The Weekly Wrap (week ending Sep 11, recorded Thursday night Sep 10) — stance reflects how each name was framed in this episode (not a price rating). Where a row carries a subscriber's view (the NVIDIA/semis email, the Qualcomm warrant answers), it is marked as such and rated Neutral unless Eisman states his own view. Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What was said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M | Macy's | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | "No one cares about this retailer anymore at all" (a ~$10B cap), but "it looks like this is now a turnaround story that is beginning to work" — beat and raised; total same-store sales +2.7% "not bad, but not great," while Bloomingdale's comped +11.3% on "the demise of Saks." The stock fell on weak next-quarter EPS guidance, "but still, the strength in same-store sales comps was a pretty good sign." Constructive read, no position stated. | 19:18 |
| ORCL | Oracle | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | "In some ways, it was a very good quarter" — revenue +30%, non-GAAP EPS +30% (non-GAAP excludes stock comp, "which I just think is wrong"). "On the somewhat negative side," RPO reached $664B vs $600B the prior quarter — "not that much greater" — and "approximately 50% of its RPO coming from OpenAI, a company that we all know has massive negative cash flow." Up 4% after hours but "way off its highs" on the over-reliance. | 18:01 |
| GME | GameStop | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Higher profits on collectibles and a raised full-year outlook, but revenue fell to $790M vs $972M; it "now generates more revenue from collectibles than video games." "This was once a crazy meme stock. No longer. It's generating a profit, but EPS growth is slow, and revenue growth is negative" — a ~$9B cap that "has done nothing in years… No one seems to really care anymore." | 20:26 |
| QCOM | Qualcomm | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Collaboration with Amazon on custom AI chips and optical networking "designed to create competition with Nvidia" — plus a warrant for 25M Qualcomm shares at $161.26, in the money (stock >$175) and worth "over $4 billion." "Frankly, I'm a bit bewildered by this deal. Not by the partnership, by the warrants" — not circular financing, since no cash changes hands and Qualcomm "does not need any cash anyway." Subscriber answers he quotes: a "strategic customer acquisition cost" securing a ~$60B pipeline and AWS as anchor customer; or payment for Amazon IP, since Qualcomm's XPU expertise "is not established." | 16:24 |
| AMZN | Amazon | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The other side of the Qualcomm deal: receives warrants on 25M QCOM shares worth >$4B while partnering on custom AI chips — the hyperscaler building its own silicon to reduce NVIDIA dependence. A subscriber suggests "Amazon's contribution of IP" explains "Amazon's asking for warrants." No view on Amazon itself. | 16:01 |
| NVDA | NVIDIA | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view (rebutting the Zitron "circular financing" framing): semis were ~45% gross-margin businesses, NVIDIA runs near 80% (Eisman: "I think they were 74%"), so it is "extracting rent from hyperscalers and then using it to finance their emerging competitors" — labs, then neoclouds and open-weight models — a "modern-day Robin Hood" that may "accelerate the commoditization" of its own rents. Eisman's caveat: "this could be correct," but the current ecosystem depends on Anthropic and OpenAI, and one could fail before the challengers can replace their commitments. | 12:10 |
| AVGO | Broadcom | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: hyperscalers "hate this dynamic" of NVIDIA dependence and "are responding by developing their own silicon, working with Broadcom, Marvell, and others, but this takes time." | 13:00 |
| MRVL | Marvell Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: named with Broadcom as the custom-silicon partners hyperscalers use to reduce their NVIDIA dependence — "but this takes time." | 13:00 |
| ASML | ASML Holding | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view: "In this knife fight, you want to be the one selling the knives" — upstream semiconductor suppliers "benefit regardless of whether the winner is Nvidia, a hyperscaler, an AI lab, or some architecture we haven't seen yet." Eisman quotes it and calls the email "very interesting" but does not adopt the list. | 13:22 |
| KLAC | KLA Corp | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: one of the upstream "sell the knives" equipment suppliers (with ASML, Lam, Applied) that win whoever wins the AI knife fight. | 13:22 |
| LRCX | Lam Research | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: named in the "sell the knives" upstream-supplier list; cheaper inference should drive "greater demand for compute, memory, and semiconductor manufacturing capacity." | 13:22 |
