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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaydad Mani and Today is Wednesday, February 25th. In today's episode, we'll tell you why PayPal might get acquired soon. Then we'll break down earnings from Circle, Kava and Lucid, then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Apple is bringing manufacturing to my hometown of Houston, Texas. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets bounced back on Tuesday with the S P 500 rising 0.8% and the Nasdaq gained 1%, pretty much making up for all the losses from Monday. Yesterday was a broad based rally. Over 350 stocks in the S P were in the green and nine out of the 11 sectors were also up. So the vibes were good yesterday. And one of the best performing stocks was AMD which jumped 9% after announcing a massive 100 billion dollar chip deal with Meta. I broke down that deal on yesterday's show, so go check that out if you missed it. Now, software stocks also moved higher yesterday, this time thanks to Anthropic. Anthropic held an event yesterday and they said they plan to partner with existing software companies and, you know, not destroy them like everyone thought was going to happen. So it was nice to see an Anthropic related headline help the stock market and not cause a crash. And hopefully this will calm some of the AI panic that we've seen over the last few weeks. Now speaking of AI, today is a big day because Nvidia reports earnings after the bell. You know, with the AI trade wobbling these days, investors are going to want to see blowout earnings, so expectations are going to be high. You know, fun fact about Nvidia, their stock has only gone up 7% in the last 6 months, so not a lot of movement there. We'll see if Nvidia stock and the overall market gets a boost after the numbers drop. I'm really curious to see what CEO Jensen Huang has to say on the earnings call. We'll recap all that stuff on tomorrow's show, so make sure you guys tune in for that. Let's run through some head headlines starting with PayPal. PayPal is going through a rough stretch right now. The stock has lost nearly half its value over the last year. They just fired their CEO at their poor Q4 earnings. Payment volumes are slowing down from competition from Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay. So the vibes are not good for one of the most iconic Internet companies in history. But because of the slide in the company stock, they've now become a potential takeover target. According to Bloomberg, PayPal has been taking meetings with banks after receiving interest from multiple potential buyers. At least one buyer is looking at buying the whole company, while others are only interested in certain PayPal assets. One of the companies interested in buying PayPal seems to be Stripe. Stripe is an online payment processing company. They're essentially like a key financial infrastructure for the Internet. And they're one of the most valuable private companies in the world. In fact, just recently, the company was valued at $159 billion. And after an employee tender offer, which is when a company gives existing shareholders a chance to cash out some or all of their stock to the company or a third party investor. Now, talks between Stripe and PayPal are still in the early stages, but adding PayPal could be a huge get for Stripe. Despite all the issues that I just outlined, PayPal is still one of the most recognizable payment networks in the world. They process almost $2 trillion in annual transaction volume. They also own Venmo, which is the most popular peer to peer payment app in the US so yeah, big picture, PayPal might getting acquired soon. Would be interesting to see if Stripe ends up buying them. I kind of think that Apple should consider making a move here too. Let's stick with the fintech theme and talk about Circle. Circle is the company behind the stablecoin usdc. It's the second largest stablecoin in the world. And they just delivered a monster earnings report, beating on both revenue and profit estimates. Revenue in Q4 jumped 77% to $770 million. And earnings came in at 43 cents per share, crushing estimates of 16 cents. The bright spot here is that stablecoin adoption has been picking up. The amount of USDC in circulation surged 72% to $75.3 billion. And that's key to Circle's business model. See, Circle makes money by holding U.S. treasuries in reserve to back every token in circulation. And they pocket the interest on the US Treasuries that are in their reserves. So the more USDC in circulation, the more Treasuries that Circle buys and the more that they make. I think the most interesting and encouraging part about Circle's earnings is that despite the overall crypto market being in a slump, you know, Bitcoin is down 50% from its October highs. That hasn't impacted the adoption of stablecoins. The beauty of Circle's business model is that their business isn't impacted on the price of Crypto they make money as long as people continue to use USDC for payments, trading and moving money around the blockchain. And the company's also trying to become more than just a stablecoin issuer. They got conditional approval to become a national trust bank. And they're building out payment networks with 55 financial institutions and they're projecting 150 to $170 million in non interest revenue this year. So they're actively diversifying their business. Investors were loving this report. Circle stock is getting a big boost this morning, up more than 20% at the time of this recording. And you know the stock really needed this because shares had fallen 75% from their all time highs. Let's talk about some stocks make in moves today. Shares of Kava are popping this morning after the Mediterranean fast casual chain delivered a surprise in its fourth quarter earnings. The company reported same store sales growth of 0.5% in Q4, which was a surprise because Wall street was expecting a 1% decline for the full year 2025. Same store sales were up 4% and revenues topped $1 billion for the first time in the company's history. Now here's the thing. A lot of that growth came from menu price increases, people walking through the door. Kava raised prices about 1.7% in 2025 and same stores traffic actually fell 1.4% in Q4. So Kava has fewer customers coming in, but those customers are just paying more when they do come in. So that could be a problem long term. We'll see how much Kava customers are willing to put up with the menu price increases, especially as other food places like McDonald's and Taco Bell are leaning harder into value. Kava management doesn't seem to be too concerned though. In fact, they're expecting same store sales growth of 3 to 5% in 2026. They plan to open up to 76 new locations. As a result, Kava stock is up more than 10% this morning at the time of this recording. Now on the flip side, Lucid is having a rough morning after the EV maker widely missed earnings expectations in Q4. Now their revenues did beat estimates coming in at $523 million which was up double year over year. But the bigger issue is production and profitability. The number that stuck out to me was that Lucid burned through $2.7 billion in 2025 and they still have no reach profitability. The company also just laid off 12% of its US salaried workforce to try to cut costs and improve Their margins. Now their balance sheet has about $4.6 billion of liquidity. So they're not going to be going bankrupt anytime soon. But the clock is ticking. The one bright spot for Lucid is their 2026 outlook. Lucid is guiding for 25,000 to 27,000 vehicles this year, which would be a 40 to 50% jump from 2025. The company says that their Gravity SUV is expected to drive most of that growth, but, you know, investors aren't as optimistic. Lucid shares are down more than 4% this morning at the time of this recording. You know, I actually saw a Lucid driving through my neighborhood the other day. I hadn't seen one in person in a while. And I got to say, man, it's a nice looking car. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Apple is planning to manufacture their Mac Mini computers right here in my hometown of Houston, Texas. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is moving some of their production of their Mac Mini computers from Asia to a Foxconn facility in North Houston. Apple's converting a 220,000 square foot warehouse into manufacturing space, with production starting later this year. This move is part of Apple's broader pledge to invest $600 billion in the US over the next four years. Apple made this pledge last year after they got pressure from the Trump administration to reshore more manufacturing in exchange for tariff relief. So Apple is getting tariff exemptions on their other products for, you know, moving Mac Mini productions here in the U.S. the thing is, the Mac Mini is a pretty niche product. It accounts for less than 5% of Mac sales and less than 1% of Apple's total revenue. But honestly, it's one of my favorite Apple products. I own two of them. It's a cute little computer that's very powerful and sold at a pretty good price, which is rare to say about Apple products. You know, big picture though, I don't see Apple making iPhones or their other popular products in the US anytime soon. Now, Apple did say they're also expanding the Houston facility to include a new training center for advanced manufacturing. Not really sure what that means, but we'll see. So, yeah, shout out to Houston. I want to visit one of these manufacturing places. If someone listening can hook it up, shoot me an email or dm. Also, I think we need to seriously consider changing Houston's name from Space City to Chip City. 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. 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.