← The Rundown
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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 Friday, February 20th. In today's episode, we'll tell you about what the Supreme Court just said about President Trump's tariffs. We'll also tell you about the updated deal between OpenAI and Nvidia. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much money hedge fund managers made in in 2025. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Well, stocks snapped their mini win streak on Thursday with the S and P and Nasdaq both dropping around 0.3%. The main story driving the sell off yesterday was the rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. Investors are closely monitoring the US Military buildup in the region. And there are rumors of a possible strike on Iran. Now, we've seen this before. Remember last summer there was a similar headline. In fact, the US Military did carry out strike in Iran. The markets freaked out for a couple of days, but then things cooled off. We'll see if something similar happens this time. This escalation has the energy markets worried, though, because Iran could potentially close the Strait of Hormuz, which is the world's busiest oil passage. Roughly 20 million barrels of oil run through it daily, which is equivalent to almost a fifth of global oil demand. So any prolonged conflict or disruption in the Strait of Hormuz could send shockwaves through the global economy. In fact, oil prices have already gone up 10% in the last month. So definitely something to keep an eye on. Now we just got some breaking news as I'm recording this. The Supreme Court has struck down President Trump's tariffs. The court said that President Trump exceeded his authority by invoking the Economic Emergency Powers Law to impose his reciprocal tariffs. So now those tariffs are illegal. I mean, we were waiting for this decision for weeks now and we finally got it. And it'll be interesting to see what President Trump does from here because tariffs were his signature economic policy and now that's being taken away, or at least, at least the tariffs that were under the Emergency Economic Powers act, which was like 70% of them. So, yeah, there's a lot to process here. This news just broke like three minutes ago and we'll see how the markets end up reacting to it. Now, looking ahead, we are winding down earnings season, but we still got some heavy hitters on deck for next week. The one that everyone's going to be watching is Nvidia. They report earnings on Wednesday after the close. You know, AI spending has been the dominant market theme for the last two years, but the vibe is starting to shift, so we'll see what Nvidia has to say about all of that. We're also going to be hearing from Salesforce that same day. You know, Salesforce has been one of the biggest victims of the software sell off this year, so I'm really curious to see what they have to say in their earnings. So next week is going to be a pretty important week. Coming up, 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 Nvidia and OpenAI. Nvidia and OpenAI have scrapped their $100 billion partners that they first announced back in September of last year. The original plan was for Nvidia to invest $100 billion into OpenAI in 10 installments of $10 billion each as OpenAI's need for computing power grew over time. Now, in return, Nvidia was going to get ownership stake in OpenAI and OpenAI would commit to buying millions of Nvidia AI chips. It was kind of a complicated deal and it was never really finalized. So now those plans are being scaled back and simplified. Nvidia is now set to invest $30 billion directly into OpenAI and in exchange for equity, that's it. No complex multi year commitments or chip purchase agreements are baked in. This $30 billion is part of a massive new funding round for OpenAI and they're on track to raise over $100 billion total, valuing OpenAI at $730 billion. So despite the concerns around AI in the stock market, OpenAI seems to have no problems raising money right now. OpenAI plans to use the money to build out its computing capacity, which likely means they're going to be buying more Nvidia chips. So I'm sure Nvidia will see that money come back to them pretty soon. Let's shift gears and talk about something we don't really cover a lot on this show. Private credit. One of the biggest private credit players, Blue Owl Capital, just froze withdrawals from one of its investment funds, meaning that investors weren't freely able to redeem their money anymore. And that sent shockwaves through Wall Street. Now, zooming out a bit, let me first explain private credit because it's become a big industry over the last few years. Private credit is basically when non bank lenders make loans directly to. So instead of borrowing from JP Morgan or issuing bonds in public markets, companies borrow from investment Firms like Blue Owl, Apollo, Ares, KKR and more. Private credit has become a popular way for companies to fund AI infrastructure. Today, private credit has grown to be a $3 trillion industry. And these loans offer higher yields, which is why they become attractive to investors. But the problem is that these private credit loans inside these funds are long term loans and, and they can be hard to sell quickly. So when a ton of investors try to cash out at the same time, it can be a problem. And that's essentially what happened to one of the funds at Blue Owl. Investors started pulling money from one of their retail focused funds. Too much money was being pulled out, so Blue Owl had to stop redemptions. Now, Blue Owl was able to return money to investors by selling some of the loans inside this fund. But overall, this episode freaked out the market. Blue Owl stock dropped 6%. Other private credit firms like Apollo and BlackRock also dropped around 5%. Now, I'll be honest with you guys. I'm not that plugged into the private credit space. Maybe we'll have to do a deep dive on it soon. But it definitely has critics, including JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. And there are some people calling this Blue Owl situation as a canary in the coal mine for a potential private credit bubble. So, yeah, definitely something to keep an eye on. And who knows, maybe there'll be a movie about it someday with Margot Robbie explaining to us what private credit actually is. Let's talk about some stuff. Stocks making moves today. Opendoor is surging this morning after the online home buying platform posted a solid quarter. Now, a quick refresher on what Opendoor does. They buy homes directly from sellers and they flip them on their platform. The company became sort of a meme stock last summer when new leadership came in and got retail investors excited about the turnaround. And last quarter, there was real signs of progress. The company reported $736 million in Q4 revenue, crushing wall street estimates. They also increased home purchases by 46% compared to the prior quarter. And they're also selling homes 23% faster than before. So that means that they're buying more homes and turning over inventory quicker, which are both good signs. That said, though it's not all clean, the company is still unprofitable. In fact, they're actually forecasting a 10% drop in revenue next quarter. But management says that they expect to hit profitability by the end of the year, so that has investors excited. And Opendoor stock is up around 50, 15% this morning at the time of this recording. Now on the flip side, Newmont is getting hit. Despite reporting a solid quarter, Newmont is the world's largest gold miner. And you think with gold sitting at above $5,000 an ounce, up more than 70% over the past 12 months, that this company would be printing money. And to be fair, they are. Their full year 2025 profits more than doubled to $7 billion. Their adjusted earnings for Q4 nearly doubled analysts expectations. But the reason the stock is down this morning is because Newmont's guidance for 20 underwhelming. Newmont is expecting to produce around 5.3 million ounces of gold in 2026, which is down from the 5.7 million last year. You know, with the price of gold on a historic run right now, investors wanted more gold production and not less. But the company's CEO says they're not getting starry eyed about gold prices right now. They want to focus more on margins over volume. Seems like a smart business decision, but that was disappointing for investors. And the stock is down around 3% this morning in reaction to the earnings. If you zoom out though, Newmont stock has gone up more than 150% in the last 12 months. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. 2025 was the best year for hedge funds since 2009. Hedge funds saw an average gain of 12.6% last year thanks to the market volatility. Now what's funny is they still underperformed the S and p, which was up 18 last year. But hey, that didn't stop hedge fund managers from getting really, really rich. Last year, Bloomberg just posted the highest paid hedge fund manager 25. And the top spot went to Steve Cohen. He personally made $3.4 billion from his hedge fund, 0.72. Now some of you guys might know Steve Cohen also owns the New York Mets baseball team. They had a mediocre year last year, so he might need to use some of that $3.4 billion to start writing bigger checks to sign better players. By the way, the second highest paid hedge fund manager was David tepper. He made $3.2 billion last year. And, and he owns the Carolina Panthers football team. So I guess my biggest takeaway from that list is that hedge fund managers make for pretty bad sports team owners. It's also pretty wild that you can make all that money while still underperforming the S and P pretty much every year. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. 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 or 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 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 for the deep dive.
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