Key insights
- Carnival (CCL) faces headwinds from rising fuel costs, leading to lowered earnings expectations despite strong underlying demand. Cybersecurity stocks, including Crowdstrike (CRWD), are declining due to potential AI competition from Anthropic. Unity Software (U) is rising after positive preliminary Q1 results and restructuring announcements. Carnival's fuel cost issues may impact peers, while AI competition could pressure cybersecurity valuations.
Market Catalysts Host Julie Hyman takes a closer look at some of Friday morning's trending tickers and stories.Carnival Corporation (CCL) is rising after warning that higher fuel costs will weigh on the cruise line's earnings.CrowdStrike (CRWD) and other cybersecurity stocks are falling on reports of new AI cybersecurity competition from Anthropic (ANTH.PVT).Unity Software Inc. (U) is gaining after preliminary Q1 results topped expectations and the company announced asset sales and restructuring plans.
we are watching Carnival Cruise lines, cyber security stocks and Unity software. I want to start with Carnival cruises. This is the first of the big cruise lines to report and the first that we're really hearing what the bite of increased fuel cost is going to be.
And it's a doozy for the company. It's raising its expected full cost, fuel cost for this year to $2.15 billion dollars. That's up by a third.
And the company says it is assuming here that the purchase price of fuel for March and early April will be Brent crude averaging $90 a barrel, then for the remainder of April and May as well, and then 85 a barrel for the third quarter and $80 for the fourth quarter.
So in other words, you know, sort of doing its own futures curve if you will, as it looks out to what it expects those fuel costs to be here.
Um, and so the company now says full year earnings will be lower than it had anticipated as a result of these higher fuel costs.
If you look at the backdrop here, the company's first quarter profit was the best since 2020.
Um, so it looks like underlying demand is still relatively strong. It's that the fuel costs are really problematic for this company and probably some of its peers as well.
Uh let's also take a look at cyber security stocks here. We're seeing a stocks like Crowdstrike lead some of the declines and that's after a report from Fortune that said Anthropic is testing a new AI model that has to do with cyber security tools, offering cyber security tools here.
Um and it has powerful cyber security capabilities according to that article.
You know, we've we've been seeing this really since the advent of the generative AI uh LLMs, the large language models and chatbots that when they're rumored or reported to come out with some sort of new functionality or new model, we see different areas being hit.
So today it is those cyber security stocks turned and all of them are down pretty sharply, but the market overall is down of course as well.
And then finally Unity software, um which is a gaming software company. We're watching that stock. It released a preliminary first quarter results uh that were ahead of its forecast here.
The company is also planning to sell a video game publisher, um and it's also closing an advertising unit.
That is something that some analysts had been anticipating here.
So those shares are higher by almost 8% and also of course, bucking the downtrend that we're seeing in the market overall.