Reddit's DD Machine Is Locked In On $QCOM and $DAL While the Rest of Wall Street Watches Oil Burn

While the broader market is busy stress-eating over WTI crude above $95 and a Strait of Hormuz that's been closed for 18 days, Reddit's investing communities have a different agenda. High-conviction posts are circulating around $QCOM — which just dropped a $20 billion share buyback and bumped its quarterly dividend to 92 cents — and $DAL, which absorbed a jaw-dropping $400 million fuel cost spike in March alone and still reaffirmed guidance. The WSB crowd loves a company that eats a punch and keeps walking.

The other thread blowing up? OpenAI's IPO push. CFO Sarah Friar is reportedly defining GAAP metrics and cleaning up infrastructure spend disclosures ahead of a potential Q4 listing. Reddit can't trade it yet, but the OpenAI hype is spilling over into adjacent plays — $MSFT (deep OpenAI partner) and $AAPL (whose capital-light, on-device AI strategy is getting serious DD love as a hyperscaler hedge). One popular thread argues Apple's 2.5 billion device network spending only $14B on AI infra versus the industry's $700B is either genius or delusion — and Reddit is split 60/40 on which.

Meanwhile, the Thoma Bravo LP event has legacy software names getting roasted in real time — Orlando Bravo basically said the quiet part loud: public software companies facing AI disruption deserve their valuation haircuts. That's not a bear thesis, that's a eulogy.