Zadod Mani (0:00)

Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadod Mani and Today is Monday, February 2nd. In today's episode, we'll tell you what caused gold, silver and bitcoin to crash. We'll also break down earnings from Disney and who their next CEO might be, then stick around to the end of the show to find out why. It's the best time to buy a home in years. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. January is in the books and it was a wild month to say the least, ending with a sell off on Friday where The S&P 500 dropped 0.4% and the NASDAQ fell by 0.9%. Overall. For the month, though, stocks did finish in the green. The S&P 500 was up 1.4% in January, while the Nasdaq gained nearly 1%. The best performing index though was the small caps Russell 2000, which was up more than 5%. Now, the big story this past month wasn't stocks, but instead metals like gold and silver. And we had some pretty massive happen on Friday. After a big run up to start the year, gold and silver got absolutely demolished on Friday. Gold dropped more than 10% and silver crashed over 30% which was the worst single day drop since 1980. And I should mention bitcoin as well. It also joined the sell off over the weekend, dropping more than 10% and is now under $78,000. Now this might seem unrelated, but the catalyst for the sell off was President Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. See, Kevin Warsh is a former Fed governor and he has historically been hawkish, meaning he prefers interest rates to be higher in order to keep inflation in check. And higher interest rates are bad for assets like gold, silver and bitcoin because they don't pay any interest.

Podcast Host/Announcer (1:51)

So.

Zadod Mani (1:51)

So investors would rather hold Treasuries and earn a higher yield on their money. Now, I do think this might have been an overreaction by the market because I doubt Kevin Warsh is going to come in and start hiking rates. But I guess we'll have to see. I mean, the market seems to be freaked out about this, but there are other factors at play that led to the sell off in gold and silver, like there was too much leverage and speculation. We actually posted a deep dive over the weekend about silver and why it saw a huge run up in prices over the last few months and why it crashed on Friday. In that episode, we also broke down the bull in Bear Case for Silver moving forward. So if you want to learn more, check out that episode. We'll post a link to that episode in the description. Now looking ahead, we have another jam packed week coming up. We are getting earnings from Palantir, amd, Google, Eli Lilly, Amazon and more. Now on top of all those earnings, we're also getting the January jobs report which is expected to drop on Friday morning assuming the partial government shutdown ends by then. All signs point to it ending, but we'll have to see. So yeah, we have another big week ahead. So if you're new here, you've come at a great time. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Disney. Disney reported earnings this morning and the numbers were solid, but the market reaction hasn't been so great. Let's start with the numbers first. Disney beat Wall street expectations on both revenue and earnings, driven by the strength in their streaming business and theme parks. Q4 revenues came in at just under $26 billion, which was up 5% year over year and earnings per share hit $1.63. You know, Disney's streaming business is starting to be a bright spot. Operating income from Disney plus and Hulu surged 72% from a year ago, hitting $450 million. So the company is making some money from streaming now after years of losses. Meanwhile, Disney's park, cruises and experience business continues to be the profit engine. Revenue in that segment hit a record $10 billion with operating income rising 6% to $3.3 billion. You know, people love going to the Disney parks. Attendance was up and guests spent more money per visit. And dis cruise business also continues to boom. Now despite the great earnings, Disney stock is down 6% this morning and it's because Disney warned that international tourism to the US Parks is slowing down, so that could hurt their revenues and profits moving forward. On top of that, Disney also said its entertainment division profits dropped 35% and sports profits fell 23% due to the increased costs for sports rights. But I think the big reason for the drop in the stock is the drama behind the scenes. According to the Wall Street Journal, current CEO Bob Iger is planning to step down before the end of the year and the Disney board is expected to vote on his successor this week. Rumor has it that the Disney board will pick Josh d', Amaro, the guy who currently runs the parks division, to be the next CEO. You know, I think there's some anxiety here from investors because last time Disney picked a new CEO, it was Bob Chapek. He became CEO in 2020 and he was so bad that Bob Iger had to come back in less than three years. So yeah, I think the uncertainty around the new CEO is making investors nervous and the stock is down around 5% this morning. the time of this recording, let's shift gears and talk about Oracle. Oracle just announced plans to raise up to $50 billion this year through a mix of debt and stock sales. That money is going to go straight into building out massive cloud infrastructure to meet AI demands in their customers like OpenAI, Meta, Nvidia, AMD and TikTok. Now remember last year Oracle kind of came onto the scene after they announced a 300 billion dol billion contract with OpenAI to supply computing power over five years. The stock jumped 36% the day they made that announcement because investors suddenly saw Oracle as a serious player for AI data centers. But then reality set in, because building all these data centers is going to be insanely expensive. In fact, Oracle's free cash flow went negative last year and analysts expected to stay negative until 2030. On top of that, the company already borrowed $18 billion last year and now they're saying they need $50 billion more. So that made investors une easy. And Oracle stock crashed 50% from its September peak, wiping out over $400 billion in market value in December alone. The stock dropped 11 after their disappointing earnings. See, the other problem for Oracle is that they are now dependent on a few giant customers, some of which aren't profitable yet, like OpenAI. So if OpenAI continues to struggle as they face competition from Anthropic and Google, that could directly impact Oracle's business. That being said, Oracle stock is up around 3% this morning. So maybe investors are just cautiously optimistic about Oracle's path forward. But I mean, this could be a make or break year for Oracle. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the video game software maker Unity are bouncing back this morning after getting absolutely crushed last week. The stock crashed 24% on Friday because of Google's new AI tool called Project Genie. Now this tool looks pretty cool, allows users to create like an open world game just from a prompt. You can type in something like Samurais in Tokyo and boom, you're walking around virtual Tokyo as a samurai now I saw a couple of demos of it and it looks really cool. And I guess investors got worried that this could be the future of video game development. The Unity software powers around 70% of the top 1,000 mobile games. And the fear was that Google could eventually eat into Unity's core business. But it seems to have been an overreaction because GENIE is still very early and any real world competition with Unity is likely going to take years. So investors are buying up the dip and the stock is up more than 8% in pre market trading. Now on the flip side, Nvidia shares are falling after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company's $100 billion mega deal with OpenAI is on ice. Now, remember, back in September, Nvidia announced this massive agreement with OpenAI to build computing power for them and invest up to $100 billion in the company to help them pay for it. But according to the Journal, talks haven't progressed. In fact, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has privately downplayed the chances the deal ever gets finalized. Jensen has apparently criticized OpenAI's business strategy and he's worried about the competition from Google and Anthropic. Now, Jensen was asked about this report over the weekend and he downplayed it. He said that Nvidia still plans to make a massive investment in OpenAI during their next funding round. So he's downplaying all the drama, but it's definitely something to monitor moving forward. Nvidia stock is down around 2% at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. For the first time in years, home buyers are actually getting a deal. About 62% of buyers in 2025 paid below the original asking price, according to data from Redfin. That's the highest percentage since 2019, back when housing was actually affordable. And by the way, these discounts aren't small either. For homes that sold below asking, the average discount was around 8%, which is the biggest markdown buyers have seen since 2012. And get this, in December, there were over 600,000 more sellers than buyers on the market. That's the biggest gap on record. So the housing market is starting to shift towards buyers, but home sales are still at a 30 year low because most people still can't afford to buy a house. You know, mortgage rates are starting to come down. They're currently around 6% for a 30 year mortgage, but that's still much higher than the average rate during the 2010s. But if you're in a position to buy a house right now, this is the most buyer friendly housing market that we've seen in years. 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. 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. 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.