Enterprises can't fix their GPU waste problem because the fix makes the problem worse. Releasing idle capacity would improve utilization, but the same shortage driving GPU prices up is exactly why no team will give capacity back. So the fleet sits at roughly 5%, billed by the hour, and the cycle tightens. That pressure — repeated across thousands of enterprises over the past two years — is the rea...
Enterprises can't fix their GPU waste problem because the fix makes the problem worse. Releasing idle capacity would improve utilization, but the same shortage driving GPU prices up is exactly why no team will give capacity back. So the fleet sits at roughly 5%, billed by the hour, and the cycle tightens. That pressure — repeated across thousands of enterprises over the past two years — is the reason most companies are now running their GPU fleets at roughly 5% utilization , according to Cast AI's 2026 State of Kubernetes Optimization Report, which measured actual production clusters rather than surveying them. It's also the reason nobody releases the idle capacity. Cast AI co-founder and President Laurent Gil has been tracking the dynamic for two years. “Many of the neoclouds are not cloud,” he told VentureBeat. “They are neo-real estate.” Five percent is about six times worse than a no-effort baseline. Gil puts a reasonable human-managed target at around 30% once you factor in day cycles, weekends and normal business patterns. Five percent means enterprises are running their most expensive infrastructure line at a fraction of what doing nothing intentional would yield. And it lands at the same moment cloud compute pricing has broken its 20-year pattern. AWS quietly raised its reserved H200 GPU prices by roughly 15% on a Saturday in January, with no formal announcement. Memory suppliers pushed HBM3e prices up 20% for 2026. It is the first time since AWS launched EC2 in 2006 that a hyperscaler has meaningfully raised reserved GPU pricing rather than cut it. For now, the assumption under most enterprise AI budgets — that cloud compute gets cheaper every year— no longer holds at the top of the stack. The cloud market has split in two The pricing move matters less for what it is than for what it signals about where the shortage actually bites. Cloud compute has split into two layers. At the commodity layer, the old deflation still works. H100 on-demand pricing has fall...
State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (NYSEMKT:XLK) offers lower costs and higher yields, while iShares U.S. Technology ETF (NYSEMKT:IYW) provides broader exposure and includes communications giants like Alphabet. Tech investors often choose between narrow sector focus and broader industry exposure within the tech landscape. While both funds target U.S. technology companies, their underly...
State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (NYSEMKT:XLK) offers lower costs and higher yields, while iShares U.S. Technology ETF (NYSEMKT:IYW) provides broader exposure and includes communications giants like Alphabet. Tech investors often choose between narrow sector focus and broader industry exposure within the tech landscape. While both funds target U.S. technology companies, their underlying index rules lead to distinct concentrations. For those evaluating these two technology titans, the choice often hinges on whether to include the diverse digital advertising and services segments found in the broader tech index. Beta measures price volatility relative to the S&P 500; beta is calculated from five-year monthly returns. The 1-yr return represents total return over the trailing 12 months. Dividend yield is the trailing-12-month distribution yield. Continue reading
Wavetop/iStock via Getty Images Overview When I previously covered the Virtus Equity & Convertible Income Fund ( NIE ), I issued a buy rating due to the attractive valuation and return potential at the time. Since then, the share price has experienced some volatility but the total return remains positive. The fund has released an updated annual report for its 2026 period, so I wanted to revisit th...
Wavetop/iStock via Getty Images Overview When I previously covered the Virtus Equity & Convertible Income Fund ( NIE ), I issued a buy rating due to the attractive valuation and return potential at the time. Since then, the share price has experienced some volatility but the total return remains positive. The fund has released an updated annual report for its 2026 period, so I wanted to revisit the fund's earnings performance, dividend stability, and outlook for the remainder of the year. I believe that NIE can deliver attractive returns going forward if the market momentum remains positive. At the time of my last coverage, NIE traded at a discount to NAV of 10.07%. Following the slight pullback in the market through the first quarter of the year, NIE now trades at a slightly larger discount to NAV of 10.64%. Referring to the red line on the graph below, NIE now trades at a higher-than-average price to NAV level. For reference, NIE has actually traded at an average discount to NAV of 10.07% over the last five years. While this can be a solid time to accumulate, there are still some downside risks to consider. CEF Data The fund is very reliant on technology stocks and a downturn in the sector can be disastrous for NIE. This can put NIE in a position where it is paying out more than it earns, which can hurt the growth of the underlying NAV. NIE currently offers a starting dividend yield of about 7.8%, while issuing its payouts on a quarterly basis. The latest annual report confirms that NIE can support the distributions with ease, but the portfolio is very reliant on net realized gains. Fund Strategy According to the latest fund overview , NIE has total managed assets of $795.6M that are spread across a blended portfolio of assets. The fund's primary goal is to generate attractive total returns through a combination of capital appreciation and income generation. To achieve this goal, the fund combines common equities and convertible securities. Convertible securities ...
Uber announced several new features on Wednesday during its annual event, which push far beyond the company's original ride-hailing purpose and deeper into its users' lives.
Uber announced several new features on Wednesday during its annual event, which push far beyond the company's original ride-hailing purpose and deeper into its users' lives.
An SEC filing dated April 28, 2026, showed GuardCap Asset Management Ltd sold 3,593,257 shares of Yum China during the first quarter. The estimated transaction value was $186.04 million based on the average closing price for the quarter. The value of the stake at quarter-end declined by $167.44 million, a figure that includes both trading activity and market price movements. Yum China leverages a ...
