Chipotle Mexican Grill is entering the snack business.

The fast-casual giant announced Thursday it will roll out its first-ever “High Protein Menu” later this month, featuring grab-and-go protein cups. Starting Tuesday, customers in the U.S. and Canada can buy a 4-ounce portion filled with adobo chicken or steak.

The move is designed to re-energize demand as the chain known for massive burritos and bowls is grappling with slowing sales growth and a fundamental shift in how Americans eat.

“For years, guests have used Chipotle’s customizable offerings to build high protein and fiber-filled meals on their own,” Chris Brandt, Chipotle’s president and chief brand officer, said in a release.

The company recently cut its full-year same-store sales forecast for the third consecutive quarter, triggering a nearly 20% single-day stock selloff. Multiple Wall Street firms lowered their price targets, citing weakening traffic, most sharply among customers ages 25 to 35, and fading visibility into a rebound.

Chipotle stock is down around 38% year-to-date.

Across the fast-casual sector, inflation-weary consumers have been pulling back on dining out, and analysts have told CNBC previously that Chipotle is battling a value perception problem, with some diners lumping the chain in with pricier fast-casual rivals despite average entree prices that are closer to $10.

Beyond the protein cup, the High Protein Menu includes entrees such as the Double High Protein Bowl and the High Protein-High Fiber Bowl, with items ranging from 15 to 81 grams of protein per serving.

“This curated menu brings that fan behavior to the forefront with clean ingredients and flexible portions, making protein and other dietary goals easier to reach in just a few taps,” Brandt said.

Smaller, protein-dense portions allow Chipotle to compete not just with other restaurants, but with protein bars, shakes and convenience-store snacks, while potentially capturing visits outside of lunch and dinner.

High-protein diets have ranked as the top diet pattern in the U.S. for three consecutive years, according to Chipotle. About 70% of Americans now say they prioritize protein, and more than one-third have increased their intake over the past year, according to the International Food Information Council.

The launch also comes against the backdrop of a dramatic shift in consumer behavior driven by GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and growing interest in macronutrient tracking. GLP-1 users, in particular, tend to eat smaller amounts while emphasizing protein to preserve muscle mass — a trend that is forcing restaurant chains to rethink portion sizes, menu structure and pricing.

Chipotle isn’t alone in pivoting toward protein-forward offerings. Fast-casual salad chain Sweetgreen recently introduced new menu items following the trend, headlined by a bowl with 106 grams of protein.

Invesco launched an exchange-traded fund designed to give investors exposure to the top 45% of companies in the Nasdaq-100 Index.

Brian Hartigan, the firm’s global head of ETFs and index instruments, runs Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), which is the fifth-largest ETF in the world, according to VettaFi. Now Hartigan is taking on the Invesco Top QQQ ETF (QBIG), which launched Dec. 4.

According to Hartigan, there is a demand to capture the megacap concentration story within the Nasdaq.

“That’s what investors were asking us for. How do I dial up that, that exposure and really capture the majority of the drivers of returns in the Nasdaq,” Hartigan said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.

As of Wednesday, some of Invesco Top QQQ ETF’s top holdings were Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft, according to Invesco’s website.

Hartigan notes investors can balance out their portfolio risk with similar funds.

“You have this precision that investors are using ETFs to really balance out either under concentration or over concentration for their portfolios,” he said.

As of Friday’s close, Invesco Top QQQ ETF is up around 5.5% since its debut.

Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, notes other new funds have launched to allow investors to be concentrated on megacaps.

“We’ve seen other issuers launch products either targeting the largest mega-cap names or specifically avoiding them. And what that tells you is issuers are clearly aware of this battle of the markets right now. I think we’re going to continue to see sort of this tug of war play out moving forward,” he said.

Almost three years into a largely dormant IPO cycle, venture capitalists are in a tough spot.

The private market is dotted with richly valued artificial intelligence startups, including some that are described as generational companies. But venture firms in need of exits aren’t going to get relief from AI anytime soon.

That’s because, unlike prior tech booms, VCs aren’t at the center of this one. Rather, the biggest companies in the industry — Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia — have been pouring in billions of dollars to fuel the growth of capital-intensive companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI and CoreWeave.

With some of the most well-capitalized companies on the planet flinging open their wallets to fund the generative AI craze, the normal pressures to go public don’t apply. And even if they did, this batch of startups is nowhere near showing off the profitability metrics that public investors need to see before taking the plunge.

Tech giants have more than money. They’re also throwing in tangible benefits like cloud credits and business partnerships, packaging the types of incentives that VCs can’t match.

