Pokémon just “tackled” the S&P 500.

Card Ladder's Pokémon index, which tracks the market value of the iconic trading cards, is up 179% year-over-year, against the S&P's 33%.

And the ones trading them aren't hedge fund managers. They're 12-year-olds with belt bags full of $100 bills and PSA-graded Charizards.

Kids across the country are treating packs like position sizing, sending their best pulls to authenticators, and flipping profits back into inventory.

The market is real: $830K in daily secondary sales, and a single Pikachu Illustrator sold at auction for $16.5 million in February.

The next generation of investors is ahead of the game. And they want to be the very best, the best there ever was.

— Brooks & Cas

Allbirds (BIRD) traded at $15 on its IPO day in 2021. By last Tuesday, it had shed 99.6% of that value. Then on Wednesday, it surged a whopping 650%.

Why? Allbirds announced it was leaving the shoe business for "AI compute infrastructure," rebranding as NewBird AI in the process.

The company secured $50 million to fund the pivot. For context, Coreweave (CRWV) — the actual AI compute company this plan appears to be modeled on — is expected to spend 635x that amount in capital expenditures this year alone.

The Coreweave comparison is not entirely without logic. Coreweave once pivoted from crypto mining to buying Nvidia (NVDA) chips and renting out computing power. Its stock has since tripled to a $74 billion valuation.

Allbirds, post-surge, was worth around $113 million. The gap is large enough to park a data center in.

But what happens next depends almost entirely on an historically un-dependable market force: meme momentum.

Barron's noted the stock would need GameStop (GME) level Reddit (RDDT) buzz to pull off a secondary offering and raise real capital. That’s the financial equivalent, per the publication, of achieving sustained flight via self-administered pants hike.

Allbirds never turned a profit selling eco-friendly sneakers. Whether it turns one selling AI compute is another question. But it will require considerably more than nine seconds of audio and a pivot deck to answer.

Three of Europe's biggest luxury houses reported shaky first-quarter sales this week, and investors were already nervous.

The Iran war has raised the specter of consumers pulling back on ultra-expensive discretionary purchases, and the sector sold off hard. But the panic may be overblown, especially for the strongest names.

Hermès (HESAY) is facing weak Chinese demand and slowing handbag sales, which has some investors questioning whether its invitation-only access model for Birkin and Kelly bags is starting to crack.

Gucci, under parent Kering (PPRUY), posted an 8% sales decline in the quarter, with new designer Demna's collections landing well in the US but underwhelming elsewhere; a reminder that a turnaround at this level takes longer than hoped.

LVMH (LVMUY) is in a holding pattern, waiting on new Dior designer Jonathan Anderson to boost the fashion and leather-goods division that drives nearly 80% of operating profit.

None of it is great news… in a vacuum.

However, Prada is trading at 12x projected earnings, a record low since its 2011 IPO, against a historical average of 28x. Brunello Cucinelli has pulled back with the sector despite posting 14% first-quarter sales growth. Elsewhere, Hermès and LVMH trade 20% and 15% below their 10-year average price-earnings multiples, respectively; unusual discounts for two names historically treated as safe havens.

It’s also worth noting that Hermès caters to ultrawealthy shoppers whose spending is typically only crimped by a stock market slump. The S&P 500, as of Friday, is back to trading at record highs.

The old axiom says to be greedy when others are fearful. Luxury stocks are the market's current test of that nerve.

Big Pharma is still buying. It just isn't buying big.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the industry is on pace for a record year of bolt-on deals (midsize acquisitions typically in the low-single-digit billions). That discipline is proving unexpectedly great for biotech as a whole.

The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI) is up about 6% this year while the S&P 500 is slightly negative, following a year in which biotech beat the broader market by roughly 20 percentage points.

The shift is a direct reaction to the hangover from megadeals. AbbVie's (ABBV) $63 billion Allergan acquisition and Bristol-Myers Squibb's (BMY) $74 billion Celgene deal — the twin engines of 2019's record biopharma M&A year — produced mixed results at best.

Meanwhile, Merck (MRK) has become the clearest embodiment of the new playbook. With its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda generating nearly $32 billion in 2025 revenue but facing patent expiration in 2028, Merck has gone on a bolt-on binge, spending roughly $25 billion across three separate deals in the past year. On the flip side, the firm also walked away from a potential $30 billion Revolution Medicines (RVMD) acquisition.

Through April 7, 19 deals valued at $1 billion or more have been announced in 2026, per Stifel (SF), and none exceeded $10 billion. That puts the year on pace for an annualized record of 72 such deals.

Investment bank Needham estimates that nearly half of the roughly $700 billion in annual revenue generated by the world's 14 largest drug companies will face patent expiration by 2031. This gives pharma both the motive and, per Stifel, more than $650 billion in available M&A firepower.

Goldman Sachs (GS) notes the median acquisition price has fallen to about 7x a target company's projected revenue, well below the 11x typical from 2007 to 2023. More deals, better prices, and a wider circle of winners.

For biotech investors, the best environment might not be the loudest one.