Aug 19, 2026

Source: https://www.investing.com/news/analyst-ratings/truist-reiterates-buy-on-coreweave-stock-cites-margin-tailwinds-93CH-4867769

Not sure if it’s my algorithm but LITERALLY every single day I see nothing but posts about how OpenAI is on the brink of going under, prepared to take the entire economy with it.

There is very little evidence to support this. They are growing 18% quarter over quarter and made $6.7 billion in Q2. They have deep pocketed investors and NVDA isn’t about let something happen to them…

wow we were green for like an hour then dipped. so sad

The Treasury announced it will increase buybacks of older long-term Treasury bonds—not issue more long-term debt. It plans to at least double certain 10–30-year buyback operations from $2 billion to $4 billion, beginning September 9.

Bank of America (BofA) highlighted CoreWeave and Nebius as beneficiaries of increasingly favorable pricing dynamics in AI infrastructure, with demand for compute continuing to run ahead of available supply.

For CoreWeave, this is particularly relevant because pricing power is an important part of the margin story. If demand remains stronger than available capacity, CRWV has greater ability to negotiate attractive economics on new contracts rather than relying on lower prices to fill its infrastructure.

This also pushes back against one of the recurring concerns around neoclouds, that rapid industry capacity expansion would quickly lead to oversupply and falling AI compute prices. So far, the pricing environment appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

BofA’s commentary follows the latest earnings from both CRWV and NBIS, which provided further evidence of strong demand for AI compute despite the significant amount of new capacity being brought online.

This isn’t a new customer contract or major catalyst by itself, but it is another useful datapoint supporting the view that AI compute remains supply-constrained and that CoreWeave and Nebius are benefiting from stronger pricing rather than price compression.

Wanted to buy some shares and hold for 3 yrs

Can I rant about Coreweave and the stock market?

There were such low expectations for that CoreWeave that it's stock nearly doubled this week post-earnings after they reported a 112% increase in revenue (~$13 billion annually now) and a revenue backlog of $104 billion. Which made for good headlines and so the stock went up.

That's because this week the market decided that massively negative cash flow does not matter anymore (a week ago it was bad). All that matters this week is revenue.

CoreWeave also disclosed that their cost of revenue rose 181%. The cost of revenue is growing faster than the actual revenue! For those that aren't financially inclined: that's not good, especially for a company that already is losing money.

And the $104 billion in revenue backlog? Well, that sounds good until you read the notes of their financial statements that disclose how much in "undiscounted lease payments" they have remaining, which are separated by leases they currently pay and leases that have not yet commenced. (These are largely CoreWeave leasing from SPVs so they can keep the debt of many data centers off their books.)

The total amount of payments due on all of those leases is $79.5 billion. Where is the slide on that in their investor deck?

For fun, the amount of principal payments of debt (not interest, just principal) they have to make: $35.5 billion. (They will just refinance this, if their credit rating allows it, but more on that below.)

Adding together the leases and principal payment of debt: $115 billion.

In simple terms, CoreWeave has a revenue backlog of $104 billion which is built on an "expense backlog" of $115 billion. Please note these expenses don't include ~$3 billion (and growing) of annual interest and basic costs like electricity, labor, etc... just to keep their servers running. In other words, there are many tens of billions more of unaccounted for future expenses that aren't included in that $115 billion.

And in the fine print to the revenue backlog, they note they haven't actually built all the capital they need to earn that $104 billion, so they raised their capex to $39 billion for 2026 and forecast similar in 2027. That means they need to raise even more debt which means even more interest, so they can build out the infrastructure necessary to earn that $104 billion.

Given this continued build out and need to refinance debt, their interest expense isn't going to stay at $3B, it's likely to be ~$10 billion annually in about a year or two (again, for reference, they are forecasting $13 billion in revenue this year and the market went wild on that.)

There is a reason that S&P rates CoreWave as B+ (Highly Speculative.) I'd argue that's being way too generous, given their precarious financial situation.

Long story short: there isn't a clear path to profitability for this company. The realistic best case is that interest rates drop enough that they can meander along as a zombie company for years, slowly burning cash but never actually going bankrupt. The worst case is their revenue can't keep up, either because they overbuilt or because their revenue disappears. Given that 70% of their revenue comes from 3 unnamed companies (widely believed to be Open AI (backed by Microsoft), Anthropic, Meta), of which two are wildly unprofitable and one is a potential competitor with their own excess data centers.

The entire company is a bet that OpenAI and Anthropic will suddenly start making so much money on AI (or on an IPO...!) that CoreWeave can dramatically raise their prices, despite massively growing competition to their business model, including from Meta and SpaceX.

I guess that means it's a buy? At least for this week, while the market is not worried about negative cash flow.

(Not investment advice, I don't trade CoreWeave, I'm just pointing out how insane the market can be vs. reality, especially around earnings calls.)

Are deals constructed with costs for capEx for that deal built in? CEO had indicated this earlier this year/late last year and I am wondering if this is still the case…

Atreides Management, led by technology investor Gavin Baker, significantly increased its CoreWeave position during Q2.

Atreides’ disclosed CRWV position increased from 810,535 shares at the end of Q1 to 2,124,845 shares as of June 30, adding roughly 1.31M shares, or about 162%. The position was valued at approximately $211.5M at quarter-end. (13F Mar 31, 13F Jun 30)

What makes this particularly interesting is Baker’s background and his recent commentary on the AI infrastructure market. Before founding Atreides, he spent nearly two decades at Fidelity and managed the Fidelity OTC Portfolio from 2009 to 2017.

