After Hours Summary: GOOG +6.2%, TENB +8.7%, TDOC +5.3% higher on earnings; SNAP -18.6%, RHI -10.9%, MSFT -3.7%, TXN -3.7% lower on earnings; PACW +36.6% and BANC +12% announce mergerAfter Hours Gainers:
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: PACW +36.6% (also to merge with BANC), BANC +12% (also to merge with PACW), TENB +8.7%, GOOG +6.2%, TDOC +5.3%, HA +5%, HIW +5%, TRMK +4.7%, LOB +4.6%, VICR +4.4%, MANH +4%, KALU +3.3%, CALM +2.1%, RNST +2%, UMBF +2%, CB +1.8%, WSBC +1.7%, ROIC +1%, CR +0.7%, AAT +0.6%, ATRC +0.3%, FCF +0.1%, NEX +0.1%, PRO +0.1%
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: DISH +6.3% (DISH will start selling premium mobile services on AMZN according to Bloomberg), ABOS +5.4% (RA Capital discloses 25.9% stake), WFC +3.5% (increases dividend; also authorizes $30 bln stock repurchase program), WSBF +2.2% (CEO to retire), BCBP +1% (files $100 mln mixed shelf securities offering), AMRN +1% (receives positive recommendation from Spanish drug pricing committee for VAZKEPA), LUNR +0.8% (NASA awards Zeno Power-led team, including LUNR), ET +0.4% (increases dividend), GTLS +0.4% (Dalian Clean Energy selects GTLS to supply hydrogen compression), LHX +0.3% (LDOS and LHX team up for US Army project)
After Hours Losers:
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: SNAP -18.6%, RHI -10.9%, WIRE -6.4%, CSGP -5.2%, WM -5.1%, NBR -4.9%, MSFT -3.7%, TXN -3.7%, MTDR -2.8%, VBTX -2.4%, ENVA -2%, ASH -1.9%, CNI -1.6%, MMSI -1.6%, EQT -1.3%, RUSHA -1.2% (also declares 3-for-2 stock split; also increases dividend), V -1.1%, LXFR -0.8%, BUSE -0.3%, BDN -0.2%, RNR -0.2%
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: RILY -1.1% (commences $100 mln stock offering), MSEX -1% (upgraded treatment plant now in service), GDEN -0.9% (completes previously disclosed sale of Rocky Gap Casino), LDOS -0.9% (LDOS and LHX team up for US Army project), ERIC -0.2% (INTC and ERIC expand collaboration; ERIC will use INTC's technology for next-gen 5G infrastructure)
‘Oppenheimer’ is a great film about the wrong man
Harry Truman, travestied in the film, built the world we live in, and stand to lose
The fact that J. Robert Oppenheimer agonised over his part in the creation of the atomic bomb is not interesting. Was he meant to whistle to work? Harry Truman, to whom it fell to use the “gadget”, is the more dramatic figure, precisely because he made what might be the most history-altering executive decision since Pontius Pilate without much in the way of outward qualms.
Christopher Nolan’s biopic of Oppenheimer gives the 33rd US president just one scene, in which he shambles around as a provincial buffoon who can’t say Nagasaki right. Apart from its over-reliance on dialogue for exposition, and its naivete about the chances of total Axis surrender, this account of the father of Nato is the most jarring thing in a fine film whose three hours seldom drag.
Since the last decade, when Donald Trump won the presidency, Vladimir Putin took Crimea and Xi Jinping set China on a more assertive path, liberals have tried to put a name to what we are defending from these revisionist leaders. The best effort, the “rules-based international order”, is terrible. So call it the Truman Show.
It is Truman who made the foundational decisions of our world: to keep the US in Europe after 1945, to garrison vulnerable places even farther afield, to reduce industrial tariffs. In ending American isolation, his predecessor Franklin Roosevelt had the “advantage” of a world war. Truman set himself a harder task: to maintain a forward US posture during peace time. The result, an empire in all but name, has had costs. But the past 18 months have been a sublime education in its uses. Imagine Ukraine right now without a committed US. In another 18, depending how Americans vote, you might not have to.
The lesson of this decade so far is that liberalism isn’t tenable without hard power. And there hasn’t been enough of a reckoning with the dereliction of those who governed before. I am not calling for show trials, quite, though it is striking what gets scrutinised and what doesn’t. In the UK, there is an inquiry into the Covid pandemic, but not the decline of the defence budget since the 1980s. There were several on the Iraq war but not on the (far from warlike) response to Russia’s incursions into Georgia and Crimea. Could it have been firmer? How much did it embolden the Kremlin?
