← The Rundown
The Rundown
Disney's Cable TV Biz Dents Profits, Firefly Surges on Plan to Resume Rocket Launch
00:09:51
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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadad Mani and Today is Thursday, November 13th. In today's episode, we'll tell you why the end of the government shutdown won't give us all the economic data we were waiting for. We'll also recap earnings from Disney, Cisco and FanDuel, then stick around to the end of the show to find out about the big engineering breakthrough from Waymo. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks are coming off another mixed day of trading with the S P 500 pretty much flat on Wednesday. But the Nasdaq dropped 0.3%. The Dow Jones continues to be the star of the show. It hit record highs yesterday. But you guys already know what I'm gonna say. Nobody should care about the Dow. Long time listeners know I'm a big time dao hater. I've done my rant about the Dow multiple times. It's a boomer index that isn't representative of the overall. You know, the Dow is made up of just 30 stocks and it's price weighted and not market cap weighted, which makes zero sense in 2025. And because it's price weighted, Goldman Sachs actually makes up nearly 10% of the Dow while a company like Apple, one of the most valuable companies on earth is only three and a half percent. So yeah, that's my Dow rant for today. But the real story here is that big tech stocks continue to dip. On Wednesday, companies like Meta, Google, Amazon, Tesla and Oracle were all down between 2 to 3%. So this rotation out of big tech seem seems to still be happening and it's a trend that I'll be watching for the rest of the year. Now zooming out a bit, let's talk about the government shutdown because after a record 43 days, the shutdown is finally over. President Trump signed a bill last night that would fund the government through the end of January. So that's some great short term news. Now many investors were looking forward to getting their hands on all the economic data from the government once the government reopened. Now we never got the October jobs report and the October inflation report. Well, it turns out we might not ever get that data. Data. The White House said yesterday that the shutdown may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system with the October CPI and jobs report likely never being released. Now the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the federal agency in charge of this data, is slightly pushing back. They said they're going to resume normal operations now that funding is restored and some analysts think they'll still publish October numbers once they've processed everything. So we'll stay on top of that developing story. Hopefully the BLS still releases that data. So yeah, next few weeks should be very interesting with Nvidia earnings and a Fed meeting. 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 Disney. Disney delivered a mixed bag of earnings this morning and it's dragging down the stock. Disney did beat on profits, but revenues came in light because the old school part of their business, which is cable TV, continues to struggle. Profits at the traditional TV unit fell 21%. On top of that, Disney's movies in Q2 didn't do so great either, especially when you compare it to your success like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool and Wolverine. But the bright spot for Disney was their streaming and parks business. Let's start with streaming. Operating income from streaming jumped 39 in Q3, thanks mostly to price hikes. Disney plus added 3.8 million subscribers, bringing his total to 132 million, and Hulu grew to 64 million. But keep in mind, just like Netflix, Disney won't be reporting subscriber numbers in their earnings report moving forward. Now looking at Disney's Experience division, which includes their parks and cruises that saw profits jump 13%, Disney says that demand for cruises and parks have been holding up despite higher prices. Now looking ahead, Disney's got some big movies coming out this quarter. Zootopia 2 is right around the corner, which I'm really excited about, and a new Avatar movie is coming out in December, so that should help their box office numbers. But the expenses tied to those movies will reduce Disney's earnings by $400 million. On top of that, Disney's also in a messy distribution fight with YouTube TV, which has been extremely annoying for sports fans like me because I can't watch espn. But let's hope they figure that out pretty Overall, Disney is dealing with some short term uncertainty, but they still expect double digit earnings growth for 2026. I guess that wasn't enough for investors and Disney stock is down around 8% this morning. @ the time of this recording, let's shift gears and talk about Anthropic. You know we always talk about OpenAI, but not a lot about Anthropic, which is the maker of the Claude Chatbot. Anthropic recently came out and said they plan to invest $50 billion to build new custom data centers starting in New York and Texas through a partnership with GPU cloud startup FluidStack. These facilities are expected to go live in 2026, with more coming after that. And this isn't even Anthropic's first mega campus. They already have an $11 billion dedicated data center in Indiana built by Amazon, which is one of their largest investors and primary cloud partner. You know, Anthropic is running into the same issue that all AI companies are running into. They say they don't have enough capacity to meet demand. Anthropic's business has been growing fast. The company now serves more than 300,000 businesses and it' run rate revenue has surged from $1 billion at the start of the year to $7 billion as of last month. So they're trying to get their hands on as much data center capacity as they can get, especially since their competitor like OpenAI, are planning to spend like a trillion dollars on data centers. So, yeah, big picture AI spending isn't slowing down anytime soon. JP Morgan estimates that global spending on data centers, AI infrastructure, and the power to support all of it will exceed $5 trillion over the next five years. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Cisco's shares are climbing after the network company delivered another strong quarter and more importantly, an upbeat outlook that shows that it's finally cashing in on the AI boom. Revenues for the company jumped 8% year over year, powered by a 15% growth in its core networking business. Cisco has now reported four straight quarters of revenue growth, reversing a losing streak of four consecutive quarters of revenue decline. Call that the James Harden now, the big headline from Cisco's earnings was AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers, which hit $1.3 billion. These big tech hyperscalers are buying up Cisco's networking products to install in AI data centers. Cisco said that their relevance in AI continues to build and they lifted their full year outlook for 2026. So investors loved it. And the stock is up more than 5% this morning at the time of this recording. Now, sticking with the winners here, let's talk about Firefly Aerospace. Shares of the space company are skyrocketing this morning after telling investors they expect to resume launches of their Alpha rocket by the end of the year. The company had halted flights after a rocket exploded during a September test, but they say they found the issue and they've since added extra inspections and automated abort systems. So investors are happy to hear that shares of the company are up more than 20% this morning. Now, Firefly is a private Rocket company that's trying to be a legit competitor to SpaceX. They IPO'd back in August. There was a lot of hype surrounding this company, but the stock is down around 60% from its peak now. Speaking of losers, let's talk about Flutter, the world's biggest online betting company and the owner of FanDuel. Their shares are sliding this morning after cutting full year profit outlook. And the reason that they're cutting their outlook is kind of funny. Apparently betters on FanDuel keep winning, which means Flutter has to send out a higher payout, which is eating into their margins. The other big threat to Flutter's business has been the rise of prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. You know, these platforms have gotten super popular because they don't have to meet strict gambling regulations from state governments because they're events contracts, which is a loophole they use to get around all these regulations. In fact, sports betting volumes on Kalshi is nearing $1 billion a week, according to the Financial Times. But Flutter is fighting back. They're launching their own prediction markets app called FanDuel Predict in a partnership with the CME Group to take on Kalshi and Polymarket. Now, the opportunity here is huge, but it's also going to be expensive to build out. Flutter says the investment will cut profits by 40 to $50 million this quarter and 200 to $300 million next year. And that's the reason why the stock is facing some pressure today. It's down around 4% at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. Waymo will start doing driverless rides on highways for the first time ever. Waymo is Google's self driving car company, probably the leader in that space. And they just announced that starting this week, Waymo will start driving on highways in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco. Now this is a pretty big milestone because up until now, autonomous rides have stayed on local streets. Highways are tougher, cars are driving at higher speeds. There's bigger risk if something goes wrong. And honestly, people drive like maniacs on the highway. At least here in Houston, which is like 80% highway. So shout out to the Waymo team. Glad they made it onto the highway. Now I'm just waiting for Waymos to launch in Houston so I never have to drive again. 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. 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. 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.