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Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadod Mani and Today is Thursday, January 15th. In today's episode, we'll recap earnings from TSMC and tell you what it means for the AI trade. We'll also tell you why investment banks are having a big quarter, then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Tesla will stop selling their FSD software. We got a great show for you today. Go. Stocks had their second red day in a row on Wednesday with the S P 500 dropping 0.5% while the Nasdaq lost more than 1%. It was the worst day of the year so far for the Nasdaq, and once again, this sell off was mostly concentrated in tech stocks. Every single Magnificent seven stock was down yesterday. In fact, yesterday was one of those days where more than 310 stocks in the S P actually closed higher, but the index still fell because the mega cap tech names carry so much weight. Remember, S&P 500 and NASDAQ are market cap weighted indices. So the larger the company is, the more impact it has on the index. Now, some on Wall street are calling this the return of the S P493. So instead of the market being carried by a handful of AI and mega cap tech names, money is finally rotating into the rest of the market. The best example of that are small cap stocks. The Russell 2000, which tracks smaller companies, finished in the green yesterday and is now up nearly 67% on the year, massively outperforming the Nasdaq so far in 2026. Now, I don't think this is a reason to panic or anything. Market rotations happen and honestly, I think it's a good and healthy thing that the market is starting to broaden out a bit. That said, if big tech names continue to struggle, the major indices could have a hard time rallying. We'll see how long the weakness in the tech sector lasts. Many of the big tech names will start reporting earnings in a couple of weeks, so maybe those earnings could spark a rally. We'll have to see how it all plays out. I mean, it does feel weird being a tech investor underperforming the market because that hasn't happened in a long time. But yeah, we'll be breaking down the earnings in a couple weeks. So if you're new here, 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 tsmc, TSMC is the world's largest chip maker, one of the most important companies in the world. And they just reported earnings and delivered a record quarter with profits jumping 35%. That now marks eight straight quarters of year over year profit growth, which is incredible. Revenue also beat expectations rising 20%. And the outlook is what really caught investors attention. TSMC says it expects 2026 revenue growth of nearly 30%, which is even stronger than what Wall street was forecasting. So that's a pretty big signal that the AI boom still has plenty of fuel left in the tank. A big chunk of TSMC's growth right now is coming from high performance computing, which includes energy, AI chips and advanced 5G applications. That segment alone made up 55% of total sales last quarter. Now, smartphones are still a meaningful part of their business, accounting for about 32% of revenue. Now TSMC is increasing their capex spending to keep up with all this demand. The company says they expect their CapEx to be in the range of between 52 billion and $56 billion in 2026, which is up from the $40 billion in 2025. So these numbers from TSMC are definitely a bullish indicator for the overall AI trade. But I do want to point out one risk, which is the shortage in memory chips. See right now with all this AI infrastructure build out, the AI servers going into these AI data centers need dram, NAND and high bandwidth memory, which is squeezing the supply for smartphones and PCs. Now if you guys have a gamer friend, they're probably complaining about this nonstop. The price of RAM has just absolutely skyrocketed over the last few months. Now that might be great news for memory makers like SanDisk and Micron, but it could force PC and smartphone companies to raise prices, which may slow down demand, and that would be bearish for TSMC. Also, Apple alone made up roughly 20 of TSMC's revenue in 2025. If Apple sees a slowdown, it could also lead to a slowdown at tsmc. So those are some of the risks that TSMC faces moving forward. Overall, though, TSMC's numbers are very encouraging. They suggest that the AI spending is showing no signs of slowing down. But investors should keep an eye on the memory bottleneck and see if it leads to a meaningful slowdown at tsmc. Let's keep it moving and talk about earnings from investment banks, starting with Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs had a monster quarter thanks to the record breaking equities trading. The bank made $4.3 billion in equity trading revenue in Q4, which was up 25% from last year. So when markets get choppy like they did in Q4, it's great for traders at these big banks. But beyond just trading, Goldman also saw investment banking