The trouble with inquiry-itis, a virus not confined to Britain, is its focus on acts of commission, not omission. In retrospect, Barack Obama took his serene detachment too far, at least in foreign policy. Few administrations anywhere in the west have dated worse than Angela Merkel’s complacent one. Yet, in polite society, each of those names still carries far less stigma than George W Bush or Tony Blair do for the active debacle of the Iraq war. That moral calculation might be correct, but it isn’t examined.
Truman’s reputation languished for decades. His intervention in Korea was a horror, and something of a failure. But what might have happened had the west not shown it would produce counterforce to almost any communist advance anywhere?
If he is neglected (how many westerners can picture him?) it is for two reasons. First, he reminds us what liberalism has done to survive this far. The film treats the nuclear bombing of Japan as a unique moral compromise, and it might be. But “conventional” weapons turned much of Tokyo to a cinder over the course of one night. The allies bombed German civilians. As for America’s own past, the Union didn’t beat the Confederacy with chivalric jousting.
Liberalism’s blend of high conscience and its opposite existed nowhere so much as in the person of Truman. He decolonised the Philippines. He stood up for civilian control of government against the would-be warrior-king General Douglas MacArthur. At the same time, this product of seriously rum municipal politics called the bomb a “blessing” long after he used it and was complicit in the Red Scare at home. Oppenheimer’s urbane manners and Vedic learning don’t make him the more morally complex man.
And so to the other reason Truman is obscured. Snobbery. It is hard for some liberals to accept that we owe our world to a failed haberdasher from Missouri: a mule-trader’s son, a figure of suave derision until, in his sixties, he became perhaps the most powerful human being who will ever live. (Neither his predecessor nor his successor had the nuclear monopoly.) He leaves behind no treatise and few epigrams, much less in translated Sanskrit. But he knew a liberal must learn to walk with, if not the devil, then the brute.
UN inspectors find mines at Russian-occupied nuclear plant in Ukraine
Explosives planted in buffer zone at Zaporizhzhia facility should not affect its safety and security systems, says IAEA
UN atomic watchdog inspectors have found landmines at the site of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, occupied by Russian forces since the early days of the war after their full-scale invasion last year.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said the mines were planted in a buffer zone between the internal and external perimeter barriers, at what is the biggest nuclear facility in Europe.
“Having such explosives on the site is inconsistent with the IAEA safety standards and nuclear security guidance and creates additional psychological pressure on plant staff,” Rafael Grossi, the IAEA’s director- general, said in a statement on Monday night.
But he added that the “detonation of these mines should not affect the site’s nuclear safety and security systems”.
Since last year Ukraine has accused Russia of militarising the plant by basing troops there and storing weaponry at the site. It is located in Energodar, a city in the southern regions of Ukraine, which Russia’s forces occupy along with the country’s far east.
Grossi said the IAEA had been aware of the previous placement of mines “outside the site perimeter and also at particular places inside”. He added the nuclear body’s permanent inspectors on the site “have been told that it is a military decision, and in an area controlled by military”.
The IAEA said its experts had carried out inspections and regular “walk-downs” across the nuclear plant “without seeing any heavy military equipment”. But they said they were “continuing to request access to the roofs of the [plant’s] reactors and their turbine halls, including units three and four which are of particular interest”.
Western officials, military analysts and scientists have long warned about the possibility of a nuclear accident at Zaporizhzhia.
Safety concerns spiked last month after the nearby Kakhovka dam along the Dnipro river was blown up, flooding swaths of land and threatening to deprive the nuclear plant of water needed to cool nuclear fuel on site, even though electricity generation was halted last year.
“The IAEA experts are continuing to closely monitor the situation regarding the availability of water for cooling the ZNPP’s six reactors and other essential nuclear safety and security functions,” the IAEA statement said.
“Available water supply remains relatively stable . . . the site continues to have sufficient water for some months,” it added.
Lingering concerns about the nuclear power plant come a week into a Russian air strike campaign that has targeted Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in a bid to choke Ukrainian grain exports. Moscow last week withdrew from a UN-brokered agreement from last summer that created a maritime food shipment corridor to ease Russia’s Black Sea blockade of Ukrainian ports.
In a phone call with UK prime minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy pleaded for additional air defence systems to protect his country’s ports, including the provincial capital Odesa, whose historic centre was this weekend heavily scarred by a Russian missile strike.
“Ukraine urgently needs to strengthen its air defence to protect its historical heritage and continue the Black Sea Grain Initiative,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter.
On Monday Russia launched drone strikes on Ukraine’s Reni port on the Danube, which forms a border with Romania, an EU country and member of the Nato military alliance.
Russia conducted fresh “kamikaze” drone strikes in the early hours of Tuesday targeting Kyiv and regions to the west, east and south of the capital. Officials said all those aimed at Kyiv were intercepted, but some infrastructure damage was reported in other regions.