| AMAT | Applied Materials | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: the fourth equipment name in the "sell the knives" list of suppliers that benefit regardless of which AI architecture wins. | 13:22 |
| MU | Micron Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: "memory suppliers such as Micron and SK Hynix" as the other half of the "sell the knives" trade — lower prices "stimulate usage, which in turn drives greater demand for compute, memory." | 13:22 |
| 000660.KS | SK Hynix | STK | Neutral | Subscriber view, passing: named with Micron as the memory suppliers that benefit "regardless of whether the winner is Nvidia, a hyperscaler, an AI lab, or some architecture we haven't seen yet." | 13:22 |
| GM | General Motors | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The valuation control for Tesla: "Auto stocks, by contrast, have very low multiples. GM's 2026 PE is 6.5 times" — against Tesla's 220×. A comparison, not a call. | 9:12 |
| SPCX | SpaceX | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Passing, as evidence that tech takes science fiction "very seriously": "In the SpaceX prospectus, if you recall, it says that one of the goals of the company is to mine asteroids." No new view on the stock. | 7:39 |
| Anthropic | Anthropic (private) | — | Neutral | Half of the dependency he keeps as his caveat — the current AI ecosystem is "almost completely dependent, on the health of Anthropic and OpenAI." After OpenAI's price cut: "I wonder if Anthropic will have to follow with its own price cut." Also: a former Anthropic researcher's extinction warning, on which "count me a skeptic." | 14:55 |
| Hugging Face | Hugging Face (acquired by NVIDIA) | — | Neutral | Subscriber view: NVIDIA's challengers are increasingly "the neo clouds and the open-source open-weight ecosystem. Hence, the strategic logic of acquiring Hugging Face, which Nvidia acquired, I believe, last week" (Eisman's hedge on the timing). | 13:00 |
| Saks | Saks (Saks Global, private) | — | Neutral | Named only as the cause of Bloomingdale's +11.3% comp: "Bloomingdale's benefits from the demise of Saks." | 19:35 |
| VantageScore | VantageScore (bureau-owned, private) | — | Neutral | FICO's competitor and the mechanism of his short: "Prior to last week, Vantage Score… was only available as a pilot program. Now, it is available to all lenders." | 18:49 |
| TSLA | Tesla | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Robotaxi event: "not much new," stock −6%; "Elon Musk has a history of over-promising and under-delivering. He seems to have done so again." 2026 consensus EPS $1.66 → "the 2026 PE is 220 times" vs GM 6.5×, so "the future of this company depends on the success of the robotaxi." EPS peaked at $4.07 in 2022; 2026 is 59% lower, yet the stock "has done nothing for 5 years" — "how difficult it can be to short a cult stock." "I have no skin in this game. Just count me a skeptic." | 9:12 |
| FICO | Fair Isaac | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | FHFA head Bill Pulte attacked FICO and the bureaus for price gouging ("over the last 5 years, FICO raised prices by something like 1,600%") and was "back at it" this week, while VantageScore moved from pilot to available to all lenders. "My view? I think FICO's monopoly is going to break and break badly, and I still like this short." | 18:49 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI (private) | — | Negative | "I still believe that if OpenAI fails within a year, there will be a massive correction in the stock market" — the generation-one dot-com risk. Its CFO disclosed a price cut on GPT 5.6 Luna shortly after its July release, claiming "a tenfold increase in model usage" — "Is this the harbinger of a price war? We shall see." It is also ~50% of Oracle's RPO, "a company that we all know has massive negative cash flow." | 15:18 |
A jargon-free summary of the view on each name — what it is and why he frames it that way. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
Macy's is the old department-store chain, and it also owns Bloomingdale's, its upmarket sister store. Eisman's point is that investors stopped paying attention to it years ago — the whole company is worth about $10 billion — and that is exactly when a turnaround can quietly start working.
"Same-store sales" means sales at stores open at least a year, so new openings don't flatter the number. Macy's overall grew 2.7%, which is ordinary. But Bloomingdale's grew 11.3%, and the reason is a competitor dying: Saks, the rival luxury department store, is in trouble, so its shoppers are walking over to Bloomingdale's.
The shares actually fell because management forecast weaker profit next quarter. He looks past that: the sales trend is the thing that tells you whether a turnaround is real, and that trend is improving. This is an observation, not a stated position.
Oracle rents out computing power for AI in its cloud business. On the surface the quarter was strong: sales and adjusted profit both up about 30%. Eisman notes one accounting quibble — the "adjusted" profit leaves out the cost of paying employees in stock, which he thinks is wrong because that cost is real.
