← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadod Money and Today is Monday, February 9th. In today's episode, we'll recap last week's wild ride in the markets and what to look forward to this week. We'll also tell you why Nova Nordisk is suing hims and why China is telling their banks to sell U S Treasuries. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much money was bet on the super bowl this year and why Sports Betting Stocks Stocks Keep Sliding we got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets are coming off a roller coaster of a week. After dropping for most of last week, stocks got a big relief rally on Friday. The S P 500 surged 2% while the Nasdaq rallied 2.2%. And I guess I should shout out the Dow Jones. It jumped 1200 points and crossed 50,000 for the first time ever. Still don't care about the Dow. You know, Friday was the best day for stocks since May and it snapped a brutal multi day losing streak and it gave investors something good to feel about heading into the weekend. Overall though, the S and p was down 0.1% last week and the Nasdaq fell 1.8%. Now we'll have to see if the markets can build off the Friday rally this week. There are some on Wall street that aren't convinced the Friday bounce was real. The thinking is that rally on Friday might have just been traders covering their short position, so there's definitely still some anxiety in the markets which could make for another choppy week of trading. Now looking ahead to this week, we've got another packed earnings calendar and we're also getting the delayed January jobs report on Wednesday morning and a CPI inflation report on Friday morning. So it's going to be a big week for macroeconomic data as well. We'll see how the market responds to everything. As always, make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Also, if you're watching the video version of this podcast, you've probably noticed that we've upgraded the studio a bit and we've been trying hard to continue to level up our game. So I want to give a big shout out to Public for making all of this possible. I love doing this show every day and we've come a long way since we started this show over two years ago now. And a big reason for that is Public. You know, Public has continued to invest in this show because it's their priority in helping us make the best content possible. And that's one reason why there's no ads on here. Public pays for everything, which allows us to focus on delivering the best daily market show we can, seven days a week. So, again, big shout out to public. I highly recommend you guys checking them out if you haven't already. It's a fantastic investment platform with a ton of features including things like direct indexing, tax loss harvesting. And I also love their AI research tools as well. By the way, they're doing a 1% match right now when you transfer from another brokerage account. So it's a great time to sign up for Public, if you haven't already. We'll drop a link in the description to check them out. All right, let's get into the rest of the show. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Novo Nordisk, the pharma giant. Novo Nordisk is suing the telehealth platform himss for patent infringement to to shut down what they call illegal copycat versions of their blockbuster weight loss drugs. You know, HIMS has been selling compound knockoff versions of Novo's blockbuster weight loss drugs, Wegovy and Ozempic, but their drugs are not FDA approved. Then last week, HIMS went a step further by announcing that they'd sell a copycat version of Novo Nordisk's new Wegovy pill for just $49 a month. And I think they pushed their luck too much because they got immediate blowback not just from Novo Nordisk, but also the fda. The FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, promised swift actions to clamp down on illegal copycat drugs. On top of that, the Department of Health and Human Services also referred Hims to the Justice Department for potential violation of federal law. So HIMS got freaked out and they scrapped the pill over the weekend, but they were still selling the knockoff versions of the semi glutide injections. Well, Novo Nordisk is not letting that slide anymore either. On Monday, they filed a lawsuit to ban HIMS from selling any compound versions of their drugs and they also financial damages from the company. Now, for some context here, the FDA normally does allow compounding pharmacies to make knockoff versions of drugs when there's a shortage. And Novo Nordisk's drugs were on the shortage list for a while, but they came off that shortage list early last year. But despite that, HIMS did not stop making the compound drugs and now they have a messy legal fight to deal with. This is Definitely making investors nervous. HIM stock is down more than 20% this morning at the time of this recording. On a side note, both these companies had super bowl ads last night and I thought they were pretty good. In fact, there were a lot of pharma ads last night. Let's shift gears and talk about China and US Treasuries now. We don't talk a lot about US Treasuries on this show, but I thought