EU agriculture ministers are scheduled to meet in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss alternative routes for Ukrainian grain to reach world markets after Russia threatened to attack ships in the Black Sea, the main supply route.
Plans include increasing capacity to bring cereals out over land and river routes through the EU, said Luis Planas, Spain’s agriculture minister, who is chairing the meeting.
Research Calls
- Upgrades:
- Adidas AG (ADDYY) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Societe Generale
- Adidas AG (ADDYY) upgraded to Outperform from Neutral at Exane BNP Paribas
- Datadog (DDOG) upgraded to Outperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research; tgt $140
- Fortum Oyj (FOJCY) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Berenberg
- Huntington Banc (HBAN) upgraded to Neutral from Underweight at JP Morgan; tgt raised to $13
- KBC Group SA (KBCSY) upgraded to Buy from Hold at Deutsche Bank
- Meta Platforms (META) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at New Street; tgt $350
- Walmart (WMT) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler; tgt raised to $210
- Zscaler (ZS) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BTIG Research; tgt $185
- Downgrades:
- Avanos Medical (AVNS) downgraded to Sector Weight from Overweight at KeyBanc Capital Markets
- Bank of Hawaii (BOH) downgraded to Underperform from Mkt Perform at Keefe Bruyette; tgt $47
- CI&T Inc (CINT) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup; tgt raised to $7
- Corteva (CTVA) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Redburn
- Goldman Sachs (GS) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup; tgt raised to $400
- Inditex (IDEXY) downgraded to Neutral from Outperform at Exane BNP Paribas
- Kodiak Sciences (KOD) downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JP Morgan
- MainStreet Bancshares (MNSB) downgraded to Equal-Weight from Overweight at Stephens; tgt $24
- NIKE (NKE) downgraded to Underperform from Neutral at Exane BNP Paribas
- Progressive (PGR) downgraded to Underweight from Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley; tgt lowered to $114
- Rackspace Technology (RXT) downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Citigroup; tgt raised to $1.50
- Sprouts Farmers Market (SFM) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Deutsche Bank; tgt lowered to $42
- TC Energy (TRP) downgraded to Neutral from Sector Outperform at CIBC
- Tractor Supply (TSCO) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at BofA Securities; tgt lowered to $226
- Vermilion Energy (VET) downgraded to Hold from Buy at Desjardins
- Walt Disney (DIS) downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at Atlantic Equities; tgt lowered to $76
- Zevia PBC (ZVIA) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman; tgt lowered to $3
- Others:
- dLocal Limited (DLO) initiated with a Positive at Susquehanna; tgt $18.50
- Emerald Holding (EEX) initiated with a Buy at Rosenblatt; tgt $7.20
- Electronic Arts (EA) initiated with a Hold at HSBC Securities; tgt $128
- Endava (DAVA) placed on negative catalyst watch at Citigroup; tgt lowered to $63
- EPAM Systems (EPAM) placed on negative catalyst watch at Citigroup; tgt raised to $240
- Fidelis Insurance Holdings Limited (FIHL) initiated with a Market Perform at BMO Capital Markets; tgt $15
- Fluence (FLNC) initiated with a Neutral at ROTH MKM; tgt $31
- Howmet Aerospace (HWM) initiated with an Outperform at Robert W. Baird; tgt $61
- Incyte (INCY) initiated with a Buy at Citigroup; tgt $82
- JD.com (JD) named Research Tactical Idea at Morgan Stanley; tgt $60
- Kenvue (KVUE) initiated with a Buy at Edward Jones
- lululemon athletica (LULU) assumed with an Overweight at KeyBanc Capital Markets; tgt $425
- MAC Limited (MTAL) initiated with a Buy at Canaccord Genuity; tgt $13
- Mobileye Global (MBLY) resumed with an Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley; tgt $34
- NIKE (NKE) assumed with a Sector Weight at KeyBanc Capital Markets
- On (ONON) initiated with an Overweight at KeyBanc Capital Markets; tgt $42
- Playtika (PLTK) initiated with a Buy at HSBC Securities; tgt $15.80
- ProKidney Corp. (PROK) initiated with a Buy at BTIG Research; tgt $16
- Shift4 Payments (FOUR) initiated with a Buy at Mizuho; tgt $80
- SoFi Technologies (SOFI) initiated with an Equal-Weight at Stephens; tgt $7
