← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Saydadmani and today is Thursday, March 26th. In today's episode, we'll tell you about Meta's tough week in court. We'll also explain the latest AI breakthrough from Google that is bringing down memory stocks. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much it's going to cost to buy a new NBA team. We got a great, great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks were back in the green on Wednesday with the S P 500 up half a percent while the NASDAQ climbed about 0.8%. Like I've been saying all week, we are in a yo yo market where stocks go up and down based on oil prices. And yesterday oil prices came down after optimism about a potential peace plan and ceasefire with Iran. But look, this stuff changes on an hourly basis. At this point, this there are reports that Iran has rejected the peace plan. Not only did they reject it, they countered with their own five point proposal that includes Iran keeping control of the Strait of Hormuz. So today the optimism about a ceasefire is starting to fade, which is causing oil prices to rip higher again. Brent crude is back above $106 a barrel after falling below $100 yesterday. You know, we're about a month into this conflict now and oil prices have gone up more than 35%. And look, there are some oil executives worried that things could get worse. The biggest energy conference in is happening in Houston this week and CEOs on stage are painting a pretty scary picture. For example, the CEO of Chevron said the effects of the Strait of Hormuz closure are not fully priced in yet. I mean, this guy runs one of the biggest oil companies in the world. So when he says the market is underestimating this, that's worth paying attention to. Now, to be fair, there are reports that some tankers have started to pass through the straight up Hormuz, but the straight isn't fully open. The bottom line here is that every headline about Iran will move the price of oil, which will then determine which direction stocks go in a given day. But we're going to continue to stay on top of the latest developments and break it down for you every day. 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 Meta. It's been a wild week for the social media giant. Let's start with their legal troubles. First, Meta lost two major court cases in two different states this week. On Tuesday, a jury in New Mexico found that Meta misled users about the safety of its platform when it comes to children being targeted by online predators. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in damages. And then on Wednesday, a jury in Los Angeles ruled that Both Meta and YouTube were negligent in a landmark social media addiction case. A young woman sued the companies, claiming that features like Infinite scroll and algorithmic recommendations were designed to be addictive and caused her mental health harm. The jury agreed, and Meta has to pay about $4.2 million in damages and YouTube has to pay 1.8 million. Now, those $am pocket change for these tech companies. Meta made over $60 billion in profits last year. But this isn't about the money. It's about the precedent that's being set. There are thousands of similar lawsuits filed against social media companies by teenagers, school districts, and state attorney generals across the country. So even though the fines in this case are relatively small, this could open the floodgates for more cases, and it could also open the gate for regulation against social media companies. Now, as Meta is dealing with the legal stuff, they're also continuing to cut back on their staff. According to a report from the Information, the company cut a few hundred jobs on Wednesday, mostly targeting the Reality Labs division. This is the division that includes all the Metaverse stuff, and the company seems to be cutting back heavily on that to pay for all their AI stuff. So, yeah, a lot going on with Meta right now. Their stock is down around 3% today following the court rulings, and down about 10% for the year. I think we're going to have to cover Meta in our deep dive this week, so stay tuned for that. Let's shift gears and talk about memory stocks because they are getting hit hard right now thanks to some research coming out of Google. Google published some research this week on a new compression technique called Turboquant, which could reduce the amount of memory required for AI. In simple terms, when AI models run, they store past calculations in what's called a key value cache. That way these models don't have to redo the same work. And it's a big reason why memory has been in huge demand over the past year or so. But this turboquant algorithm compresses that cache. And Google says that it can reduce the amount of memory needed to run large language models by up to six times. So that caught the attention of the market. People are already calling this the deep sea moment for memory stocks of SK, Hynix and Samsung fell 5 to 6% in South Korea. And then you have Micron, SanDisk and Western Digital all down about 3 to 4% today. Now, similar to the Deep SEQ situation, this is probably an overreaction. You know, when Deepsea came out back in January 2025, all these chip companies like Nvidia stock tanked because everyone thought that it was going to reduce the demand for GPUs. But none of that actually happened. In fact, there's more demand for GPUs than ever before. The reality is, as these AI models get more efficient and these compression algorithms get better, companies aren't going to cut back on memory. They're just going to do more with the memory they have. So, again, this might be an overreaction by the markets. I think this new research from Google might just be an excuse for investors to take profits. And after the massive run up in these memory stocks over the past year, let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the hair care company Olaplex are up more than 50% this morning after the German consumer goods giant Henkel announced that it's acquiring the company for $1.4 billion, or $2.06 a share. Now, if you aren't familiar with Olaplex, I'm pretty sure your girlfriend or your wife probably is. This was the hair care brand that blew up on social media 2020 and 2021. My wife was definitely obsessed with it for a minute. And the company rode that hype all the way to an IPO in 2021 at a $13 billion valuation. I'm telling you guys, 2021 was just so crazy that a shampoo company was valued at $13 billion. But since then, the stock has been a disaster, losing more than 90% of its value. See, competition flooded in, sales started to decline, and there were claims that some Olaplex products were actually causing hair loss. So that's why Henkel is swooping in and fraction of what it was once worth. Now, moving on, let's talk about Snap. Their shares are moving lower after the European Union opened a formal investigation into the company over child safety. EU regulators are accusing Snap of having a weak age verification system that's failing to keep kids under the age of 13 off the platform. On top of that, regulators say that Snapchat's algorithm is also misclassifying teenagers aged 13 to 17 as adults and pushing them towards inappropriate content. I mean, the EU is going as far as saying that children on the platform are being exposed to grooming by adults, and can even purchase drugs, vapes, and alcohol through the app. So these are pretty serious allegations. So as a result, Snap stock is down around 2% this morning at the time of this recording. Kind of surprised that it's not down a lot more. Overall, though, it's been a pretty tough week to be a social media platform. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. The NBA is expanding for the first time in over 20 years. The existing 30 owners in the NBA unanimously voted for the league to look at adding teams in Las Vegas and Seattle. And what blows my mind is the price tags being thrown around. The league expects the bids for each new team to be seven to $10 billion each. To put this into perspective, the last time the NBA expanded was back in 2004. At the time, Charlotte was sold for $300 million. So we've gone from 300 million to potentially 10 billion in two decades. That's more than a 30x jump in price, and it just shows you how valuable sports teams have become lately. Now, the money that's collected from these new teams will be split equally by the current 30 owners. So assuming they get $10 billion each for the two teams, that's $20 billion total. So that means that each owner will get around $660 million each. I guess that explains why the NBA owners voted to expand. Personally, though, as an NBA fan, I have mixed feelings about this. I think there are like 10 teams actively trying to lose games right now, and we're going to be adding two more teams. So, yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about the expansion. I think the NBA needs to have less regular season games. But I am happy to see that Seattle will finally get an NBA team back after losing the Supersonics. But look, this price tag of seven to $10 billion leaves a very limited amount of rich guys that can actually buy the team. Your options are basically Jeff Bezos or a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund. The NBA is hoping for these new teams to start playing by the start of the 2028 season. So right as LeBron enters the back half of his prime. 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.