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This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Walmart leans into tech and in video delivers eye popping numbers. We not just take a look at earnings, we dig even deeper to try to separate the signal from the noise. The godfather of AI moves on from matter what Professor Yann Lacan will do next and why it matters and this week's merger moment, Abbott Labs and yes, a stool testing company join forces. We break down the $21 billion deal for Thursday, November 20th. It's free markets daily and I'm Ann. More market details to come. But first, this week's merger moment. Rumored yesterday and confirmed today, Abbott Labs, the diversified healthcare giant with a 215 billion dollar market cap, is buying Cologuard maker Exact Sciences. Cologuard is the at home screening test that detects cancer and pre cancerous cells by looking for key indicators in a stool sample. Exact Sciences, which is publicly traded on the Nasdaq, makes a number of other cancer diagnosis products and totaled over 5 million tests performed so far in 2025. Now in buying Exact Sciences, with its $3 billion plus of annual revenue, Abbott says it will become one of the leading cancer diagnostics companies in the world, doubling its addressable market to over $120 billion. Abbott also claims the deal increases the margin profile of its diagnostics segment, but by 7 percentage points, which is a lot. Now that diagnostics part of Abbott's business, does in fact need some help because although it generated more than $8 billion in COVID test sales alone in 2022, post pandemic operations haven't been able to find a way to fill that sales gap since. Now, at a $23 billion total valuation, this is a big deal, with 21 of that being paid by Abbott's labs in cash. And it particularly caught our eye as the latest data point, shining a light on the focus on oncolo that's dominating the healthcare sector broadly in pharmaceuticals, it's the leading therapeutic area for drug development, with a high percentage of both preclinical and clinical trials dedicated to cancer research. And just two days ago, Johnson and Johnson agreed to buy Hulda Therapeutics, a private company for just over $3 billion in cash. That's to expand J&J's cancer portfolio through Hulda's focus on solid tumors and prostate cancer. And precision oncology specifically is a rapidly developing market expected to expand over two and a half times by 2034. It's a cancer treatment approach that actually uses a patient's genetic and molecular information to create a really personalized treatment plan. Well, today the area accounts for around $700 million of exact sciences revenue, a high proportion of its total sales. And it's an area that Abbott wants to expand into, given the overall trend. While the stock market is still making up its mind on whether this integration will be a net positive for Abbott Labs, shares ticked down nearly 1 1/2% over the course of today. But but we're going to keep watching as the market absorbs more information on this one and what Abbott actually follows up with in terms of its actual integration plan. Well, coming up, Walmart and Nvidia dominate market moves. Today we break down why, and a leading light in AI leaves Meta. We break down what he's up to next. Well, Brew Markets Daily is sponsored by Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. And before the show today, our producer John mentioned a feature he recently found on Public. That's right.
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I've been getting portfolio insights from Alpha Public's AI powered research assist assistant. Then I discovered Alpha can do recaps of earnings calls. That's where I love getting an inside peek into a business. As soon as it shares updates, Public.
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Gives you smarter context in which to use a wide range of asset classes, offering the tools you need to build and manage your wealth, whether it's with stocks, options, bonds or crypto. Find your account in minutes or less. Get started at public.com brewmarkets that's public.com.
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BrewMarkets paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in Podcast Description well, today.
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The market has been digesting earnings from the world's biggest retailer, Walmart, and from the world's most valuable company, Nvidia. So we have been heads down all day today trying to unpack what's going on and there's been a ton of noise and a ton of market volatility coming around the results of one of these in particular. But we're going to start with the first of the two, which is one of my favorite companies to discuss, and that is Walmart. So John, let's start with the numbers and then we'll get into what we actually heard from the company itself.
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Excellent. Walmart has a market cap of $855 billion. It employs over 2 million people worldwide. And coming from the earnings report, revenue of $180 billion was up 5.8% year over year and adjusted operating income was up 8% year over year. And the company raised guidance for sales and operating income. Shares in Walmart were up 6.5% today and up 18% year to date.
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There we go. It's that. That magic set of words, isn't it? Raising guidance for the year is really one of the key reasons that we saw Walmart popping back up on this one because we haven't seen a huge swathe of retailers actually doing that. But Walmart doubling down on its message and saying we're doing pretty well now. There was one theme throughout the investor report and also the earnings call which caught our eye because we've talked, John, before about how Walmart is doing two things at the same time and full credit to them for doing it. First of all, they're managing to be all things to all people at the moment. Every demographic coming to Walmart right now. The higher incomes, the less, the less wealthy. All finding ways to get deals in their shopping from Walmart. That's number one. And number two, they're actually managing to do what so many retailers are not doing successfully even now. And that is truly being omnichannel, truly meeting people where they are. Whether it's with physical stores or with E commerce. There's so much more going on here. So much so that actually the tech emphasis is really striking.