“The AI startups we talk to are having no problems fundraising at robust valuations,” Melissa Incera, an analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told CNBC. “Many are still reporting having too much unsolicited investor interest at the moment.”

Add it all up and venture investors are maneuvering through a deep market distortion with no clear end in sight. U.S. VC exit value this year is on track to reach $98 billion, down 86% from 2021, according to an Aug. 29 report from PitchBook, while venture-backed IPOs are expected to be at their lowest since 2016. Traditional VCs are actively trying to play in AI, but they’re mostly investing higher up the so-called stack, putting money into nascent startups building applications that require far less capital than the infrastructure businesses powering generative AI.

So far in 2024, investors have pumped $26.8 billion into 498 generative AI deals, including from strategic investors, according to PitchBook. That continues a trend from 2023, when generative AI companies raised $25.9 billion for the full year, up more than 200% from 2022.

According to Forge Global, which tracks private market transactions, AI as a percentage of total fundraising jumped from 12% in 2023 to 27% so far this year. The average round for AI companies is 140% bigger this year compared with last, the data shows, while for non-AI companies the increase is only 10%.

Chip Hazard, co-founder of early-stage firm Flybridge Capital Partners, says that investing dollars are shifting “up the stack” and that “enduring companies will be built at the application layer.”

That’s all going to take time to develop. In the meantime, startup investors continue to suffer from the fallout of the market turn that began in early 2022, when soaring inflation led the Federal Reserve to lift interest rates, pushing investors out of risky assets and into more conservative investments that finally offered yield.

Tech stocks have since bounced back, driven by Nvidia, whose chips are used in training most of the AI models, and other megacap stocks like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. The Nasdaq hit a record in July before selling off a bit of late. But IPOs and pricey acquisitions have been few and far between, leaving venture firms with minimal returns for their limited partners.

“Managers are having a difficult time raising additional funds without delivering LP returns, especially because more liquid, lower-risk investments now have attractive yields thanks to high interest rates,” PitchBook wrote in its August report.

The one pure AI company that appears close to going public is Cerebras, a chipmaker founded in 2016 that’s backed by some traditional VCs including Benchmark and Foundation Capital. As a semiconductor company, Cerebras never reached the lofty valuations of the AI model developers and other infrastructure players, topping out at $4 billion in 2021, before the market’s downward tilt.

Cerebras said in late July that it had confidentially filed its initial public offering paperwork with the SEC. The company still hasn’t filed its public prospectus. A Cerebras spokesperson declined to comment.

When it comes to the foundational model companies, the astronomical valuations they quickly commanded put them in a very “different league,” outside of the realm of VCs, said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Blitzscaling Ventures.

It’s “very challenging for VCs to be promising any exits right now, given the market conditions,” Owyang said, adding that early-stage investors may not see returns for seven to 12 years on their newer bets. That’s for their companies that ultimately succeed.

In January, Menlo disclosed that it was raising a so-called special purpose vehicle (SPV) — called Menlo Inflection AI Partners — as part of a $750 million funding round in Anthropic in a deal that valued the company at more than $18 billion. Since Anthropic’s launch in 2021, Amazon has been the company’s principal backer as it tries to keep pace with Microsoft, which has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI and is reportedly part of an upcoming funding round that will value the ChatGPT creator at more than $100 billion.

Menlo had previously invested in Anthropic in 2023 at a valuation of about $4.1 billion. To put in more money at a much higher price, Menlo had to go outside of its main $1.35 billion fund that closed last year. In raising an SPV, a venture firm typically asks for LPs to put money into a separate fund dedicated to a specific investment, rather than a portfolio of companies. Menlo filed to raise $500 million for the SPV.

In July, rival startup Cohere, which focuses on generative AI for enterprises, announced a $500 million funding round from investors including AMD, Salesforce, Oracle and Nvidia that valued the company at $5.5 billion, more than doubling its valuation from last year.

Cohere confirmed to CNBC that part of the financing, as well as some of its previous fundraising, came through an SPV. Inovia, based in Montreal, organized the latest SPV, and Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke was one of the participants.

Representatives from Menlo and Inovia didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some investment banks have also put together SPVs to allow multiple investors to pool capital into a hot company. JPMorgan Chase told CNBC that clients “have been able to access several leading AI investments” through the bank’s Morgan Private Ventures unit.

