The 2026 Tony Awards followed a trend that’s been helping Broadway to net record-high box office revenue: star power. Singer Pink, who’s never been on the Great White Way, hosted the awards ceremony for a season in which actors from Keanu Reeves and Ayo Edebiri to Adrien Brody and Alden Ehrenreich (who won) made their debuts, with all that celebrity skin in the game making up for the fact there were a paltry six new musicals.
The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 all climbed higher Monday. Information technology was the best-performing sector as chip stocks rebounded. Market breadth was weak, as energy and consumer discretionary were the only other sectors to outperform the S&P 500.
After the market closed yesterday, OpenAI announced they've filed an S-1. So when's the IPO? Not so fast. “We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.”
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“Apple may have just explained how Siri is actually going to become useful,” is a headline Sherwood News wrote almost exactly two years ago, when the company first announced AI Siri at its annual developer conference in 2024.
Two WWDCs later, and it’s very tempting to write that again.
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- Apple announced widely expected advancements to Siri — now called Siri AI and built on Google’s AI models — that enable at least some of Apple’s 2.5 billion-device user base to access AI across their device features and apps.
- Those upgrades include things like getting writing help anywhere you put text or pulling your flight confirmation number from an email while you’re on the phone with customer service. The revamped Siri is also highly conversational and context-aware, drawing on personal data like your real-time location and adapting to individual apps.
- Apple also showed off new child accounts and controls for parents, which use age-appropriate recommendations based on experts’ guidance. New features include detecting and blocking nudity, gore, and violence in Messages and FaceTime calls for child account users.
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Apple’s gambit to get back in the AI game (or just to catch up) included the choice to rely upon “a deep collaboration with Google” to use the company’s Gemini family of models alongside Apple’s own foundation models to power the new features it showed today. In a move that builds on its earlier privacy promises to users, Apple stressed that some of the new Apple Intelligence features run with data processed on-device, and others on servers using Apple’s complex Private Cloud Compute system.
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The changes announced today seem like a huge and necessary leap in how to operate your iPhone and other devices. But we’ve been burned before, and this time it will have to actually work. The stakes are also higher this time around: Apple’s competitors, like Google, have already been doing it. Apple is more popular, but the tech has to be operational for that to matter.
The stock was mostly static during the conference keynote, but investors ultimately appeared underwhelmed. Ahead of the event, Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives said he believed Apple could monetize its AI services and storage features to the tune of $15 billion a year in additional services revenue.
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A year ago it wasn’t clear how AI was going to work out for Alphabet, which missed out on the first-mover advantage held by OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The fear was that AI competition would eat into traffic for Google’s all-important Search business. And that incorporating AI answers into its own searches could cannibalize revenue, since customers would be less likely to pay for their blue-linked pride of place if people got all their answers up top.
Those fears have not materialized.
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- AI is “driving an expansionary moment in search,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in his remarks at Alphabet’s investor presentation Friday.
- “When people use AI-powered features, they use Search more — in fact, queries reached an all-time high last quarter,” he said. “AI Overviews and AI Mode are driving user engagement and AI-powered ad tools are driving better ROI for advertisers.”
- It helps when your distribution scale is practically unmatched: Google said its Search AI Mode has already crossed 1 billion monthly active users, while AI Overviews now have over 2.5 billion.
- Outside traffic numbers from Similarweb seem to agree, showing a recent uptick in global visits across Google after falling slightly when ChatGPT first came out.
- In all, Google’s main cash cow, Search, has seen revenue growth accelerate last quarter, growing 19% year on year.
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With Google incorporating AI into all parts of Search, the success of its stand-alone chatbot Gemini is becoming less important, as evidenced by the overall growth in Google traffic. Many have previously remarked that Gemini lagged the popularity of ChatGPT, but even that is doing pretty well, recently growing market share and gaining on leader ChatGPT, according to data from Apptopia.
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Tesla’s future as an AI and autonomous powerhouse relies on scaling its Robotaxi business, but the company’s driverless fleet is quietly shrinking. Interest in Robotaxis and its relatively low prices compared with Waymo, Uber, and Lyft remains high, but data shows it’s harder than it was a month ago to hail one.
Theories to explain it
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Three market themes investors are watching closely |
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- 🏒 Hockey: It has been an edge-of-the-seat Stanley Cup Final so far, arguably one of the wildest opening three games on record, featuring unlikely comebacks and even a double-overtime win for Las Vegas at home on Saturday night. That hard-fought win — which put them up 2-1 on the series over the Carolina Hurricanes — has made them the 64% favorite* to hoist the cup.
- 🎬 “Toy Story 5”: Markets are pricing in a strong response for Pixar’s forthcoming movie “Toy Story 5,” with prices implying a 72% chance its Rotten Tomatoes score comes in above 90%, a 38% chance it comes in north of 95%, and even a 13% chance it’s above 97%.
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*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
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