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Right. The company called itself a people led tech powered omnichannel retailer. And the word tech just kept coming up over and over again. And I just want to say I remember back, you know, Walmart was sort of the, the big bad person putting out of business, the mom and pops. Then Amazon came along and Walmart had such small E commerce presence compared to Amazon at the time that it kind of felt sad like oh, you would go to Walmart's website and they did. So they've really caught up and they highlighted that E Commerce was up 27% globally and that's led by store fulfilled pickup and delivery in Marketplace.
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And let's just unpack that. Store fulfilled pickup is code for really, really fast delivery. Yes, right. That's what it is. The fact that Walmart is using its stores as distribution centers, using it for fulfillment is one of the ways, at least so far, that it's been able to keep an edge from relative to Amazon because getting perishable goods to your kitchen as Fast as possible has been the way that they've gotten recurring traffic.
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They pointed out, for example, In Walmart, approximately 35% of store fulfilled orders were expedited or delivered in under three hours and sales through these expedited channels increased nearly 70% this quarter.
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Yeah, they really called it out saying also in all of our markets we're getting faster with delivery speeds, reaching more households across a broader assortment and improving execution. And there it is, it's that keyword execution, just getting it right. They also talked about with a little bit of specificity what it is that they're doing with AI.
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Right. And we've talked about this on the show that these companies are saying AI. But are they really doing much well.
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In terms of framing itself as a tech company? There was one absolute mic drop moment today in which Walmart was making it very clear it wants the market to think of it in the, in the tech world, not think of it just as a retailer. And it's extraordinary the way they did this. The company announced it's moving its listing away from the New York Stock Exchange where it is the fourth, fourth largest company on the nice and it's relisting instead on the nasdaq. The Nasdaq of course being considered the home of US tech companies.
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And companies have made these moves for different reasons in the past. Campbell's company transitioned from the New York Stock Exchange to NASDAQ in 2024, but they weren't acting like they were becoming a tech company. They cited cost savings and access to NASDAQ services. But Walmart again underscoring it today said it's quote technology forward approach that's bringing it to the nasdaq.
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Nasdaq also itself a publicly big company. But it really is interesting now to think even about where you're listed is effectively a marketing tool. Right? It's marketing yourself, not just to your investors, but it's also saying to your consumers, we are tech and think of us as a tech consumer facing brand. Well, just one final thought around Walmart. We touched on Target a little bit earlier this week. Both Walmart and Target are having parallel experiences when it comes to their leadership at the moment. Both companies as of this moment have chief executives who started in 2014. Both are leaving with their successes coming into place in February and both being replaced by leaders who've been in their companies for decades. So basically you've had a bench and a succession plan that's clearly been around for a while. I do sort of, I'm sort of curious about this I wonder if either CEO of Walmart or Target had any idea that the other was leaving because you actually quite often hear the following. We were lucky to have Alexis Ohanian, who is a co founder of Reddit, on the show. He spoke to us a couple of weeks ago and he talked about how one of the things that motivated him was having a competitor at another social media business called Digg. And he literally, do you remember this, referred to the CEO and founder of Dig as his nemesis, like the face on the dartboard. And it really motivated him to get up in the morning wanting to fight that particular founder. And I do sort of wonder when you get these rivalries, just as Walmart and Target has been intense, whether having that same rival across the way from you, but a bit of a motivator sort of day in and day out.
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Sure, that's interesting. And they step into such different experiences here. And when Target made the announcement, the thought was, Target needs to make a change. Why are they bringing in someone from the inside? Walmart is doing well, doing well in E commerce. And so now it says, oh, this is a great succession plan. And even on the call today, the outgoing CEO said, John's ready. He knows our business so well and he has the characteristics to lead us into the future. I couldn't be happier for him in the company. Congratulations, John.
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That's John Furneaux, as you said, that's the promoted CEO over at Walmart. And of course, in that instance, this is where outgoing CEO Doug McMillan can say, John's been with us, he's been building. The success has been part of the story. Target, on the other hand, very different story where you've got the chief operating officer being promoted and folks are saying, well, on the one hand he was there during the best days of Target. At the other hand, has he been partly responsible for some of the decline at Target that we've seen over more recent years? So you sort of, you got to really understand the context for these CEOs when they, when they take their seats. Very different perspectives on whether fresh blood or consistency and continuity is more important. Well, let's move on from Walmart. I'm sad. I could talk about Walmart today. And let's talk about Nvidia. And even as we were walking into the studio today, John and I were really sort of looking at the facts of the Nvidia earnings and saying, look, the story that's been in the headlines all day have been Nvidia's popping back up off the back of its earnings as a Sign that AI bubble fears were overblown. And then they subsequently referred, reversed course Nvidia stock and the rest of the market coming back down as the afternoon went on, suggesting that the market having had a couple of hours to absorb these earnings, perhaps thinking about the world and the AI trade and Nvidia's part in it a little bit more, a little bit differently. But let's go through the numbers, John, to start with.