fees increase 25% to 2.6 billion billion, thanks to an increase in M and A activity and debt underwriting. Overall, the bank saw their profits increase by 12% to $4.6 billion. Now I should mention that Goldman's revenues did drop by 3% in Q4, but that was because they offloaded the Apple card loan portfolio and credit card business to J.P. morgan. Honestly, though, Goldman Sachs getting out of the consumer credit card business right before a potential 10% credit card rate cap might be great timing. So overall, Q4 was a huge quarter for Goldman Sachs. And their stock is up around 2% this morning. Now let's talk about Morgan Stanley. They also had a great quarter, especially their investment banking division. Total Investment banking revenues jumped 47 in Q4, driven by a wave of companies rushing to issue debt, especially tied to AI data centers. On top of that, their wealth management business continues to be a machine. The firm brought in over $120 billion in net new assets during Q4. So yeah, the big picture here is that these big investment banks are crushing it right now. They're taking advantage of the market volatility and increased M and A activity, and also riding the AI boom by issuing debt. All of that is great for business and their stock continues to move higher. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of BlackRock are rising this morning after the world's largest asset manager reported a record trillion in assets under management. A big reason for that is ETFs. See, BlackRock owns iShares, which has some of the biggest ETFs in the world. So as more and more people invest in ETFs, that increases BlackRock's assets under management. But beyond just ETFs, BlackRock has also been aggressively expanding into alternative investments, including private equity, private credit, and infrastructure. That strategy is starting to pay off. The firm now manages more than $423 billion in alternative assets, which is up over 45% from a year. And these alternative assets have higher management FEES compared to ETFs, which means more profit for BlackRock. And here's another key detail for BlackRock. Their base management fees, which are fees that aren't tied to market performance. Those were up 9% year over year. So that means that BlackRock continues to make money even when the markets get choppy. As a result, shares of BlackRock are up more than 2% this morning in reaction to the earnings. Now on the flip side, oil stocks are sliding this morning after President Trump dialed back his aggressive stance on Iran, easing fears of a US on the country. You know, there have been mass government protests in Iran for weeks now and Trump had warned that the US could get involved and respond with military action and that risk sent oil prices jumping more than 10% earlier in the week. Now Iran is a major oil producer and a key member of the OPEX plus countries with some of the largest oil reserves in the world and any disruption or military conflict there would have tightened global supply. But now that Trump is backing down, oil prices fell nearly 4% and that's also pushing down the stock prices of oil giants like Exxon, Chevron and other oil name let's wrap the show with the fun fact Tesla is officially turning their full self driving service into a subscription only product. Elon Musk announced on x that starting February 14th, Tesla will stop selling Full Self Driving as a one time purchase and instead only offer it as a monthly subscription. See, up until now you had two options. You could either pay $8,000 up front when buying a new Tesla and then get FSD for life, or you could subscribe to FSD by paying 99amonth. But going forward the lump sum option is gone and it's going to be subscription only. And I can't say that I'm surprised. You know, this is just another example of the subscription ification of the economy. You know investors like predictable high margin reoccurring revenue and that's what subscriptions are. And Tesla is just further leaning into being more of a software business than a car company. Plus I can't imagine that many Tesla buyers are paying $8,000 upfront anyways for FSD. In fact, according to Tesla CFO, only 12% of Tesla's current fleet have FSD, which includes anyone that paid upfront or or is paying $99 a month. You know, I have a Tesla and I tried FSD for a month and while it was cool, I just don't think that it's worth it for me. I don't really drive a lot. I mostly work from home so I didn't think it was worth paying 100 bucks a month. Now Tesla drops the price like 40 bucks a month. I could see myself getting it, but until the prices come down, I don't think many Tesla owners are going to be getting fsd. You know, if you're a Tesla owner, let me know in the comments on if you currently pay for FSD and if you think that it's worth it. And if you don't pay for fsd, at what price point would you consider paying for fsd? 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.