Still, for investors to get a return there has to be an IPO at some point, as the regulatory environment makes it virtually impossible for big tech companies to orchestrate significant acquisitions. And companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia can be plenty patient with their investments — they have a combined $280 billion in cash and marketable securities on their balance sheets.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which reportedly valued itself at more than $200 billion in a recent employee tender offer, has enabled investor shares through secondary transactions. That may be what’s eventually in store for some investors in xAI, Musk’s 18-month-old AI startup, which is already valued at $24 billion after raising a $6 billion round in May.

But SpaceX is an outlier. For the most part, secondary transactions are viewed as a way for founders and early investors to cash out a portion of their stock in a high-valued company, not a way for VCs to generate returns. For that they need IPOs.

Michael Harris, global head of capital markets at the New York Stock Exchange, told CNBC recently that the NYSE is in dialogue with “a number of AI-focused companies” and said that, “as the industry evolves we’d expect that pipeline to continue to build.”

A select few AI companies have hit the public market this year. Astera Labs, which sells data center connectivity to cloud and AI infrastructure companies, debuted on the Nasdaq in March. The company is valued at about $6.5 billion, down from $9.5 billion after its first day of trading.

Tempus AI, a health-care diagnostics company backed by Google, went public in June. The stock is up around 50% from its debut, valuing the company at $8.6 billion.

The IPO floodgates never opened, though, and high-profile AI companies aren’t even talking about going public.

“Unless there is a dramatic shift in market sentiment, I would be hard-pressed to see why these AI startups would put themselves in the public spotlight when they can keep growing privately at such favorable terms,” said S&P’s Incera. Going public “would only amp up pressure to show returns or reduce spending, which for a lot of them is not a feasible ask at this point in the maturity curve,” she said.

Most venture investors are bullish on the potential for generative AI to eventually create big returns at the application layer. It’s happened in every other notable tech cycle. Amazon, Google and Facebook were all web applications built on top of internet infrastructure. Uber, Airbnb and Snap were a few of the many valuable apps built on top of smartphone platforms.

John-David Lovelock, an analyst at Gartner and a 35-year veteran of the IT industry, sees a big opportunity for generative AI in the enterprise. Yet, in 2024, only 1% of the trillion dollars spent on software will be from businesses spending on generative AI products, he said.

“There is money being spent on certain GenAI tools and the few applications that exist,” Lovelock said. “However, broad-scale rollout of GenAI within the broad enterprise software catalogue of products has not yet occurred.” 

Bitcoin isn’t running alongside meme stocks as it did three years ago, although this week’s stock market action might indicate a big crypto rally is on its way.

GameStop and fellow meme stock AMC Entertainment are each up more than 160% over the past two days. Meanwhile, bitcoin is little changed, down just 0.1% in the same period, according Coin Metrics. In 2021, by contrast, GameStop and AMC rallied 821% and 373%, respectively, from January through April. Bitcoin’s gains in that time, though more modest, still came to 96%.

“This isn’t 2021 when the world was locked down and awash with liquidity,” said Antoni Trenchev, cofounder of crypto exchange Nexo. “It’s worth remembering GameStop mania peaked in January 2021, well before bitcoin’s more than $60,000 highs in April and November that year. If you want to read into events of the past 24 hours you could suggest GameStop may be acting as a leading indicator ahead of the next leg of bitcoin’s post-halving run.”

“Today’s stronger than estimated U.S. producer price data is a reminder that the macro[economic] and inflationary backdrop isn’t conducive for a bitcoin rally, and it’s likely to stay rangebound after an explosive opening to 2024,” he added.

To be sure, there’s a world of cryptocurrencies beyond bitcoin that includes meme coins. Still, they haven’t joined the party in the same way. Dogecoin and Shiba Inu coins have risen about 3% each in the past two days, according to Coin Metrics.

Bitcoin is widely considered in a class of its own within the crypto world, driven by macro factors when there aren’t specific catalysts to consider, such as the launch of U.S. bitcoin exchange-traded funds or the Bitcoin halving that takes place every four years.

Noelle Acheson, economist and author of the “Crypto is Macro Now” newsletter, added that the meme stock run was “more of a revving of engines than a full take-off” and that macro issues are still pressuring bitcoin.

“Tomorrow’s inflation data may boost spirits if it comes in better than expected, but uncertainty is high,” she said. 

This year, the U.S. permitted the introduction of the first bitcoin ETFs, pushed largely by BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world. The funds are expected to attract new types of investors, steady flows of new cash, all while reducing volatility. Plus, the 2023 regional banking crisis in the U.S. that kicked off the current bitcoin cycle alterted many people to cryptocurrency’s potential as an alternative financial system and hedge against uncertainty.