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All right, well, they had record revenue of $57 billion and that was up 62% year over year. Operating income of 36 billion was up 65% year over year. And revenue from Nvidia's data center segment set a record at 52 billion and that beat estimates of 49 billion. And just I keep saying billion and billion. And the company increased its guidance for the current quarter, estimating that sales will reach 65 billion higher than what analysts were predicting at 62.
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So it did all the things right, all the numbers, all the numbers. And it did the very thing that Walmart got rewarded for, which was increase its guidance for the current period. And yet here we are watching Nvidia do this sort of mountain shaped share price journey today. Up and then down again. So let's talk about operationally what is going well. And there were some specific quotes that caught our eye, caught our ears because they were very reassuring, right? There are a lot of reassuring things in this earnings report. Sales of Nvidia's Blackwell line of GPUs, the most powerful chips that the company has yet designed, were, quote, off the charts. According to CEO Jensen Huang. There was that headline, grabbing half a trillion dollar amount in terms of demand for those chips. And then the Chief Financial Officer, Colette Kress said, quote, we are still in the early innings of these transitions that will impact our work across every industry. We currently have visibility to $500 billion in Blackwell and Rubin revenue from the start of this year through the end of calendar year 2026. These are strong, bold, definitive, prescriptive, encouraging statements. We even had Jensen Huang, let's just talk about this. He went out of his way to address concerns that there is an AI bubble. On the earnings call. Let's listen to what he had to say.
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There's been a lot of talk about an AI bubble.
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From our vantage point, we see something very different.
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As a reminder, Nvidia is unlike any other accelerator. We excel at every phase of AI.
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From pre training and post training to inference. So how extraordinary that the CEO of the most valuable company is going out of his way, basically. To say, people don't panic, right? Everything's going to be fine, he'd said in the press release. He was quoted in the press release before that earnings call. He wrote, we've entered the virtuous cycle of AI. AI is going everywhere, doing everything all at once. And so this is where John and I, you, you and I were thinking, how do we cut through this? How much of this is noise and how much of this actually is a way to interpret what's going on more broadly? So here's just a couple of thoughts and you've got to kick me under the table on this if any of this is. If I'm going off the reservation. Number one, Jensen Huang is never going to say we are in a bubble, right? Why would he ever say to the market, we're in a bubble? The definition of which is something that is not sustainable. No CEO is going to say, my company is at the mercy of something not sustainable. That's just never going to happen. It's a little more unusual that they'd prescriptively go out of their way to say, things are all fine. Nevertheless, this is never going to be a no bubble speech. Number two, even if we are in a bubble, and this is just one person's view, the bubble fears to me seem to be around the circularity of these AI investments. But again, Nvidia is a very big company. There's a lot it can weather from its sheer scale. It's not about Nvidia itself, right? People are worried about Oracle, people are worried about the big capex budgets of the hyperscalers, of which Nvidia is the beneficiary, right? So if people are going to worry about where AI's impact is perhaps going to be overstated, the first signs of that are going to be the people who are dumping all this money into capex, but aren't seeing the returns. That's where we're going to see it first, I think. So when we try to cut through it. We have seen this sell off in Nvidia's share price since then. And so the question really is why? What is it that the market is now seeing? Having spent more time in this, having heard Jensen Huang's optimistic take at the beginning of their earnings call, clearly trying to get control of expectations and get control of sentiment, but it didn't quite work. And this is where I'm going to nerd out for a minute. But stick with me, because this is the kind of thing that can create inflection points in stock valuations over the course of this afternoon, as that share price was coming down, there was a particular theme that was picking up in the coverage by the analyst community. And even if you go on X and here was the thing that was getting picked up and on television and it got louder and louder and louder as the afternoon today went on. And that's people started to look more closely at the cash needs of Nvidia. And this is where they went. Go look. If you take a look in its financials, Nvidia's inventory so the stock of chips it's sitting on has more than doubled since January. And here's the nerdy part of this. For your inventory to go up, it means you, a company have laid out cash to go buy it, to go build that piles of inventory. The other thing that people were looking at was the accounts receivable, another nerdy term. It basically means the money that you are waiting to receive from your customers. Those two things went up. And so the market I think was taking a closer look at cash flow and saying, hang on a second, yes, there are these great contracts, yes, there are all these orders coming in. Yes, the outlook for the demand is strong, but let's follow the money and cash is queen. And the cash consumption of Nvidia is not looking as good as it used to. And that I think is at the core of why Nvidia ticked down a little bit. And the second thing being sentiment was already getting a bit nervous around AI. And while Nvidia said lots of great things, yes, it revised its outlook upwards, the underlying thesis wasn't earth shatteringly different enough to put to rest all the concerns that have been bubbling up around a bubble over the last couple of weeks. So just to finish the thought, there were a couple of things that did also strike us because we want to keep watching them as we move forward. We're going to keep coming back to this AI bubble thesis. We're going to get AI fatigue like absolute everybody else. But the company did highlight automotive and robotics and we're looking here because the automotive division, which includes contracts like a partnership to scale Uber's network, reported revenue up 32% year over year. And don't forget, we are now in a world where Waymo is going more mainstream, self driving is getting more mainstream. And then also we. It's so easy to forget that Nvidia started life as a gaming chips. And that's not over.
