Good morning. It's an expectations game, innit? Last night, Nvidia's earnings report included the CFO saying she expected revenues to grow 70 per cent in fiscal 2028. Wall Street has been expecting 44 per cent growth — implying an additional $100bn of unexpected sales. The market responded to this staggering disclosure by pushing the stock up by a nice-but-not-staggering 5 per cent in late trading. Meanwhile Salesforce, a software group whose shares have been taken to the woodshed by fears of displacement by AI, expects revenues for the rest of the year to come in a shade above analyst estimates, and its shares rose 13 per cent after the bell.

Anthropic, maker of Claude, is reportedly planning to list in October. It has mastered the dark arts of leaking financial information during what is supposed to be a quiet period ahead of the initial public offering. The steady drip of positive news stories about revenue growth, potential $2tn valuations and AI models too powerful to release to the public is doing the work of the IPO underwriters before the roadshow has even started. In less than eight months, Anthropic's annualised revenue is said to have gone from $9bn to over $65bn.

Do the numbers stack up? The funny/scary thing about private companies is that there is no agreed standard for financial disclosures. We're not saying anyone is cooking the books; internally, they have to follow the same accounting rules as everyone else. But privates can choose which financial metrics to disclose, and can throw in a few heroic assumptions for good measure.