. It’s something that was picking up sharply by the end of the 1960s and may well keep doing so now. Bloomberg Opinion columnist John Authers explained this w...
Brigg, Lincolnshire: We work these vehicles hard and they will have problems, but today was really not the day for a steaming bonnet There’s never a good time for a tractor to break down, but this was exceptional timing. Late April was very dry as predicted, and with a change in weather prospects, the birdfood seed needed to go in. The purpose of this “crop” is to fill the birds’ winter hunger gap...
Brigg, Lincolnshire: We work these vehicles hard and they will have problems, but today was really not the day for a steaming bonnet There’s never a good time for a tractor to break down, but this was exceptional timing. Late April was very dry as predicted, and with a change in weather prospects, the birdfood seed needed to go in. The purpose of this “crop” is to fill the birds’ winter hunger gap, and it has to be sown in a narrow window: after the early May frosts, but before the soil dries out too much. We had just delivered the trailer of seed to the field, and were on the road returning to the farm, to collect the rolls that press the seed into the soil. As we passed through Brigg, the lights appeared on the dashboard and steam started to appear from the bonnet. This was our smallest and newest tractor. Hurriedly, we pulled into a driveway, water pouring from under the engine. Half on and half off the road, we started to collect traffic behind us. A quick look justified a call to the tractor dealers – it was a tricky job and the clock was ticking. Continue reading...