CPI Landed, Ceasefire Is Holding, and Anthropic Lit a Fire Under the CDN Sector

The ceasefire gave you the best week for stocks since November, and Anthropic gave you the most complicated Friday of the month.

Oil finally cracked below $100, Replimune's melanoma program hit another FDA wall, and today's Closing Bell has every name and number from a session that finished the week with style.

Right now, one company is quietly powering critical operations across the U.S. military.

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There’s growing speculation that Elon Musk could bring SpaceX public in the future.

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The session's biggest story had nothing to do with Iran: Anthropic launched Claude Managed Agents, and investors immediately sold Fastly, Akamai, and Cloudflare on fears that AI-native platforms are starting to overlap with traditional edge and CDN infrastructure.

CPI for March came in exactly as expected at 3.3% annually. Oil dipped below $100 for the first time in weeks as the ceasefire held, and consumer sentiment hit a record low as inflation expectations for the next year jumped to 4.8%.

The week ends with the major indexes up, the Strait of Hormuz still largely closed despite the ceasefire, and Anthropic's latest launch giving investors something new to process over the weekend.

Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT) just secured a $4.7 billion contract to accelerate production of its Patriot interceptor missile.

The deal is part of a seven-year agreement with the U.S. government to more than triple annual output. Demand from the U.S. military and allied nations has outpaced supply for months.

Everyone wants this missile. Lockheed is the only company that makes it. That is as good as a business position gets.

Demand Exceeds Supply Everywhere

Patriot interceptors have been heavily used in the Gulf conflict and relied upon by Ukraine to defend critical infrastructure.

A potential $9 billion sale to Saudi Arabia was approved earlier this year. The problem is not demand. Production cannot keep up with how fast these missiles are being used.

You do not get a contract to triple production unless global events have made your product absolutely essential. Lockheed is in that position right now.

Defense Revenue That Compounds

Every new conflict, every new allied defense agreement, and every new threat environment drives more orders for Patriot missiles.

This is not a one-time contract. It is the beginning of a production ramp that will generate revenue for years.

You rarely find a company with this combination.

A product the world cannot function without, a customer base that keeps expanding, and a production contract that locks in revenue through the end of the decade.

CoreWeave Inc (NASDAQ: CRWV) just signed a deal with Anthropic, the company that builds the Claude AI models, to provide computing capacity for training and deploying its technology.

This comes one day after CoreWeave landed a $21 billion agreement with Meta.

Nine of the ten leading AI model providers now use CoreWeave's platform. Read that last line again. Nine out of ten.

A company most people had never heard of two years ago now powers nearly every major AI operation on earth.

The Client List Is the Moat

Any company can build a data center. Getting the world's biggest AI developers to depend on it is entirely different. Each new client validates the platform and makes the next deal easier to close.

Anthropic is not a small startup experimenting with cloud options. It builds one of the most advanced AI systems in the world.

Choosing CoreWeave means the infrastructure passed a very high bar. You do not trust your most important technology to a provider unless the performance is exceptional.

Growing Faster Than the Giants

Traditional cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have dominated for years. CoreWeave carved out a lane by specializing exclusively in AI workloads using the most powerful chips available.

That focus attracts customers who need raw computing power at scale without the complexity of a general-purpose cloud.

You celebrate the wins, but the real test is whether CoreWeave can build fast enough to keep every promise it just made to the most demanding customers in technology.

Oil prices are on the rise, putting the energy sector back in the spotlight.

Large banks have raised their crude outlooks, and investors are reexamining which companies could benefit most if supply risks persist.

In a new report, Zacks highlights three oil stocks standing out in the current market backdrop.

[View the briefing]

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Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) was just ordered to pay $53 million to families who alleged the company did not adequately warn that its cow's milk-based formula for premature infants could cause a potentially deadly bowel disease.

Punitive damages have not yet been decided.

That number could grow significantly. This is not just a legal loss. It is a direct hit to the trust parents place in one of the most recognized names in baby nutrition.

The Brand Damage Is the Real Problem

Abbott's nutrition business depends entirely on parents trusting the safety of its products. A jury verdict saying the company failed to warn about serious risks to premature infants strikes at the heart of that trust.

Lawsuits come and go. But when the subject is sick babies, and the verdict says you did not do enough, the reputational impact lingers far longer than the legal bill.

You cannot put a dollar figure on how parents feel about a brand after a headline like this.

More Cases Are Likely Coming

Abbott has to prepare for the possibility that this is chapter one, not the full story.

Your attention should be on how many similar cases are in the pipeline and how aggressively they are being pursued.

One jury verdict does not destroy that. But it does remind everyone how fragile trust can be when the most vulnerable patients are involved.

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Sky Quarry [SKYQ] $12.59 (+72.70%)

Sky Quarry operates Nevada's only refinery, and the stock surged as oil's resettling above $95 following the ceasefire kept the domestic refinery thesis alive and relevant.

The company had dropped sharply earlier in the week as oil fell on peace optimism, but Friday's rebound in crude and the ongoing uncertainty around whether the Strait of Hormuz actually reopens brought buyers back hard to a name with a very thin float.

Zentalis Pharmaceuticals [ZNTL] $6.61 (+48.77%)

Zentalis announced Thursday evening that it has selected the pivotal dose for azenosertib, its lead ovarian cancer drug, clearing the final gating step before a potential accelerated approval filing.

The DENALI Part 2 topline readout is now targeted by year-end 2026, and the clean dose selection data showing better responses with no treatment-related deaths gave investors a reason to reprice a biotech that had been trading near historical lows.

Organon [OGN] $8.83 (+27.69%)

Reports surfaced Friday that Sun Pharmaceutical Industries submitted a $12 billion binding offer to acquire Organon, which would value the women's health and biosimilars company at a significant premium to its recent trading price.

Sun later said the claims were speculative, but with a $2.29 billion market cap and a stock that has been under pressure for months, even acquisition rumors of that size move it hard and fast.

Fastly [FSLY] $23.00 (-21.91%)

Anthropic launched Claude Managed Agents on Friday, a hosted AI service that virtualizes session management, orchestration, and execution layers in a way that directly threatens the value proposition of CDN and edge infrastructure companies.

At a $3.51 billion market cap with a Buy rating, this was real institutional selling on a real competitive threat.

Akamai Technologies [AKAM] $91.35 (-16.66%)

Same Anthropic catalyst as Fastly. Akamai provides edge delivery, security, and cloud infrastructure, and the market spent Friday repricing how much of that business could be absorbed by AI-native agent platforms over the coming years.

At a $13.43 billion market cap with a Buy rating, a 15% single-session drop on a competitive threat narrative rather than an earnings miss tells you the AI disruption fear is being taken seriously by institutional money.

Fair Isaac [FICO] $922.37 (-13.99%)

FICO is caught in the broader software and AI disruption selloff that has been running all week, down more than 50% from its all-time high set last December. The company also faces a Senate investigation into its credit score pricing practices and growing competitive pressure from VantageScore in the mortgage market.

Friday's 14% drop puts FICO at prices not seen in years and at a valuation that, for the first time in a long time, looks genuinely cheap relative to its earnings growth.

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That's it for today! Please, write us back, and let us know what you think of the Closing Bell Roundup. We're always eager to hear feedback!

Thanks for reading. I'll see you at the next open! 

Best Regards,
— Adam G.
Elite Trade Club

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