Midday Movers: KBH Surges 17%, EXPE Gains, CBRS Drops

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KB Home surged 17% on a Q2 revenue beat, Expedia jumped 9% as crude oil prices fell, and Cerebras dropped 16% on its first post-IPO earnings report.

Lead

U.S. equity markets delivered a sharply divided session at midday Tuesday, June 24, 2026, as homebuilder KB Home and the broader travel sector staged strong advances while AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems fell steeply following its first earnings release as a public company. The diverging moves reflected three separate macro and corporate catalysts — a housing earnings beat, a crude oil price shock tied to Iran diplomacy, and a high-profile debut quarterly report from one of the semiconductor sector's most closely watched names.

KB Home: Earnings Beat Lifts the Sector

Adjusted earnings of $0.43 per share came in just below the $0.45 consensus, though sequential margin improvement and the elevated backlog conversion rate of 66% held investor attention. The company's built-to-order model, which accounted for 73% of net orders in the quarter, supports margin visibility into the second half of the year. KB Home also returned more than $90 million to shareholders during the period, including $75 million in share repurchases.

The KBH beat triggered broad gains across the homebuilder sector. The iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF (ITB) climbed 6%, Builders FirstSource (BLDR) added 11%, and PulteGroup (PHM) rose 9%.

Travel Stocks and Oil: EXPE Among the Day's Top Movers

The rally extended across the travel complex: Booking Holdings (BKNG) gained 8%, MakeMyTrip (MMYT) jumped more than 9%, and Royal Caribbean (RCL) climbed approximately 6%. Expedia shares were trading near $262.15 during midday, within a 52-week range of $164.47 to $303.80. Exxon Mobil (XOM) moved in the opposite direction, trading in a narrow $137.25–$139.00 band as the oil price decline weighed on the energy sector.

Cerebras: Debut Earnings Disappoint on Margin Outlook

First-quarter core revenue of $191.3 million rose 92% year-over-year, powered by a 167% increase in cloud services and 60% growth in hardware. The net loss narrowed to $14 million, or 22 cents per share, from $23.9 million in the year-ago period. The headline figures were broadly strong, but the margin trajectory unsettled investors: Cerebras projected core gross margin of 36%–38% in the second quarter, down from 46.5% in Q1, citing shifts in customer mix and increasing infrastructure investment.

The report also disclosed a multi-year agreement with OpenAI covering 750 megawatts of computing capacity, valued at more than $20 billion, and a partnership with Amazon (AMZN) to integrate Cerebras inference hardware into AWS infrastructure. For the full year, the company guided core revenue of $855.5 million to $865 million, representing 69% growth at the midpoint, with second-quarter core revenue expected to reach $914 million — 88% higher year-over-year.

Outlook

KB Home's outsized single-session gain reflects market confidence in the homebuilder's near-term delivery pipeline; the company's sequential backlog expansion and built-to-order discipline position it to sustain volume even if mortgage rate conditions remain choppy. In travel, the trajectory of U.S.-Iran negotiations and crude oil prices in the sessions ahead will determine whether the sector rally has legs, with EXPE and BKNG the primary barometers for institutional positioning. For Cerebras, the margin compression narrative is likely to persist as the company's hyperscale AI infrastructure contracts expand — investors will watch Q2 results closely to assess whether the gross margin trough has been accurately guided or may widen further.