In the 2017 HBO documentary “Becoming Warren Buffett,” the Berkshire Hathaway chair, a famous McDonald’s enthusiast, said he uses the stock market to decide his breakfast: “When I’m not feeling quite so prosperous, I might go with the $2.61, which is two sausage patties…” Obviously, not only could Buffett afford the most expensive item on the McDonald’s menu, but his company Berkshire Hathaway has a big enough cash pile to buy McDonald’s outright. We made a list of other companies that Berkshire Hathaway’s $382 billion could buy.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 had a positive start to what is historically the best month of the year for stocks, almost exclusively powered by the AI trade as Amazon announced a $38 billion cloud computing deal with OpenAI, while the Russell 2000 fell. Consumer discretionary (which includes Amazon) and tech were the best-performing sector ETFs.

Last quarter, Meta’s revenue from its Reality Labs segment, which includes its AI smart glasses, was higher than analysts predicted and its losses were lower. Those losses relative to revenue were still massive — nearly 10x what it was bringing in — with the company posting an operating loss of $4.4 billion on revenue of $470 million.

Meta has a couple of things that it’s great at and plenty of other things that it’s merely good at. Gadgets, at least so far, ain’t one of them. So, why hasn’t the company cut bait and moved on?

In other words, Meta isn’t just betting on selling hardware. It’s betting that its AI services built on top of those devices will generate a new stream of revenue — much like Apple’s ecosystem of services layered on the iPhone.

Here, Meta — which (as Facebook) once tried and failed to build its own smartphone — is hoping history will rhyme rather than repeat. The difference this time is that Meta wants to own both the devices and the software that runs on them.

Like Apple, which has turned its Services segment into a reliable profit engine even as hardware sales have wobbled, Meta wants to ride that same train: hardware as a gateway, software as the payoff.

Of all the many ways to measure investor sentiment — surveys, futures positioning, and more — one of our favorites might be through the answer to this question: how much are traders willing to pay for options that offer upside in stocks compared to those that protect against downside?

So, what does that mean for the bull market?

Zooming in on a similar measure, Goldman Sachs analyst Cullen Morgan showed that sentiment is particularly ebullient for the so-called Magnificent 7. 

“Coming into earnings this week, put-call skew in the Mag7 complex inverted for the first time since December of last year (i.e. implied volatility of calls traded over puts),” he wrote on Friday. “This phenomenon has only happened a handful of times. The move implies investors are overwhelmingly positioned for continued upside. Historically, such low skew readings have tended to coincide with short-term consolidation or reversals as optimism peaks.”

The Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) — a Dallas-based challenger pitching itself as a “pro-business” alternative to Wall Street — announced an investment from JPMorgan last week, bringing its total funding above $250 million ahead of its planned 2026 launch. More than 70 investors have joined so far, and TXSE’s debut marks the first SEC-approved exchange in decades that will eventually be able to both list as well as trade public companies’ shares.