The bigger issue is the backlog. "RPO" (remaining performance obligations) is the total of signed contracts not yet delivered — future sales already agreed. It grew only from about $600 billion to $664 billion in a quarter, and roughly half of it is owed by one customer, OpenAI, which burns large amounts of cash. So half of Oracle's future depends on a single company that cannot yet pay its own way.
GameStop was the video-game retailer that became the famous "meme stock" in 2021, when small investors bid it up to squeeze short sellers. Today it sells more collectibles (figures, trading cards and the like) than video games.
It is making a profit and raised its outlook, but sales are shrinking ($790 million versus $972 million a year ago) and profit growth is slow. Eisman's verdict is indifference, not hostility: a roughly $9 billion company whose stock has gone nowhere for years and that "no one seems to really care" about any more.
Qualcomm makes the chips that connect phones to mobile networks. It is teaming up with Amazon to build custom AI chips for data centers — a way for Amazon to depend less on NVIDIA.
What puzzles Eisman is the sweetener. Qualcomm gave Amazon "warrants": the right to buy 25 million Qualcomm shares at $161.26. With the stock above $175 those rights are already worth over $4 billion. Usually a company hands out something like that in exchange for money, but no cash changes hands now and Qualcomm doesn't need cash. So why give it away?
Two readers offered answers: it is effectively the price of winning Amazon as a flagship customer for a large order book in a market where Qualcomm has no track record, or it pays Amazon for technology Qualcomm lacks. Either way, Qualcomm is giving up a slice of its future share-price gains to buy its way into AI.
This view is mostly a subscriber's, not Eisman's. NVIDIA keeps about three-quarters of every sales dollar as gross profit, far above what chipmakers historically earned. The reader argues NVIDIA is using that surplus to fund the companies that compete with its biggest customers — AI labs, smaller "neocloud" rental firms, and free open-source models (hence buying Hugging Face, the hub where those models are shared). Like Robin Hood, it takes from the rich cloud giants and arms their challengers, which should make AI cheaper for everyone over time.
Eisman takes the argument seriously and allows it could be right in the long run. His objection is about timing: today's AI spending leans on two money-losing labs, OpenAI and Anthropic. If one fails before the new challengers are big enough to replace its orders, the whole chain could suffer first — just as the first wave of internet companies collapsed before the second wave, like Google, succeeded.
A price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) is how many dollars investors pay for each dollar of yearly profit. Tesla trades at about 220 times its expected 2026 profit; General Motors trades at 6.5 times. Both sell cars, so Eisman's reasoning is that the gap can only be explained by one belief: that Tesla's self-driving taxi business will one day dominate the world.
That makes the robotaxi everything — and Tesla's latest robotaxi event showed little new, with the stock down 6%. Eisman's read is that Musk has again promised more than he delivered.
He adds a lesson about short selling (betting a stock falls). Tesla's profit per share peaked at $4.07 in 2022 and is expected to be 59% lower in 2026, so the shorts were right about the business — but the stock has gone nowhere for five years rather than falling. When a company has a devoted following, being right on the numbers is not enough to profit. He holds no position; he is simply a skeptic.
FICO sells the credit score almost every American mortgage lender uses, and it has raised prices dramatically — the head of the FHFA, the regulator over mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, says by something like 1,600% over five years, and publicly accuses it of price gouging.
The competing score, VantageScore, was until recently only allowed in a trial program. Now any lender can use it. When a monopoly suddenly faces a cheaper rival that the regulator is openly cheering on, its pricing power is at risk. Eisman has been betting against FICO's stock (short) and says he still likes that bet: "FICO's monopoly is going to break and break badly."
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is private, loses a great deal of money, and is the single biggest customer behind a lot of today's AI spending — about half of Oracle's signed future contracts, for example. That is why Eisman says that if it failed within a year, the stock market would suffer a massive correction.
This week its finance chief said OpenAI cut the price of its GPT 5.6 Luna model shortly after launch, and usage jumped tenfold. More usage sounds good, but cutting prices is not what a company short of money wants to do, and if rival Anthropic has to match, it could start a price war that squeezes both of the labs everyone else is depending on.
Summary derived from the public YouTube video (transcript in transcript.txt) for personal study. Subscriber comments quoted on air are attributed as subscriber views. Not investment advice. © The Real Eisman Playbook / Steve Eisman for source material.