← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the Rundown, your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadmani and today is Thursday, May 7th. In today's episode, we'll tell you the two reasons why stocks keep surging. We'll also recap earnings from McDonald's, DoorDash and Snap. Then we dive into why Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX. Finally, stick around to the end of the show to find out why investors are obsessed with the Las Vegas sphere. We got a great show for you too today. Let's go. Stocks had a huge day on Wednesday. The S&P 500 jumped 1.5%, the Nasdaq jumped 2%, both finishing at record highs. It seems like the stock market is in full on rally mode right now, thanks to the hype around semiconductor stocks and oil prices cooling off. These chip stocks continue to be on a heater led by AMD yesterday, which surged 19% after blowout earnings. We recapped those earnings on yesterday's show, so go check that out if you missed it. Overall, The Stocks Semiconductor ETF has now gone up 63% since March 30th. Now maybe this is just a FOMO talking, but I think chip stocks going up this fast makes me a bit nervous. People are talking about how this is the best stretch for chip stocks since the year 2000 during the dot com bubble. I don't know. Something to keep an eye on though. Now the other event driving the market rally is of course, the Iran war. There's growing hope that the US And Iran are finally nearing some kind of deal to end the war and fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Oil traders seem to be optimistic. Brent crude dropped to under a hundred dollars a barrel for the first time in weeks now. To be fair, the situation is still fragile. President Trump yesterday warned on Truth Social that bombing could escalate if Iran doesn't agree to a deal, but the market is clearly betting on a deal happening. Big picture though, there's a lot for the market to celebrate right now. We have strong corporate earnings and AI hype is coming back, oil is cooling off, and the potential peace deal with Iran around the corner is a cherry on top. We'll see how it all plays out, especially chip stocks, because like I said, I'm starting to hear the bubble word being thrown around again. As always, we're staying locked into all the moving parts and pieces, so make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through Some headlines, starting with McDonald's. McDonald's reported earnings this morning and it was a beat across the board. Total revenue was up 9% to $6.5 billion, with same store sales rising 3.8%. You know, McDonald's has done a really good job turning things around. If you rewind back to early last year, McDonald's was struggling, especially in the U.S. u.S. Same store sales were down almost 4% because consumers were fed up with how expensive McDonald's has gotten. But customers are coming back. U.S. same store Sales were up 3.9% in the latest quarter. And I think it's because McDonald's finally went all in on value. They brought back the $5 value meal and launched a BU items under $3. Not to mention they brought back the snack wrap and leaned hard into pop culture marketing. All of which seems to be working. Also, their CEO makes some interesting TikToks and Instagram Reels. Now, what I find interesting about McDonald's is that they're now testing a premium burger called the Big Arch, which costs up to $10 in some cities. So it seems like McDonald's is going with the barbell strategy. They're pulling people in with the value deals and then tempting them with bigger burgers and limited time meals and all these things, fancy collab drinks. And they're having success with it. And what makes this even more impressive is that other restaurants are struggling right now. But you know, despite the rebound from McDonald's, the stock hasn't really moved much. Shares barely moved this morning following the earnings report. And if you zoom out, the stock has dropped 6% so far this year. I guess it's hard for investors to get excited about a company like McDonald's when semiconductor stocks are just ripping. Right now. Let's shift gears and talk about a deal that has the AI world buzzing. Anthropic just signed a massive compute deal with SpaceX. Under this agreement, Anthropic will get access to more than 300 megawatts of computing capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. See, because Claude exploded in popularity this year, Anthropic just hasn't had enough compute capacity to meet all that demand. People have been complaining about Claude going down and hitting usage limits all the time. So that's been very frustrating for users. So now Anthropic says this deal with SpaceX will substantially, substantially increase its computing resources and it should help it raise usage limits. Here's a wild stat that Anthropic CEO Dario Amade shared. He said the company saw an 80x growth in annualized revenue and usage in Q1 alone. I mean, that kind of growth is absolutely crazy, and clearly Anthropic wasn't ready for it. Now let's Talk about the SpaceX XAI Elon Musk angle here. What's interesting is that Elon did a complete 180 on anthropic. He's been trashing Anthropic for months now, but then he said that he spent time with Anthropic's leadership team last week and he was impressed. So now they're doing business together. I also wonder if this