A British man woke up one morning to find his 2016 Honda Civic had been stolen. After shelling out £20,000 to replace it with an identical model he found 70 miles away from his home, he eventually realized he repurchased his stolen car: he recognized a Mars bar wrapper, Christmas tree pine needles, and his parents’ address in the car’s navigation system. 

US stocks started yesterday’s session flat but then rose throughout the rest of the day as sentiment and positioning continued to repair with the absence of any negative headlines on global trade. The Nasdaq 100 advanced 2.8%, notching a third consecutive day of 2% gains — a hot streak it hasn’t seen since the dot-com bubble burst.

❓ Trivia time: take our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s the first Q:

As predicted by literally everyone, preorders for Nintendo’s Switch 2 in the US today were total mayhem, with customers reporting long wait times, broken websites, and canceled orders. The $450 console went on sale after the stroke of midnight online at Target, Best Buy, and Walmart, and sold out before most of the US woke up. GameStop waited until 11 a.m. to open orders and an onslaught of last-ditch hopeful buyers overwhelmed the site. 

While all this was frustrating for gamers, it was great for Nintendo’s stock, which got a massive power-up yesterday following Wednesday’s news that a new high score for preorders had been reached for the Switch 2 in Japan: 2.2 million. To put that in context, the original Switch sold less than a half a million units in its first month of sales in Japan in 2017. 

Despite all the talk of tariffs, cutbacks in consumer spending, and price hikes (including Nintendo’s breaking the software price ceiling), millions upon millions of people are more than willing to pay $500 for the bundled Switch 2, and “confirmed preorder” resale listings on eBay are already hitting $749. In the end, who can put a price on fun? Especially a vehicle for games that ultimately offers hundreds of hours (if not years!) of entertainment.

Another fun thing people are still spending money on? “Magic: The Gathering” cards. Hasbro reported earnings yesterday and while sure, toys are fun, it was the company’s Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming segment that really drove its stellar quarter.  

Call us nerds, geeks, or gamers, but a lasting legacy of nearly every kid like me who grew up glued to a keyboard or controller when not trading cards and laying down brutal beats on their friends is that we’re still doing it (with far more disposable income) as adults. Games from “The Last of Us” to Mario Bros. are essential parts of our cultural conversation, and as the culture continues to shift from seeing playing a game like “Magic” as a character flaw to a sign of possible genius, the money will shift as well. 

Big Pharma has failed to develop a disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis (DMOAD), leaving 365M+ people debilitated by knee OA pain globally. Temporary, palliative treatments don’t address the molecular root cause of OA — but Cytonics believes people deserve more than a band-aid solution.

Cytonics is the biotech innovator giving patients a new hope beyond Big Pharma. They’ve engineered CYT-108, a variant of the naturally-occurring A2M protein used in Cytonics’ first-gen FDA-cleared APIC therapy. With clinical trials underway,¹ CYT-108 has the potential to become the first disease-modifying therapy for osteoarthritis. 

Cytonics is getting straight to the roots in more ways than one. The development of CYT-108 is being funded by individual investors, with $2.4M raised in this round. 

Invest in Cytonics’ current raise², and help bring biotech innovation to the people that need it.

Google parent Alphabet smashed analysts’ estimates yesterday, posting first-quarter earnings per share of $2.81, versus a FactSet consensus estimate of $2.01, and revenue of $90.2 billion, versus the Street’s $89.17 billion projection. For Q1 2025, Alphabet’s revenue grew 12% year over year to $90.2 billion.

Let’s break down the results for Alphabet’s many divisions: