Peak Pixar

Hi, today we're exploring: (1) Where pandemic winners have ended up, (2) Pixar's ongoing plight, (3) All of the internet's many dead ends. Hello and Happy [Bitcoin Pizza Day]( to all who celebrate — an event commemorating the day in 2010 when someone bought 2 Papa John’s pizzas using 10,000 BTC… an amount that would be worth ~$700M today. Today we’re exploring: - Easy come, easy go: Checking in on the pandemic stock market darlings. - Peak Pixar: The famed animation studio has lost some magic. - Dead internet: Data on the web's “link rot”. Have feedback for us? Just hit reply — we'd love to hear from you! TOGETHER WITH With Zoom, DocuSign, and Peloton all making headlines in the last week, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was 2020 and the pandemic was still raging. However, unlike the days of COVID, most of the headlines are negative: Zoom has seen revenue growth [slow]( to a glacial 3% year-on-year — and even called workers back to the office [in 2023]( — DocuSign has been the rumored [target]( of private equity bidders, and at-home fitness provider Peloton announced a refinancing as it looks to avoid a “[cash crunch](. And those 3 aren’t the only pandemic stock market darlings that have been struggling recently. Everything new is old again 4 years on from when COVID first upended our daily routines, some commutes have remained walks to the home office, but much of daily life has reverted to pre-COVID norms — and the stocks that benefited most from the pandemic have come back down to Earth too. We’ve checked in on the share prices of 6 COVID winners… every single one of them is down significantly from their pandemic peak, as investors grapple with a reality that hasn’t quite lived up to the heightened “new normal” expectations. Moderna, the biotech firm that played a pivotal role in ushering life back to normalcy, has seen its shares plummet over 1,700% as demand for its vaccines and boosters has waned while Wayfair, the online home goods retailer, is now pivoting toward brick-and-mortar stores in an effort to [reignite growth](. [Read this on the web instead]( Down Pixar hasn’t been flying high for a while now, but yesterday marked a particularly low point for the animation house that gave us Up and Toy Story, as the company embarked on the biggest round of layoffs [in its history]( announcing cuts that will affect ~14% of staff, or roughly 175 workers. The production company, which Disney acquired for $7.4B back in 2006, is reportedly switching back to focusing on films, rather than churning out shows for Disney+, as Bob Iger continues [his efforts]( to ensure the House of Mouse focuses on quality over quantity. The dimming lamp For years, Pixar was the animation studio, revolutionizing what was possible in the world of 3D computer-animated feature films. For more than a decade, Pixar produced an almost unbroken string of movies that managed to do the rare quadruple: win acclaim from critics, make a lot of money, and land with kids and adults. However, amidst a turbulent movie landscape which has seen a pandemic, the rise of streaming, a writers’ strike, and a shift in consumer taste, the storied production house has struggled to recreate the magic. The commercial failures of some of Pixar’s recent releases obviously have a lot to do with Covid — 2020’s Soul and 2022’s Turning Red each scored 95% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, despite being sent straight to Disney+ — but the company’s latest films haven’t set the world alight for moviegoers or reviewers. Last year’s Elemental was a financial improvement on 2022’s Lightyear, grossing $485M worldwide according to box office data site The Numbers, though still took almost $80M less than Cars 2, widely dismissed as the worst feature that Pixar’s ever produced. [Read this on the web instead]( [Sponsored by GraniteShares]( The long and short of it… When it comes to Nvidia, investors are divided. Some back the stock’s unparalleled price growth, while others chalk it up to overvaluation. Nvidia’s highly-anticipated Q1 2025 earnings report expected today will quiet some of that chatter either way. Concentrated daily exposure to the moves of an individual stock can potentially yield investment returns. So if you're firmly on either side of the fence, you might want to leverage the probable stock price moves flowing from Nvidia’s earnings announcement. GraniteShares’ suite of Short and Leveraged single stock ETFs* give high-conviction investors a way to do just that. - [NVDL seeks +2X the daily variations of underlying NVDA stock](. - [NVD seeks -2X the daily variations of underlying NVDA stock](. Accessible through a traditional brokerage account, these two ETFs magnify exposure to NVDA’s price moves in a single trade — with no margin calls.* *An investment in these ETFs involve significant risks. Click each fund for more information. [Go long or short on NVDA with GraniteShares Single Stock ETFs**]( 404s & Heartbreak At one point or another, anyone who's ever used The Internet has likely come across a dead link, cursing the error message that informs you — in increasingly [wacky and creative]( ways — that the server can’t find the page you’re looking for. With [estimates]( that there’s a new website built every 3 seconds, it’s not all that surprising that some online real estate turns to wasteland, especially if page creators delete or let URLs rot as readily as site builders publish them. Indeed, according to recent Pew Research Center [analysis]( some 38% of links from 2013 led nowhere as of October 2023. [In 2021]( it was estimated that a quarter of the deep links on the NYT site were broken, while the recent Pew research found that 21% of government sites and 23% of news webpages had at least one dead link — a clear issue in the age of dis- and misinformation, when traceable sourcing is as important as ever and defunct URLs can be bought and changed to display [anything at all](. The internet of (dead) things The latest findings come as proponents of the “[dead internet theory]( which posits that the web has been colonized by bots that are pumping out the majority of content that we encounter online, become more ardent. Indeed, some commentators now argue that we’ve moved into the “[zombie internet]( era, where once-human-operated entities are now automated content farms publishing AI-generated images of Shrimp Jesus or [devout Christian flight attendants](. [Read this on the web instead]( More Data • Scientists tested 23 human testes for microplastics in a [recent study]( finding them in 100% of the samples. • Diet plan: Nestlé is launching a new range of “[companion]( food products for people using GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. • It’s a big week for Nvidia with the release of their Q1 2025 earnings report — and for investors that are watching on. With a leverage factor of 2X and -2X respectively, [NVDL]( and [NVD]( from GraniteShares are single stock ETFs** that give high-conviction investors short-term concentrated exposure to Nvidia common stock. [Discover both at GraniteShares]( • The Biden administration is scrapping [student loans]( for another 160,000 grads, worth a total of $7.7B. • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has gone off “AI” as a term, suggesting we use “[different intelligence]( instead. ***This is sponsored content. Hi-Viz • Great viz [deep dive]( on how annual bird migration could weigh on America’s avian flu issue. Off the charts: Which 2 companies are we charting the share prices of below? (B) Big beverage: Pepsi & Coca Cola. (A) Big romance: Bumble & Match Group. (C) Big social: Pinterest & Snap. (D) Big toy: Mattel & Hasbro. [Answer here](. Thanks for stopping by! Have some [feedback](mailto:daily@chartr.co?subject=Feedback&body=Hi%2C%0A%0AI%20like%20the%20newsletters%2C%20but%20I%20had%20a%20thought%20for%20you...) or want to [sponsor]( newsletter](mailto:james@sherwoodmedia.com?subject=Chartr%20NL%20Sponsorship%20Enquiry%20)? Not a subscriber? Sign up for free below. 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