has to do with elon's beef with OpenAI and him wanting to see Anthropic overtake them. And I wonder what this could mean for Xai. Remember, Elon merged Xai with SpaceX earlier this year and he confirmed that XAI has now been dissolved and renamed SpaceX AI. You know, this deal with Anthropic could be a sign that XAI is throwing in the towel to become a frontier AI lab. Elon spent so much money over the last couple of years to build out these giant data centers in Memphis, but Xai's chat bot Grok hasn't taken off like Claude or ChatGPT has, so the company was sitting on more compute than they needed. So instead of letting it just sit there, Elon is now leasing it out to Anthropic to earn some revenue. Anthropic has also expressed interest in working with SpaceX to build data centers in space, so it kind of seems like xai/SpaceX AI is now more of a NEO cloud than a leading AI lab. And this just adds another layer of interest to the SpaceX IPO, which is supposed to happen to in the next month or two. I can't wait for that IPO and get a peek at the financials of the company. In the meantime though, as a Claude user, I'm just happy that Anthropic will be raising usage rates. Now let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Doordash shares are rising this morning after the company gave an upbeat forecast for Q2 order value. DoorDash runs the largest food delivery service in the US and they expect gross order value in the current quarter during to come in between 32.4 and $33.4 billion, which is higher than what Wall street was expecting. Gross order value is a total dollar value of orders on the platform and it's a key metric that investors watch now. The results in the past quarter are Actually, mixed earnings per share was better than expected, but revenue of $4.04 billion missed the mark by about 100 million. On top of that, total orders of 933 million also fell short of estimates, and making it the first miss on that metric since the company went public back in 2020. Now, the total dollar value of orders on the platform did hit a record high of $31.6 billion, which is up 37% from a year ago. And DoorDash says it has more monthly active users than ever before. On top of that, the company is also expanding aggressively into grocery, retail and international markets through acquisitions like Delivero in the UK. DoorDash shares are up around 10% this morning in reaction to the report. Now, on the flip side, sales. Snap shares are down this morning after the company warned that its advertising business is being hurt by the war in the Middle east, with geopolitical headwinds costing the company between 20 and 25 million in March alone. And then, to make matters worse, Snap also confirmed that it's ending its $400 million AI partnership with Perplexity. AI. This deal was originally announced back in November and it was supposed to bring Perplexity's AI search into Snapchat. Snap stock actually jumped 15% at the time of that announcement because it looked like Snap finally had a real AI monetization strateg. But now that deal is dead. Now, the actual numbers from Snap's past quarter were fine. Revenues jumped 12% of $1.5 billion, which was in line with estimates. Snap also saw 483 million daily active users, adding about 9 million from the prior quarter. What is concerning for Snap though, is that user growth is non existent in the North American market, where Snap actually saw daily active users drop 7%. The reason that's important is because the North American market is the most important market for ad dollars. So users dropping there is a concern. As a result, Snap is down around 8% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. The Sphere in Las Vegas is the highest grossing arena in the world, selling over 1.7 million tickets in 2025. You know, longtime listeners know I'm kind of obsessed with the Sphere, even though I've never been before. You know, everyone that I've talked to that has been to the Sphere says that it's absolutely incredible. And the fact that it's a publicly traded company only adds to my obsession with it. By the way, investors are also obsessed with this company now too. Sphere Entertainment reported a blowout quarter this week. Revenues came in at $386 million, which was up 38% from the same quarter last year, and the stock hit an all time high. The stock has now gone up 400% in the last 12 months. Here's another wild stat about the Sphere. They spent $100 million to turn the wizard of Oz movie into an immersive experience. And so far the wizard of Oz has generated more $260 million in ticket sales since it opened back in August. So the Sphere might be the future of entertainment, where you go to watch movies, concerts, maybe even sports. Like imagine going to watch Top Gun or, I don't know, Spider man or something in the sphere. I would definitely pay extra to go see that. By the way, the company behind the Sphere is planning to build more spheres around the world. One is planned for Abu Dhabi and a smaller one is planned for just outside of Washington D.C. personally, I think we need to have a sphere in every major city in the world. So yeah, shout out to the Sphere. I definitely need to make a trip out to Vegas soon and check it out myself. And who knows, maybe even do a deep dive on site. Well all right guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.