GameStop Rides Collectibles Craze to Earnings Beat, Steph Curry Inks $400M Shoe Deal

**Zaid Admani** (0:00)
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Wednesday, June 3rd. In today's episode, we'll tell you how GameStop just had its best quarter ever. We'll also recap earnings from Macy's and Palo Alto Networks. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Steph Curry just signed a $400 million shoe deal with a Chinese brand. We got a great show for you today.
Let's go.
Stocks kept the rally going on Tuesday, but just barely. The S&P 500 was up just 0.1% on Tuesday, but that was enough to make it nine straight days of gains. The Nasdaq also squeezed out a tiny gain of 0.03%, but that was good enough for its 20th record close of the year. Chip stocks led the rally again. The Semiconductor ETF was up nearly 6% yesterday, thanks in large part to Marvell jumping 32% after NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hyped them up, saying that Marvell could be the next trillion dollar company. We talked more about that on yesterday's show, so go check that out if you missed it. But while stocks keep making new all-time highs, Bitcoin is getting hammered. Bitcoin fell more than 6% yesterday. It's now trading around $67,000.
The trigger for this sell-off was Michael Saylor's company, Strategy, selling a small amount of Bitcoin, just 32 to cover dividend payments for their shares. Now, in the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge sale, but the fear is that Strategy could potentially sell even more Bitcoin. I mean, they're sitting on over 800,000 Bitcoin worth over $60 billion. So if they start selling in size, the price of Bitcoin could keep sliding. And the thing with Bitcoin is that once prices start to fall, they tend to go down fast. I mean, a lot of crypto traders use leverage, meaning they borrow money to make bigger bets. So when the price of Bitcoin starts dropping quickly, those leverage traders are forced to sell their position to cover their losses. And that forced selling pushes prices even lower, which triggers even more liquidations. So it's like a downward spiral. And in the last 24 hours, crypto exchanges saw nearly $600 million in liquidations. So yeah, vibes are not great in crypto land right now. Other major crypto currencies are also sliding. ETH, Solano, they're all down, along with crypto related stocks like Coinbase. Now looking ahead, we are getting some big earnings dropping tonight. Both Broadcom and CrowdStrike report earnings after the bell. That should give us a better read on two major themes that investors care about right now, AI infrastructure and cybersecurity. We'll cover those reports on tomorrow's show, along with everything else happening in the market. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop.
Let's run through some headlines, starting with GameStop. GameStop reported earnings last night, and man, they absolutely crushed it and announced a big share buyback plan. Let's talk about the numbers. First revenues were up 14% to $835 million, and operating income came in at $143 million, which is the highest quarterly operating income since 2018 The company also reported a net income of $389 million, which is the highest quarterly profit on record. So yeah, GameStop just delivered record earnings, which I did not expect to stay in 2026 You know, the company has done a fantastic job pivoting away from just being a video game retailer and selling things like collectibles, which is where all the growth is happening right now. Things like Pokemon cards and Funko Pops and Star Wars action figures, they're all seeing a big surge in demand, especially from younger shoppers. Like for example, my seven year old daughter has been asking me to buy her Pokemon cards for weeks now, because all of her friends have them now. This is a smart pivot for the company, because as we know, more and more games are being bought digitally these days. Nobody's lining up at midnight to buy the latest physical copy of Call of Duty anymore. So embracing physical items like Pokemon cards and other collectibles has paid off for the company. Now the other big headline from the earnings was that GameStop has authorized a $2 billion stock buyback program, which runs through 2029 So that signals that CEO Ryan Cohen and the overall management believe the stock is undervalued. And you know, overall GameStop has a healthy balance sheet with more than $8 billion in cash and investments, which gives CEO Ryan Cohen a lot of flexibility moving forward. Chairs are up 10% this morning in reaction to the earnings. The fact that GameStop is up double digits and is not meme related, I think it's a good sign for the company. Let's shift gears and talk about a story that's flying under the radar right now, but could end up being a pretty big deal for how people trade. Last week, the CFTC, which is the government agency that regulates futures trading, approved a new type of trading product called Perpetual Futures Contracts. The CFTC approved Bitcoin perpetual contracts on the prediction market platform, Caoshi. This is all a bit finance nerdy, so I'll try to explain how it works. See, a normal futures contract lets an investor bet on where the price of something will be at a specific date in the future. A perpetual futures contract, or PERP, like the cool kids say, is basically a futures contract with no expiration date. You can hold the position for as long as you want, so it's simpler, it's more flexible, and it's very popular with traders globally. Caoshi said that offshore perpetual trading volume hit $90 trillion in 2025 And a big reason that PERPs are so popular is that they let traders make bullish or bearish bets without buying the underlying asset directly. And I think the key point is they can be used with leverage. The downside though, as we know, is that when there's a lot of leverage used in the trade, it can lead to big sell-offs like we just mentioned with Bitcoin. So yeah, now PERPs are coming to the US starting with Bitcoin. But many people seem to believe that PERP contracts will eventually expand into stocks and commodities. If PERPs move beyond crypto, that could eat into the business of traditional exchanges that have dominated futures trading for decades. In fact, shares of the big exchange operators like the CME Group, the NASDAQ exchange and the Intercontinental Exchange, owns the New York Stock Exchange, all got hammered this week. Now, all of this could be an overreaction. I mean, PERP contracts are still very new and only 1% of overall futures trading volume in the world, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. Personally, though, I'm not sure if crypto style, heavy leverage trading is a good idea to bring to the stock market, but we'll see what happens. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today.