CE 100 Index Adds 1.4% and Tesla Surges in Holiday-Shortened Week  

There were no fireworks in terms of overall performance, but through a holiday-shortened trading week, the CE 100 Index was 1.4% higher. 

Tesla’s the Standout  

Tesla shares gained 27.1%, in what might arguably be called the “firecracker” of the past several trading days, propelling the “Move” segment of the CE 100 Index to a 2% gain.  The company said in its most recent Deliveries Report that vehicle deliveries were 443,956 units, which in turn topped Wall Street estimates of 439,000. Deliveries fell 4.8% from from the same quarter last year — but that is better than the roughly 9% slip seen in the first quarter, as measured against the first quarter of last year. 

Ocado shares were up 15.2%, while the shopping segment was 3.1% higher.  The company’s shares rebounded from the impact of news from late last month that Canadian supermarket partner Sobeys had, as Reuters reported, “paused” the opening of a fourth robotic warehouse. 

Porch Group shares were 11.9% higher.  Investing and industry sites noted that Keefe, Bruyette & Woods announced a “market perform” rating on the company, with a $3.75 target price.  

Cybersecurity Issues

But Affirm sank 5.5%, and the Pay and Be Paid pillar gains were held to 1.3%. The company said in a release this past week that it had become “aware of a cybersecurity incident involving Evolve, a third-party vendor that serves as an issuing partner on the Affirm Card. We are actively investigating the issue.”  

 As noted in this space, the Russian-linked ransomware gang Lockbit is claiming to have stolen 33 terabytes of “juicy banking information containing American’s banking secrets” from the U.S. Federal Reserve.  The ransomware group released a large cache of files posted across 21 separate links belonging to Evolve Bank and Trust, the U.S. financial institution and banking partner of collapsed FinTech Synapse. 

“Evolve is currently investigating a cybersecurity incident involving a known cybercriminal organization. It appears these bad actors have released illegally obtained data, on the dark web. We take this matter extremely seriously and are working tirelessly to address the situation,” an Evolve Bank spokesperson told PYMNTS. 

iRobot shares gave up 5.3%.  In news from this past week, MIT robotics professor and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks said that AI, though impressive, may not be as impressive as many of its proponents have argued, as detailed in a TechCrunch interview. 

“I’m not saying LLMs are not important, but we have to be careful how we evaluate them,” Brooks said, referring to large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

The trouble with generative AI, he added, is that while it can capably perform some tasks, it can’t do everything humans can, and people tend to overestimate its abilities. 

“When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that,” Brooks said. “And they’re usually very overoptimistic, and that’s because they use a model of a person’s performance on a task.” 

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