An SEC filing dated April 28, 2026, showed GuardCap Asset Management Ltd sold 3,593,257 shares of Yum China during the first quarter. The estimated transaction value was $186.04 million based on the average closing price for the quarter. The value of the stake at quarter-end declined by $167.44 million, a figure that includes both trading activity and market price movements. Yum China leverages a multi-brand portfolio to capture diverse consumer preferences and dining occasions across China’s restaurant market. I wouldn’t look at Guardcap’s sale of its Yum China stake as a sign the firm isn’t confident about the investment. In the first quarter, the firm reduced its 11 largest holdings by 44% or more. The portfolio finished the first quarter with 27 holdings, the same as at the end of 2025. The overall size of the portfolio, though, shrank from $3.7 billion to $1.7 billion. Continue reading
Richard Drury/DigitalVision via Getty Images An update on Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals ( KNSA ) is long overdue. Since my last article in June 2025 , the company made strong commercial progress with Arcalyst exceeding expectations, again, while the pipeline was in clinical trial execution phase. The commercial execution was so good that even my increased valuation range of $43-$45 turned out quite cons...
Richard Drury/DigitalVision via Getty Images An update on Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals ( KNSA ) is long overdue. Since my last article in June 2025 , the company made strong commercial progress with Arcalyst exceeding expectations, again, while the pipeline was in clinical trial execution phase. The commercial execution was so good that even my increased valuation range of $43-$45 turned out quite conservative as it was based on Arcalyst net sales of $900-$950 million in 2027, a range that will likely be exceeded this year. Kiniksa is up 91% since my previous update, and it is up 441% since I added it to Growth Stock Forum’s Coverage Universe in March 2022. Growth Stock Forum I have largely stopped using valuation as an anchor of my investment thesis as I found that I tend to leave money on the table by adhering to what nearly always turns out to be a conservative model. At least for high quality growth names, and those are the ones that matter the most. For the purposes of continuity here, the new valuation range on Kiniksa would be $57-$63 per share, up from $43-$45 per share, based on next year’s net sales of Arcalyst of $1.2-$1.3 billion. The range does not give credit to the emerging next-generation pipeline candidates KPL-387 and KPL-1161 that have significantly better economics for Kiniksa and they could add considerably to the net present value. For these reasons, I will remain bullish on Kiniksa, above and beyond that valuation range on Arcalyst. Arcalyst’s outlook improves yet again, and the story is still early Arcalyst has been making steady progress since launch and has captured 18% of the recurrent pericarditis market at the end of 2025, and Kiniksa only counts multiple recurrences here, leaving the larger first recurrence market largely untapped. As I covered before, the major growth driver for the drug has been the duration of therapy. At launch, I had less than a year of duration of therapy as the basis for sales calculations and modeling, and the averag...
Riot Platforms ( RIOT ) will report its Q1 2026 earnings on April 30 at 4:30 PM EST, and the stock is already under pressure. In the last week, it has fallen ~15% from ~$18.66 to ~$15.98 as investors stay cautious before results. Street expectations are weak. The company is expected to post a consensus estimate loss of -$0.83 EPS with revenue of ~$130.58M. The estimate revision trend is clearly ne...
Riot Platforms ( RIOT ) will report its Q1 2026 earnings on April 30 at 4:30 PM EST, and the stock is already under pressure. In the last week, it has fallen ~15% from ~$18.66 to ~$15.98 as investors stay cautious before results. Street expectations are weak. The company is expected to post a consensus estimate loss of -$0.83 EPS with revenue of ~$130.58M. The estimate revision trend is clearly negative—0 upward vs. 8 downward EPS revisions and 1 upward vs. 12 downward revenue revisions in the past 3 months. On the other hand, as per its unaudited production and operations Q1 updates, the company sold ~3.78K Bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) for ~$289.5M and another ~500 BTC in April. This has reduced its total holdings by ~18% YoY to ~15.68K BTC. This means the company booked profits but now has less buffer if prices fall. At the same time, uncertainty around the FOMC meeting and Bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) near ~$76K is keeping pressure on the stock. Moreover, RIOT Platforms ( RIOT ) also amended its $200M loan with Coinbase , shifting to a fixed interest rate and extending maturity by 364 days for better cost clarity, reported SEC filing . The loan is backed by Bitcoin ( BTC-USD ) , USDC, and cash and needs extra collateral if risk crosses 70%, with possible liquidation at 80%. Lower BTC holdings increase risk if prices fall. However, ratings are mixed. The quant rating is 2.62 (Hold), while Seeking Alpha analysts rate it 4 (Buy), and Wall Street analysts are more bullish with a 4.57 rating (Strong Buy). Investors should note that weak estimates, falling BTC holdings, and macro pressure weigh on RIOT platforms ( RIOT ) stock as it dipped 5% today ahead of Q1 earnings, but long-term sentiment remains positive. More on Riot Platforms Riot Platforms: Executive Transition At A Paramount Moment (Rating Upgrade) Riot Platforms: A Hold At Best Riot Platforms, Inc. (RIOT) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript Why are top crypto stocks RIOT, BTDR, & CIFR under pressure? Crypto bill hits new impasse...
The S&P 500 Index ($SPX ) (SPY ) today is down -0.36%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DOWI ) (DIA ) is down -0.78%, and the Nasdaq 100 Index ($IUXX ) (QQQ ) is up +0.09%. June E-mini S&P futures (ESM26 ) are down -0.28%, and June E-mini Nasdaq futures...
The S&P 500 Index ($SPX ) (SPY ) today is down -0.36%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DOWI ) (DIA ) is down -0.78%, and the Nasdaq 100 Index ($IUXX ) (QQQ ) is up +0.09%. June E-mini S&P futures (ESM26 ) are down -0.28%, and June E-mini Nasdaq futures...