← The Rundown
The Rundown
Buffett Buys Google, Novo Nordisk Cuts Obesity Drug Prices, and Public Launches AI Brokerage
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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadat Mani and Today is Monday, November 17th. In today's episode, we'll get you ready for a pivotal week and why Nvidia's earnings could be the most important ever. We'll also recap some big moves happening in the pharma industry and an investment from Warren Buffett that has a big tech stock flying this morning. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how AI is going to to change the way that we invest. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks are coming off a pretty volatile week of trading, especially on Friday of last week where stocks went from deep in the red to finishing flat. Overall, the S P500 did manage to pull out a small win last week adding 0.1% while the tech heavy NASDAQ finish in the red for the second week in a row losing about 0.4%. The Nasdaq is now down about 4% from its all time highs from late October, which is not a full blown crash, but it's definitely a cooldown. Crypto on the other hand, is in a full on bear market right now. Bitcoin is down to around $95,000 which is more than 25% from its record highs that it set back in early October. Ether is down to around $3,000 which is more than 30% from its all time highs. So we seem to be in the middle of a market rotation where investors are selling their riskier assets like AI stocks and crypto and and putting them into other sectors like healthcare and energy. The S&P 500 healthcare sector has climbed 5.2% in November so far while the energy sector has gone up 3.8%. So that's what I'm watching moving forward to see if the rotation keeps rolling or will the AI trade bounce back this week? I think the answer to that question might come down to Wednesday afternoon when Nvidia reports earnings. Now Nvidia is the most important stock in the world right now in every one of their earnings reports. Feels like life or death. And this one might actually be the most important earnings yet because the sentiment around AI is getting wobbly and a slightly weak report from Nvidia could have the wheels completely fall off. But on the other hand, another big quarter from Nvidia could get things back on track. So yeah, Wednesday afternoon is going to be absolutely crucial. But beyond just Nvidia, I'm also keeping my eye on retail. Earnings this week. Companies like Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx and a few more are reporting earnings throughout the week. And then that's worth paying attention to because big retailers give some of the best data on how American consumers are actually spending money. So we'll see what their data has to say when it comes to the consumer. And we're finally getting data from the government as well this week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said they will release the September jobs report on Thursday. Yes, that data is pretty old at this point, but at this point we'll take what we can get. So yeah, a lot going on this week. This could be a very crucial week for our portfolio. So it's a great time to get subscribed to the podcast and make sure you guys are tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Novo Nordisk. Novo Nordisk is cutting the prices of their weight loss drug Wegovy and Ozempic. The company says they're dropping the cash pay price from 499amonth down to 349amonth. Novo said this move is part of its push to broaden access to their blockbuster weight loss drugs. They're going as far as launching a new introductory offer where a new cash paying patient can get the first two months of WeGovy or Ozempic for just $199. Not only does this undercut Eli Lilly's prices for Zepbound, but it also undercuts the copycat compound version sold through places like Hims and Hers. According To Novo Nordisk, 1.2 million Americans are still buying those compound versions. And now that Novo's prices are similar to those compound weight loss drugs, I think Novo thinks that patients will go for the real thing instead of trying to get the copycat version. And the other reason this is a savvy move is because Novo is probably hoping that once people start using Ozempic for the first coup months, they're going to start seeing results and they're going to want to keep buying the weight loss drugs to keep the weight off. The bigger picture here is that more and more Americans will likely be on these weight loss drugs in the near future, not just because of the price cuts, but also because Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly struck a deal earlier with the Trump administration to lower prices. Starting in March. Under the new system called Trump Rx, these obesity weight loss drugs will be covered under Medicare for some patients. For for the first time ever for Novo Nordisk, they're trying everything they can to win back market share from Eli Lilly. You know, the company's had a pretty tough year. They've trimmed their full year forecast four times already and