“Bitcoin is no longer seen as a pure speculation asset,” Acheson said. “Its store of value narrative is more deeply entrenched, its holder base is much broader and it has become to some extent institutionalized.”

Sylvia Jablonski, CEO and chief investment officer at Defiance ETFs, added that although bitcoin was “lumped into the meme stock category” in 2021, the market is starting to show signs of being taken more seriously now.

“There has been a shift towards credibility in longevity of holding bitcoin,” she said. “Bitcoin became more commercial in its ETF wrapper, and both retail and institutional investors tend to hold both bitcoin and ether, versus day trade it like meme stocks.”

With bitcoin rallying so far in the first quarter of the year, briefly approaching $73,000, it’s more recently been pulling back in what many investors describe as a healthy move. With few catalysts and challenged by macroeconomic headwinds, these investors also warn that the lull in bitcoin’s price could last several more months, and maybe pull prices lower still.

“These periods of consolidation can last a long time and are intensely dull,” Trenchev said. “The bitcoin narrative tap has run dry … and I wouldn’t expect the revival of the meme-stock frenzy to be a catalyst for bitcoin’s next move.”

GameStop shares rallied dramatically on Monday after “Roaring Kitty,” the man who inspired the epic short squeeze of 2021, posted online for the first time in roughly three years.

The post, a picture on X of a video gamer leaning forward on their chair as if to indicate he’s taking the game seriously, marked Roaring Kitty’s first post on the platform — or on Reddit— since 2021. The post has garnered 63,000 likes in 13 hours.

GameStop last traded up 70% after soaring as much as 110%. Trading in GameStop was halted multiple times due to volatility. AMC, another meme stock, jumped 22% Monday, while Reddit traded 13% higher.

Roaring Kitty, whose legal name is Keith Gill, is a former marketer for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Also known as DeepF——Value on Reddit, Gill drew an army of day traders who cheered each other on and piled into the brick-and-mortar video game stock, and GameStop call options, between 2020 and 2021.

The “meme stock” frenzy involved individual investors taking aim at short sellers and hedge funds who were pessimistic about the outlook for GameStop and other companies, forcing them to cover their short positions and drive up the price of the target stocks. Currently, the short position in GameStop shares amounts to more than 24% of all its shares that are freely available to trade, also known as the float.

Gill later posted a few videos with scenes from popular TV shows and movies, but there’s no clear indication of what they mean.

GameStop was the most talked about stock on Reddit’s WallStreetBets by far on Monday, with more than 600 mentions in the last 24 hours, surpassing the popular chipmaker Nvidia, according to market research platform Quiver Quantitative. 

The poster child was hedge fund Melvin Capital, which was heavily shorting GameStop and became a target of the army of amateur traders, suffering huge losses that prompted Ken Griffin’s Citadel, as well as Point72, to backstop Melvin’s finances with close to $3 billion in support.

Short selling is a strategy in which investors borrow shares of a stock at a certain price in expectations that the market value will fall below that level when it’s time to pay for the borrowed shares.

The GameStop mania that drove its stock above $120 a share, split-adjusted, in early 2021 from as little as $3 in the space of three months, forced brokerages including Robinhood to limit trading in heavily shorted stocks. In response, one Robinhood user filed a class-action lawsuit after the app’s decision to restrict GameStop trading on its platform. The suit was dismissed in August 2023.

Another class-action lawsuit brought against Gill alleged he pretended to be a novice trader despite being a licensed professional.

The volatility spawned a series of congressional hearings around brokers’ practices and gamifying retail trading, and testimony from leaders of Robinhood, Melvin Capital, Reddit and Citadel, as well as Gill. The entire episode finally inspired the 2023 movie “Dumb Money,” in which Paul Dano played Gill.

In January 2021, GameStop shares hit an all-time high of $120.75 intraday, adjusted for a subsequent 4-for-1 stock split in the summer of 2022. But as interest from individual investors eventually faded, the stock collapsed along with other meme stocks such as AMC Entertainment Holdings. GameStop last month hit a three-year low of $9.95.

Recently, the stock has started to move higher, which may have rekindled Gill’s interest, along with the enormous amount of short interest in the name. GameStop has soared 57% so far in May, closing Friday at $17.46.

But the fundamental business at GameStop, evidenced by its most recent earnings report, shows a discouraging picture at the video game company. In late March, GameStop said it had cut an unspecified number of jobs to reduce costs, and reported lower fourth-quarter revenue amid rising competition from e-commerce-based competitors.

GameStop posted revenue of $1.79 billion for the fiscal fourth quarter, compared with $2.23 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.