this was an interesting story. According to Bloomberg, Chinese regulators have verbally urged their banks in China to limit new purchases of U.S. government bonds and and in some cases even trim their existing holdings. Now this caught my attention because over the last few weeks and months we've been hearing about the Sell America trade. The thinking being that international investors are selling their US Assets like stocks and bonds because of increased uncertainty and volatility and maybe a loss in the confidence in the U.S. but Chinese regulators stress this isn't about geopolitics or a loss of confidence in US Credit. It's more about risk management. In fact, their new guidance doesn't even apply to China's official state holdings of Treasuries, which is near $700 billion. It only appl applies to private Chinese banks. Chinese regulators don't want these banks to have too much exposure to U S Treasuries as a risk management thing. But the thing is that China has been quietly reducing its holdings of U S Treasuries for years now. They used to be the largest foreign holder of U S debt. Now they're down to third after Japan and the UK and if more countries follow China's lead, that could push treasury yields higher and make it more expensive for the US Government to borrow money. It also impacts borrowing costs for normal people and businesses as well. I do think the Sell America trade is a bit overblown. You know, despite all the doom and gloom, foreign holdings of U.S. treasuries actually hit a record $9.4 trillion last year. So China selling U.S. treasuries could be something to keep an eye on, but I don't think it's worth stressing over just yet. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of ST Microelectronics are up this morning after the European semiconductor company announced a massive multi year, multibillion dollar chip deal with Amazon Web Services. As part of this deal, STM will supply semiconductor chips for AWS data centers. Also included in this deal is that Amazon gets the option to buy up to 2.7% stake in the company. So overall this is a big win for stm. You know, the company traditionally made chips for cars and industrial equipment, but demand in those sectors have been weak. But now with this AWS deal, STM is now in the middle of the AI infrastructure buildout. So investors are loving that. And shares of the company are up more than six this morning at the time of this recording. On the flip side, Micron is under pressure today after reports that Samsung is preparing to ramp up production of its next generation HBM4 memory chips as early as this month. You know, HBM chips are high bandwidth memory chips that are critical for powering AI processors like the one that Nvidia makes. And Micron dominates that market. There's been a huge demand for these chips and Micron stock has more than quadrupled over the past year. But now Samsung is planning to ramp up production faster than expected, which could take some market share away from Micron, which is why Micron stock is down around 4% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Over $1.7 billion was bet on the super bowl this year, which is about 9% higher than last year and the most money ever wagered on the game. But here's the wild part. That number doesn't even include prediction markets. According to Bloomberg, prediction markets are expected to bring in another $600 million in Super bowl bets this year. That more than an 80% growth from last year. And it's a huge reason why traditional gambling stocks have been under pressure lately. Flutter, which owns FanDuel, is on a eight week losing streak and DraftKings is down 60% from its all time high. You know, these prediction markets platforms originally focus on political bets like who's going to win an election, but sports have now completely taken over, accounting for about 90% of total trading volume. And it's all because of a regulatory loophole. See, prediction markets are technically events contracts and they are federally regulated by the cftc, which means that they're available nationwide, including in states where traditional sports betting is still illegal. Like where I live in Texas. I can't use DraftKings here, but I can play sports bets through a platform like Kalshi. Not surprising here, but the big sports books aren't happy about that. Gambling companies are now suing to block sports betting on prediction markets and that fight will likely end up at the Supreme Court at some point in the future. We'll see how that ends up playing out, but it's pretty clear that people just love to bet on sports. Also, speaking of the super bowl itself, the game was not the best. You know, it was a pretty boring game, but I thought the ads were pretty decent. There were a lot of AI ads. My favorite ad, though was probably the Duncan one with Ben Affleck. There was a lot of 90s sitcom stars in there, so a great bit of nostalgia. But yeah, shout out to the Seattle Seahawks dominating performance in the Super Bowl. They were probably the best team all year and now they get to bring home the trophy. 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.