the stock is down nearly 60% from its 52 week highs. Sticking with the pharmaceutical industry, we have another big acquisition that was announced this morning. This time it's Johnson and Johnson buying Halda Therapeutics in a deal worth just over $3 billion to expand their cancer treatment lineup. This is part of JJ's push to rebuild their pipeline. With this acquisition, Johnson and Johnson will add Halda's proprietary platforms to develop treatments for multiple types of solid tumors. Halda also has a lead drug candidate called HLD0915, which is an early to mid stage development. And it targets prostate cancer, which is an area that JJ already operates in. The company has a top selling prostate cancer drug called Orleada that brought in about $3 billion in sales last year. Now, going back to Halda here, they also have a pipeline that includes therapies targeting breast cancer, lung cancer and other tumors. So JJ is buying them and this is their second big deal of the year. Back in January, they bought the neurological drug maker intracellular for about $14.6 billion. And zooming out on the pharma industry, there's been a lot of activity in M and A this year. I mean, just last week Merck announced they were buying the flu treatment makers to Dara for $9.2 billion. And Pfizer acquired the obesity drug maker Medcera for $10 billion after an intense bidding war with Novo Nordisk. So the whole industry is scrambling right now to replace their aging blockbuster drugs and beef up their pipeline. On a side note, I might have to drop a blooper reel for every time I have to rerecord one of these pharmaceutical names. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Google's getting a nice bump this morning after Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a 4 plus billion dol stake in the company, making it their 10th biggest holding. Now, the reason this is notable is because Berkshire doesn't typically invest in many tech companies. Apple is a rare exception. Berkshire bought Apple back in 2016 and it's still their largest holding yet. Now, Berkshire has been slowly trimming their Apple stakes since 2023. In fact, they sold another 15% of their Apple stock in Q3. And now they're putting that money towards Google. So that's kind of interesting, you know, taking money out of Apple and putting it towards Google. Now it's very Unlikely that Warren Buffett was the one leading this Google investment since he is retiring from Berkshire at the end of the year. And now that Warren Buffett is stepping down, maybe Berkshire will make even more tech investments. But yeah, the market took notice of his investment and Google stock is up more than 5% this morning. It's kind of crazy to me that a Berkshire investment can still move a big stock like Google. Now on the flip side, it is a rough day for Dell because Morgan Stanley just double downgraded the stock, cutting their price target from 144 down to 110. Morgan Stanley is worried about the cost of memory. Prices for DRAM and NAND have exploded by 50 and 300% in just six months. So the increased cost of memory will decrease margins for Dell, which relies heavily on memory for PCs and servers. As a result, Dell stock is down more than 5% this morning following the downgrade. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. Public.com just launched something called Generated Assets and it's one of the coolest uses of AI that I've seen in investing. This new feature on Public.com lets you turn any idea into an investable index using AI. Think of it like your own personalized ETF and you can customize it any way you want. You can describe what you want to invest in and Public's AI will turn it into a custom asset. For example, you might be curious about companies in self driving automation or maybe you want exposure to plant based products or you want to invest in an index of companies who CEOs are under the age of 40. Well, you can create these custom indices and invest in them on public.com starting today. I was watching CNBC earlier this morning and I saw that Public's co CEO Life Abraham was on there hyping up the launch. And I'm not going to lie, I'm going to be trying it out as soon as I finish recording this podcast and see what kind of custom ETFs I can cook up. So go give it a shot on public.com and let us know if this is a feature you could see yourself using. Actually, we'll make that today's Spotify poll. So go vote in today poll and share your thoughts in the comments. Public is cooking up some really, really cool features that you don't see any other brokerage doing. So again, huge shout out to them. 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 podcasts. 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. Just as a reminder, we dropped two Fire episodes over the weekend. On Saturday we did a deep dive on the housing market, and then on Sunday we posted an interview with Downtown Josh Brown. One of my absolute favorite interviews that we've done so far. So if you missed those episodes, definitely go check that out. 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.