Baker has also been publicly discussing many of the same issues currently debated around CoreWeave: GPU rental pricing, hyperscaler capex, AI infrastructure financing and credit markets. In a recent post, he argued that the market was overreacting to widening hyperscaler credit spreads and highlighted spot GPU rental prices being materially above contracted rates.

His post:
https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/2082166566280642676

As always, 13F filings are backward-looking snapshots. This tells us what Atreides held as of June 30, 2026, not whether the fund has added to or reduced the position since then.

https://preview.redd.it/g1epogplncjh1.png?width=242&format=png&auto=webp&s=1461541ac4255115c83c8b181a59bda0eaaa4ec7

CRWV trade card · OptionWhales daily thesis

I'll research the catalyst context before writing.# A $250,000 Ticket Placed Two Days After the Best Print CoreWeave Has Ever Delivered

On 14 August 2026, at 11:27:35 ET, someone put on a two-legged put structure in CoreWeave, 4,000 contracts total, executed in the same second at matched size. They bought 2,000 of the September 18 $90 puts for $706,000 and sold 2,000 of the September 18 $85 puts for $456,000. Net cash out the door: **$250,000**.

The timing is the story. Two days earlier CoreWeave had put up the kind of quarter that usually ends the argument — revenue up 112% year over year, a record $104.2 billion backlog, with incremental commitments raising effective backlog to $129.2 billion, and a 59% adjusted EBITDA margin. The stock rocketed as much as 20% higher in premarket. Then it faded: on 13 August, CRWV traded between $104.80 and $117.49. Spot at the moment of this trade was $104.68 — the bottom of that range.

So this is not a bet placed into a vacuum. It was placed into the exhaustion of a very good number.

The Shape: A Narrow, Cheap, Bounded Slice of Downside

Strip the jargon. The trader paid $1.25 per share for the right to be short CRWV between $90 and $85, and only there, and only until 18 September — 35 days.

Above $90, the structure is inert. Below $85, it stops improving; the sold lower put caps it. The whole apparatus is worth something only if the stock travels roughly 15% lower inside five weeks, and everything the structure can become is fixed by the $5 gap between the strikes.

That bounded shape is the point, and it's what separates this from a simple bearish punt. A trader who wanted open-ended downside would have bought the $90 puts alone and skipped the $85 sale. Selling the lower strike surrenders every dollar of protection below $85 in exchange for cutting the cost by roughly 65%. You do that when you have a *specific* zone in mind — not when you think the floor is falling out. The financing leg is a statement: the scenario being paid for is a sharp retracement, not a collapse.

What the Trader Paid For, in the Language of Actual Exposure

Two numbers translate the Greeks.

The combined position carries a net delta of about −0.063 per share — the $90 leg at −0.219 against the $85 leg at −0.156. Across 2,000 spreads that's roughly the sensitivity of being short 12,600 shares, about $1.3 million of stock, for a $250,000 outlay. Modest directional weight, purchased with leverage.

Second, volatility. Both legs printed near 76% implied — CRWV trades like a high-beta AI infrastructure name, and that price of optionality is not cheap. The trader bought the 76.0% option and sold the 76.7% one, meaning they were a net buyer of the *less* expensive of the two. Small, but it's the correct side of the skew if you're paying up for a specific window rather than owning volatility outright.

The Fundamental Argument This Structure Sits Inside

The bear case for CoreWeave after a blowout quarter isn't about demand. It's about what demand costs. CoreWeave lifted the midpoint of its 2026 capex outlook by 12.1%, against a 2.4% increase in the revenue midpoint — spending guidance rising five times faster than revenue guidance. Net income for the last reported quarter was about −$740 million, and free cash flow ran roughly −$4.71 billion as CoreWeave poured about $7.70 billion into capex. And the backlog is real but long-dated: 21% of remaining performance obligations is expected to be recognized more than four years out.

That is the ambiguity a five-week put spread expresses. Not "the company is broken" — 45 analysts rate CRWV a Buy with an average target of $138.51 — but "the price already contains the good news, and the funding question hasn't been answered." The dispersion in the sell side says the same thing louder: targets run from $36 to $303. When professionals disagree by a factor of eight, defined-risk structures are how you take a position without betting the outcome.

What We Cannot Determine, and Why Saying So Matters

**Open versus close is not determinable here.** Not "probably opening." Not determinable.

The reason is specific. Prior-day open interest was measured for both legs — 7,387 contracts at the $85 strike, 7,515 at the $90. Each leg traded 2,000. Because the existing interest dwarfs the size, this 4,000-contract package could have been established fresh *or* unwound entirely inside pools that already existed, and the tape looks identical either way. Zero percent of the structure's contracts sit in legs that can be signed; the threshold for characterising the position is 60%. (The payload's top-level coverage flag reads `out_of_horizon` while the per-leg records are `covered` with real figures — the per-leg data is the binding evidence, and it still doesn't resolve the question.)

Two further honest gaps. We infer both legs belong to one trader from matched size and same-second execution — high confidence, not provable from public data. And the per-leg buyer/seller tagging is the weakest number in the file; the debit reading rests on the classifier's 90%-confidence structural fit, not on certainty about who lifted which offer.

What survives all of that: the structure leans **bearish**, and it leans bearish whether it was opened or closed. And even a confirmed new position can be insurance on equity, convertible, or private exposure we cannot see. Someone paid $250,000 for a narrow, time-boxed claim on CoreWeave trading 15% lower by 18 September. Why they wanted it is not in the data.

*Nothing here is investment advice. Options carry substantial risk of total loss, and the identity, intent, and full portfolio context of any trader discussed are unknown. Do your own work.*