← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaydad Mani and Today is Friday, November 28th. In today's episode, we'll tell you how AI could impact the holiday shopping season. We'll also tell you the latest threat that Nvidia is facing in China. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much money Macy's makes from the Macy's Day parade. We got a great show for you today. Lets go. Stocks were up again on Wednesday with the S&P 500 adding 0.7% and the Nasdaq jumped 0.8%. The stock market has been on fire lately entering the Thanksgiving break riding a four day win streak. Even crypto is seeing a mini spark right now with Bitcoin getting back above $90,000 and Ethereum is back above $3,000. So shout out to everyone that convinced their uncle or cousin to buy the dip over Thanksgiving. Now today is the last trading day of November for the stock market and looking back, it's been a pretty wild month. You know, it started off with a brutal sell off. The S and P was down nearly 5% at one point, but because of this late month rally, it's nearly back to even to close out the month. In fact, we just need a 0.4% gain today in the S and P to finish the month in the green. Otherwise November will be the first monthly loss for the S and P since since April. So we'll see if the S and P can pull it off. Now remember, today is a shortened trading session with markets closing at 1pm Eastern and usually the volumes are pretty low, but we could still get a mini rally, so we'll see. Now I should point out there also seems to be an outage at the cme, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Apparently one of their major data centers had a cooling system failure which halted trading for a huge chunk of global futures markets. That includes everything from oil features to gold to US Treasuries. Now they're still working to restore the outage. It's only been partially restored, but it shouldn't impact your portfolio unless you had plans to, I don't know, buy some oil futures or something. The major US equities exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ were not impacted, so stock trading should be functioning normally. As always, we're going to be staying on top of all the market news and drama. 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 Holiday Shopping Thanksgiving and Black Friday officially kicks off the holiday shopping season, and the early numbers have been pretty solid. Online sales on Thanksgiving Day are projected to hit $8.6 billion, which is up 6% from last year, according to Salesforce. Side note, I didn't know that Salesforce was tracking that kind of stuff now. Today, Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year. Online sales in the US are expected to hit $18 billion and sales are expected to hit 7. $78 billion globally. So Black Friday isn't just a US thing anymore. Now it's not just online sales seeing a bump. Retailers are also expecting record foot traffic at stores, but according to some estimates, shoppers are expected to spend less money because of the mixed macroeconomic environment. Consumer confidence just saw its sharpest drop in seven months, driven by concerns about the softening labor market and the broader economy. On top of that, prices of goods have gone up by 4.9% because of tariffs, according to the Tax Foundation. Overall, though, spending during the holiday season is expected to match last year, but unit sales could fall as much as 2.5% because people are spending more money to buy fewer items. The other interesting wrinkle here is the rise of AI shopping. Bank of America expects that half of shoppers will use AI during Black Friday shopping, and retailers from Amazon and Walmart to Target are all racing to deploy AI powered shopping agents to help customers find deals faster. Adobe expects AI driven traffic to surge 520% year over year, making this Black Friday a real time test case for how AI will reshape consumer behavior and shopping going forward. You know, personally speaking, I've been using Chat, GPT and Gemini to help find deals and help compare products. It's very useful for that. So maybe soon we're just going to have AI agents do all of our holiday shopping for us. It's just crazy to see how Black Friday has changed so much over the last, what, five to 10 years? Kids these days don't know the thrill of waiting in line at best buy at 4am to snag a 200 doll flat screen TV and pick up some video games for 20 bucks. Now everything is online. We got AI agents and maybe soon we'll have humanoid robots go to the stores and do our shopping for us as well. Now, sticking with AI, let's talk about Baidu, because the Chinese tech giant is working on making their own AI chips to replace Nvidia. Baidu just laid out a five year roadmap for its next generation Kunlun AI chips. With the M100 launching in 2026 and the more powerful M300 coming in 2027. Now Baidu is entering the AI chip space to fill the gap created after the US government blocked Nvidia from selling their top end GPUs into China. Baidu will now be primarily competing with Huawei, which is the current leading domestic chip maker in China. You know, just like in the US the demand for AI chips in China is exploding right now. And with Nvidia pretty much cut off from that market, JP Morgan thinks that Baidu is one of the best positions to capture the demand inside China. And this was one of the downsides and critic when it came to banning Nvidia's chips to China. Because now tech companies in China are incentivized to create their own chip instead of being reliant on Nvidia. And who knows, over time their chips might become better than Nvidia's. Even if Nvidia does get unbanned in China, they're probably never going to capture the same market as they had before. By the way, I want to point out that this is just one of many things that Baidu is working on. The company is called the Google of China because they're also working on self driving cars. They also have their own AI model called earning. And just like Google stock, Baidu stock has been on fire lately, going up more than 40% in the past six months. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Circle, the StableCoin company behind USDC, is getting a nice bump this morning thanks to its rival Tether getting a downgrade from the rating agency S P Global. S P Global downgraded Tether, citing growing concerns about Tether's reserves that back up their stable coin usdt. Turns out Tether has been loading up on riskier stuff like Bitcoin commodities and secure loans, which now make up 24% of its reserves. That's up 17% from a year ago. You know, in theory, a stablecoin issuer should keep one to $1 or US treasuries in the bank so every token can be redeemed instantly for cash. Circle largely sticks to that model. Tether, on the other hand, has been drifting away from it, putting more of their dollars into riskier investments to, you know, make more money. And that could potentially destabilize their stablecoin. So as a result, Circle stock is up around 3% this morning. Now on the flip side, Oracle stock to slide as investors become concerned with how much debt the tech company is taking on to build out AI infrastructure. You know, Oracle is pretty much betting the entire company on AI. I talked about this in my interview with Doug o'. Laughlin. Go check that out. If you missed it now, investors were initially excited about this move by Oracle, but that excitement has totally worn off. And now Oracle stock has dropped 11% in the last five days and more than 27 over the past month. The stock is down another 2% this morning. By the way, Oracle's founder, Larry Ellison became the richest man in the world at one point in September. Well, now he's down to number three on the rich guy list. With a net worth of just $262 billion, he might need to wait for Oracle stock to go back up before he buys another island. And can he even afford TikTok at this point? I mean, there's a lot of questions right now. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. More than 30 million people watch the Macy's Day Parade on TV every Thanksgiving, making it one of the biggest non sports broadcasts of the year. This parade is very interesting. It cost Macy's around $13 to put on each year. But NBC pays Macy's over $20 million to broadcast the parade. So Macy's is actually making money on this. I feel like the parade is something that a lot of people put on in the background while prepping for Thanksgiving. It comes on in the morning. Kids tend to love it, seeing all the balloons and floats. This year they had Labubus and K Pop, Demon Hunters. My daughter was glued to it for a bit. I was watching the parade with her and man, NBC stuffed that broadcast with so many ads. I think 40% of that broadcast was just ads. We barely got to see any of the floats. So eventually my daughter got frustrated of seeing all the commercials and she just stopped watching. Kids these days, man, they don't know the pain of watching tv. You couldn't just skip past ads. It's just another example of why people don't watch linear TV anymore. Well, all right guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Hope you guys had a fantastic video. Thanksgiving, you know, it was a short but eventful week and now I'm looking forward to December and seeing how the markets close out the year. If you guys enjoy listening to our show and have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you are listening on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify. All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. As a reminder, we are going to be posting a Deep Dive episode tomorrow and an interview on Sunday, so keep an eye on your podcast feed for that. Thank you guys again 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.