- Sprinklr (CXM) initiated with a Buy at DA Davidson; tgt $17
- Take-Two (TTWO) initiated with a Buy at HSBC Securities; tgt $170
- Warner Music Group (WMG) initiated with an Outperform at TD Cowen; tgt $38
- Watsco (WSO) initiated with a Neutral at Mizuho; tgt $360
- Wix.com (WIX) placed on 90-day upside catalyst watch at Citigroup; tgt $120
Research Calls
- Upgrades:
- Datadog (DDOG) upgraded to Outperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research; tgt $140
- Walmart (WMT) upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler; tgt raised to $210
- Zscaler (ZS) upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BTIG Research; tgt $185
- Downgrades:
- Avanos Medical (AVNS) downgraded to Sector Weight from Overweight at KeyBanc Capital Markets
- Corteva (CTVA) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Redburn
- Goldman Sachs (GS) downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup; tgt raised to $400
- Progressive (PGR) downgraded to Underweight from Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley; tgt lowered to $114
- Rackspace Technology (RXT) downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Citigroup; tgt raised to $1.50
- Walt Disney (DIS) downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at Atlantic Equities; tgt lowered to $76
- Others:
- dLocal Limited (DLO) initiated with a Positive at Susquehanna; tgt $18.50
- Emerald Holding (EEX) initiated with a Buy at Rosenblatt; tgt $7.20
- Howmet Aerospace (HWM) initiated with an Outperform at Robert W. Baird; tgt $61
- Incyte (INCY) initiated with a Buy at Citigroup; tgt $82
- Kenvue (KVUE) initiated with a Buy at Edward Jones
- MAC Limited (MTAL) initiated with a Buy at Canaccord Genuity; tgt $13
- On (ONON) initiated with an Overweight at KeyBanc Capital Markets; tgt $42
- Playtika (PLTK) initiated with a Buy at HSBC Securities; tgt $15.80
- ProKidney Corp. (PROK) initiated with a Buy at BTIG Research; tgt $16
- Shift4 Payments (FOUR) initiated with a Buy at Mizuho; tgt $80
- Sprinklr (CXM) initiated with a Buy at DA Davidson; tgt $17
- Take-Two (TTWO) initiated with a Buy at HSBC Securities; tgt $170
- Warner Music Group (WMG) initiated with an Outperform at TD Cowen; tgt $38
- Watsco (WSO) initiated with a Neutral at Mizuho; tgt $360
Gapping down
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
- TBI -15.3%, SPOT -6.8%, MEDP -6%, DOV -5.5%, ALK -5.1%, DHR -5.1%, IRDM -5.1%, CDNS -4.1%, RTX -3.1%, NWE -2.8%, IBTX -2.6%, CCK -2.2%, HXL -2.1%, AGYS -2%, AVY -2%, IVZ -2%, MCO -1.7%, HUBB -1.4%, GLW -1.3%, MLI -0.9%, NUE -0.7%, HRI -0.7%, AGNC -0.6%, PII -0.6%
Other news:
- STOK -39.7% (reports Safety & Efficacy Data from Patients Treated with STK-001 in the Phase 1/2a Studies (MONARCH & ADMIRAL) and the SWALLOWTAIL Open-Label Extension (OLE) Study in Children and Adolescents with Dravet Syndrome)
- TARS -11.5% (FDA Approves XDEMVY (lotilaner ophthalmic solution) 0.25% for the treatment of Demodex blepharitis)
- SOUN -8.2% (files $400 mln mixed shelf)
- AMC -8.2% (moving lower potentially due to court filing)
- VRDN -0.9% (stock offering)
Analyst comments:
- RXT -7% (downgraded to Sell from Neutral at Citigroup)
- KOD -5.1% (downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at JP Morgan)
- PGR -1.7% (downgraded to Underweight from Equal-Weight at Morgan Stanley)
- DIS -0.8% (downgraded to Underweight from Neutral at Atlantic Equities)
- GS -0.5% (downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Citigroup)
Gapping up
In reaction to earnings/guidance:
- FFIV +10.2%, LOGI +7%, SHW +5.2%, ZWS +5%, UL +4.6%, IPAR +3.9% (guidance), GE +3.9%, XRX +3.9%, LTH +3.3%, RGP +3%, PJT +2.7%, VZ +2.7%, BRO +2.6%, MMM +2.4%, MSCI +2.4%, WSFS +2.1%, HSTM +2%, VLRS +2%, GM +1.8%, PHM +1.6%, NXPI +1.4%, BIIB +1.2%, NXGN +1.1%, ST +1.1%, KMB +1%, SSD +0.9%
Other news:
- NIO +4.8% (CYVN Investments disclosed 7.7% stake)
- APE +2.8% (moving higher potentially due to court filing) SSL +2.8% (provides FY23 sales and production update)
- MCFT +1.1% (authorizes $50 mln repurchase program)
- MDC +1% (increases dividend)
Analyst comments:
- DDOG +3.6% (upgraded to Outperform from Peer Perform at Wolfe Research)
- ZS +2.7% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at BTIG Research)
- META +1.2% (upgraded to Buy from Neutral at New Street)
- WMT +1.1% (upgraded to Overweight from Neutral at Piper Sandler)