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No, the company reported revenue in the gaming sector of $4.3 billion and that was up 30% from a year ago. And so I just want to throw out this last sentence to all the gamers out there. This was in the earnings report. Nvidia launched Broaderlands 4, Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders with Nvidia DLSS 4 with multi frame Generation and Nvidia Reflex. So I assume gamers out there know what that is, but it means that Nvidia is still in the game, chips and software platform business.
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Lots going on. Well, we're going to keep watching. We're going to take a quick break for now. And when we come back, Turing Award winner Professor Jan Lecan is moving on from Meta. What's he going to do next and why does it matter? And now a word from our sponsor, Vanguard. This one's for the financial advisors out there. Hear me when I say stop falling for flash. A few flashy funds aren't enough to give a firm credibility when it comes to bond markets. Something with more substance. Look to Vanguard.
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And consistency is key.
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So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself@vanguard.com audio. That's vanguard.com audio all investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor when the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst. Some talent is so critical to a public company's path that when that person moves, the market takes note. And this week, one rumored departure from Meta was finally confirmed. One that caught our eye because it raises for us the question of where the next AI trade could be. Professor Ian Lecan is widely acknowledged as one of the godfathers of modern artificial intelligence. In 2018, he won the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science, for his work on neural networks seen as foundational to the field of machine learning. He had joined Facebook five years earlier to run AI initiatives. Now, as well as being Meta's chief AI scientist, he's a professor of computer science, data science, neural science, and electrical and computer engineering at NYU. Well, Lacan wrote in a LinkedIn post yesterday that his departure from Meta after 12 years is to, quote, bring about the next big revolution in AI systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences. Now Lacan has highlighted the limitation of current text trained models, with one particularly striking comparison. Modern LLMs train on an amount of text that would take a human 20,000 years to read. It's a lot, but that's still a smaller body of information than the total amount of data seen visually absorbed by the time a child is only two years old. As a result, world models, which is what these are called and which Lacan intends to focus on, train using the relative richness of video to capture the complex structure of the real world. Now Meta will partner with Lacan's new startup, details of which are otherwise not yet public. Now this highlights how quickly innovation in AI can change and how difficult it can be to predict winners. The emergence of Deep Seq, a Chinese competitor to OpenAI in May last year. It seemingly came out of nowhere being a case in point. So world models may be the new buzzword. We'll keep watching. Well, it's 4pm on the East Coast. There's the closing bell. The market's wrapping up for the day. We don't have a ticker tape, so let's throw it over to our human ticker.
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John and as we said, there were wild swings in the market today. The S&P 500 was up about 1% around midday and finished down 1.5%. The Dow finished down 8.10of a percent and the NASDAQ was down 2 and 2.10of a percent for the day. Some big jobs related market headlines Today Verizon Communications, the largest wireless carrier in the US announced today it is laying off over 13,000 employees, or about 20% of its non union workforce. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman took the top job just last month after the company suffered two consecutive quarters of subscriber losses. And at the time he promised a quote, simpler, leaner and scrappier business. Shares in Verizon ended the day down about a third of a percent. And after a delay due to the government shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its September jobs report which showed that non farm payrolls rose 119,000 after declining in August. But job gains were narrowly concentrated, fueled primarily by hiring and healthcare, leisure and hospitality. And the unemployment rate rose to its highest level in nearly four years following the report. The latest Fed futures trading showed less than 40% odds that the central bank would cut rates next month well, that's it, folks.
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We are through the biggest earnings of the earnings season, so we're all about to catch a break a little bit heading out towards the weekend. We've got a great show lined up for tomorrow, including one interview that we managed to have a little bit earlier this week with someone using AI and practice in a slightly unexpected field. That's it for today's Brew Markets Daily.
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And Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Anne Berry and produced by John Curto, Tarek Abd and Emily Milian. Our technical director is Lonnie Fiskas. The president of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery.
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Wake up tomorrow with the Morning Brew newsletter and tune in to Neil and Toby on Morning Brew Daily. We'll see you back here tomorrow, same time, same place. Ah, the sounds of an Etsy holiday. Now that's special. Want to hear it again? Get original and affordable gifts from small shops on Etsy. For gifts that say I get you shop Etsy, Tap the banner to shop now.