The ice cream shop that makes money when it's cold

28 Wishes sells ice cream in Los Angeles. Below 70°F, sales fall about 20%. The weather is out of their hands. Rent isn't.

So the owners started putting about $20 a day into Kalshi weather markets, taking the cold side. The days that keep customers away now pay something back.

This is hedging. Big companies have done it for decades, buying protection against bad weather, fuel spikes and rising rates. It used to take a broker, a trading desk, and an order size no corner shop could meet.

Kalshi opens it up. Contracts on weather, fuel prices, inflation, tariffs and regulation, starting at a few dollars. Take a position on the outcome that would hurt you. If it hits, the payout softens it. If it doesn't, the contract expires and the good month was the point.

See how other owners are doing it at Kalshi.com/hedging

🚀 Google's Rocket-Powered Bargain

Back in 2015, Google put $900 million into a little rocket company called SpaceX. According to a Reuters report, that stake is now worth about $68.6 billion. But Google isn’t stopping there. The parent company Alphabet even added about 3.8 million more SpaceX shares last quarter, bringing its pile to roughly 555 million shares.

Why are we telling you this? Because Google is officially too interesting to ignore. Not because it owns a portion of SpaceX. But because when you look at everything it owns, its current valuation is now too low to ignore and we officially started building a position last week.

Let's break down our thinking behind the stock and what you actually get when you own a piece of it.

The stock: flat for a year

Alphabet closed near $286 on November 6, almost the same price as a year earlier. But in between, it ran up to about $402 in May. That means the stock now sits roughly 29% below its high and a big chunk of the drop came after its third quarter report in late October.

Wall Street was grumpy because Alphabet missed estimates for the first time in nearly four years. Adjusted earnings came in at $2.67 a share versus $3.02 expected. Part of the hit came from SpaceX itself. Alphabet's finance chief said falling SpaceX shares were the main reason for $8.2 billion of negative "other income" in the quarter.

The business: four engines

Search is still the giant. Google Search brought in $63.4 billion in the quarter, up 12%, and the company said search query growth was the fastest in five years. YouTube ads added $11.2 billion, up 9%. Together those ads pay for almost everything else.

Google Cloud is the rocket inside the rocket. Cloud sales more than doubled to $30.7 billion, up 103%, and Cloud profit tripled to $11.1 billion. Other Bets, which includes the Waymo robotaxi business, is still a money pit. It made $372 million in sales and lost about $2 billion. Total company sales hit $127.6 billion, up 25%.

The SpaceX math

Alphabet has about 12.3 billion shares outstanding. Divide the $68.6 billion SpaceX stake by that, and you get about $5.60 of SpaceX for every Alphabet share. That is about 2% of the stock price. So SpaceX is a nice bonus, but it is not the main reason Alphabet is worth $3.5 trillion.

The stake also swings a lot. SpaceX stock fell from $170.86 at the end of June to $123.62 on November 5. Every $10 move in SpaceX changes the stake's value by about $5.5 billion. Google is also a SpaceX customer now, paying it $920 million a month for computing power for its Gemini AI tools.

The valuation: cheaper than most

Yes, a $3.5 trillion valuation is enormous but we need to look at it relative to their earnings. Alphabet trades at about 15 times its earnings from the past year and about 18.5 times next year's expected earnings. Microsoft sits near 22 times forward earnings, Amazon near 24, and Apple near 32. Meta is close to Alphabet at about 17, and Nvidia is the outlier at about 12. One caution is that the past-year number looks extra low because it includes big investment gains from earlier in 2026.

• 🔍 Search keeps growing. Sales rose 12% to $63.4 billion, with the fastest query growth in five years.

• ☁️ Cloud is on fire. Sales jumped 103% to $30.7 billion, and its profit tripled to $11.1 billion.

• 🚀 SpaceX is a side bonus. The stake is worth about $5.60 a share, roughly 2% of the stock price.

• ⚠️ The catch is spending. AI costs and SpaceX swings caused the first earnings miss in nearly four years.

The Munch Take: My wife told me last week that she found a designer coat at half price, and she was annoyed it wasn't a quarter price. That is kind of how the market treats Alphabet right now. The company grew sales 25%, doubled its Cloud business, and has a $69 billion rocket stake in its back pocket, yet the stock is flat for a year. Some of that worry is fair, because AI spending is huge and SpaceX shares bounce around like a toddler on a trampoline. We found the price hard to ignore, which is why we picked up shares last week. Yes, they need to keep cranking out cash to cover the massive AI bill but with the stock still up over 90% in the last 5 years, we like their track record. Not financial advice. Just being fully transparent in our positioning.

👀 Bonus Report: The midterms are over. Your portfolio risk isn’t. Get our report. (From StockEarnings)

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