February 26 Member Morning Brief: Nvidia Releases Strong Financial Report, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Prepare for “Return” This Year

1. [Nvidia Releases Strong Earnings Report] Nvidia has released a strong earnings report and expects sales this quarter to reach $78 billion, higher than analysts' expectations of approximately $72 billion. The company's stock price rose in after-hours trading; shares of Broadcom and TSMC also climbed accordingly. In recent months, investors have been concerned about over-investing in artificial intelligence, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang insists that the adoption of "AI agents" by companies is "rapidly surging."

2. [Lithography Giant ASML Delivers Impressive Results] 2025 sales reached 32.7 billion euros, up 15.6% year-on-year; gross margin increased to 52.8%, up 1.5 percentage points year-on-year; net profit was 9.6 billion euros. Annual R&D investment reached 4.7 billion euros, accounting for 14.4% of total sales.

3. [Elon Musk Expands Imagination for SpaceX] Musk stated his intention to build a giant electromagnetic catapult and a satellite assembly plant on the moon, using electromagnetic launch methods to send satellites into Earth's orbit to facilitate the deployment of a data center satellite network dedicated to AI. Reportedly, SpaceX may choose to go public in June this year, with a valuation possibly exceeding $1.5 trillion, making it one of the world's largest IPOs.

4. [South Korea Sees Baby Boom Rebound] In 2025, the number of newborns in South Korea reached 254,500, up 6.8% year-on-year, marking the fastest growth rate in 15 years and the second consecutive year of growth; the total fertility rate rebounded to 0.8, the highest in four years.

5. [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Prepare for “Return” This Year] Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Sandra Thompson said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are “very likely” to go public this year, with a valuation between $500 billion and $700 billion.

Comment: Since being taken over by the U.S. government during the 2008 subprime crisis and placed under federal "conservatorship," Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have accumulated huge profits and cash reserves over the past 17 years. The push for privatization of the "two housing giants" has not proceeded smoothly but has been accompanied by strong macro policy intervention. In January 2026, the U.S. government directly ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to use their vast cash reserves to launch a mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchase program worth up to $200 billion. This move bypassed the Federal Reserve's conventional monetary policy tools, injecting massive liquidity directly into the secondary mortgage market. The intervention had an immediate effect, successfully forcing the U.S. average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rate to fall below the critical psychological and economic threshold of 6% for the first time in years, greatly stimulating the real estate market that had stalled due to high interest rates. However, using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as direct policy tools to regulate macro interest rates is inherently at odds with the upcoming IPO privatization objectives.