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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 Thursday, March 19th. In today's episode, we'll recap yesterday's Fed meeting and what Jerome Powell said about oil prices. We'll also break down Micron's insane earnings report and why Uber is investing over a billion dollars into Rivian. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Meta might have to change the company's name again. We got a great for you today. Let's go. Stocks got absolutely cooked on Wednesday. The Dow S P, Nasdaq were all down about 1 1/2 percent, sending the markets to its lowest levels of the year. I mean, every single sector was in the red yesterday. There was nowhere to hide. Investors were processing a lot of news yesterday, most of it negative. For one, we got the PPI inflation report yesterday, which measures wholesale inflation, and it came in hot up points 7% in February, month over month. That is more than double what was forecasted. And what makes this even more concerning is that that data is before the war with Iran even started. So it doesn't capture any of the energy price spikes that we've seen lately. So that means that inflation could get worse from here. That brings us to the Fed meeting yesterday. Now, the Fed did what everybody expected. They held rates steady. But it's what Jerome Powell said in the press conference that had investors concerned. Jerome Powell basically said that they're not seeing much progress in inflation right now. And now with energy prices ris rising because of the war, that's putting the Fed in a tough spot. And he literally said that they're in a difficult situation right now. The labor market is starting to soften, but the Fed can't cut interest rates because inflation is starting to surge back up. Now, according to the Fed dot plot, the Fed is projecting one rate cut sometime this year, but the market is a bit more skeptical. They're pricing in a 50% chance that we don't get a rate cut at all. What's crazy is that before the war started like three weeks ago, there was only a 4% chance of no rate cut this year. So that is a massive shift in expectations in a short amount of time. That brings us to oil prices. Oil prices shot up again yesterday after further escalation in the war. Israel struck a natural gas field in Iran. Then Iran retaliated by striking an LNG facility in Qatar. Saudi Arabia also said an Iranian drone struck one of its refineries. So we are Seeing energy infrastructure get hit across the entire Gulf region, not to mention the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. So all this is leading to major supply disruption. And even if the war was to end tomorrow, things would not go back to normal overnight. So all of this is causing the price of natural gas and crude oil to spike. Like right now. Brent crude hit $119 a barrel yesterday, the highest of the year. Now, prices have pulled back a bit this morning, but if things continue to escalate, I don't think we're going to see a major relief in oil prices anytime soon. So, yeah, you can see why investors are a bit on edge right now. Inflation is starting to run hot again. It could get worse because of rising oil prices and the Fed's hands are tied. So any hope of a rate cut is starting to evaporate. It could be a pretty bumpy stretch for the markets in the near future. You know, we're staying on top of everything that's happening, so make sure you guys are subscribed to the PO Podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Micron, the memory maker. Micron reported earnings last night, and I gotta say, these numbers are absolutely insane. The company's revenue nearly tripled year over year to about $24 billion, completely blowing past expectations. And their gross margins doubled as well, to 75%. That is very unusual for a memory chip maker. I mean, they're putting Nvidia level margins right now, and the company is seeing no signs of a slowdown. The guidance for next quarter is even crazier. They're projecting 33 and a half billion dollars in revenue, while analysts were expecting 24 billion. This is just a perfect example of how insane the demand for memory has become as a result of the AI boom. Every data center that's being built right now to train and run AI models needs massive amounts of memory. And, you know, there's just not enough supply right now to go around. Micron CEO actually said they can only meet about 50, 50 to 2/3 of customer demand right now. But despite the blowout earnings, the stock is down 5% following the report. I guess to be fair, Micron stock had already quadrupled over the past year and was up 62% just in 2026 heading into the report yesterday. So investors might just be taking some profit here. There's also concerns around spending. Micron said their capital expenditure will top $25 billion this year and it'll jump another 10 plus billion dollars in 2027. You know, the company is ramping up capacity to meet demand. Rapid expansion is making investors a bit nervous. Zooming out, though, I gotta say, Micron has clearly become a major player in the AI boom. Their name is not as flashy as Nvidia, but the stock has outperformed in the last 12 months. This also probably means that RAM prices probably aren't coming down anytime soon, which is kind of a bummer. Let's shift gears and talk about Uber and an update on the robot taxi race. Uber announced today they're investing up to $1.25 billion in Rivian to build out a fleet of up to 50,000 fully autonomous robo taxis over the next five years. Now here's how the deal is supposed to work. In the first phase, Uber will purchase 10,000 of Rivian's upcoming R2EVs equipped with self driving technology. For the next phase, Uber has the option to buy 40,000 more of the R2s starting in 2030. As for the timeline, the first robo taxis are expected to hit the road in San Francisco, in Miami in 2028, eventually expanding to 25 cities across the US, Canada and Europe by 2031. And these self driving Rivians will be exclusive to Uber's platform. Now, I feel like there should be an asterisk on the headline here because when you dig into the details, Uber has only committed like $300 million as the initial investment. And the rest of the billion dollars will come if certain autonomous milestones are met by specific dates. So the $1.25 billion headline number is great, but it's mostly PR to try to, you know, boost the stock. A lot needs to happen for Rivian to get the full investment from Uber. I think the market kind of sniffed that out because Rivian stock initially popped like 10% when this headline hit the timeline, but now the stock is up around 3%. That being said, this move is pretty notable. You know, it's another sign that Uber is clearly going all in on the partner approach when it comes to robo taxis. Earlier in the week, Uber announced a deal with Nvidia, where Nvidia's autonomous driving software will power a separate fleet of self driving cars on Uber's network. And that's supposed to happen sooner. With cars hitting the streets of San Francisco in LA in 2027 and expanding to 28 cities by 2028, Uber stock is down around 1% this morning. the time of this recording, the stock has lost about 8% since the start of the year. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of five below are popping after the discount retailer delivered its price. Best holiday quarter in the company's history. They beat on earnings, they beat on revenue, and same store sales surged 15% in the quarter. The company says that demand was strong across all income levels and not just low income shoppers, I think. More importantly though, the company gave a strong full year outlook for 2026. Shares of the company are up 7% this morning at the time of this recording. And when you zoom out, the stock has more than tripled over the past 12 months. I doubt many people knew that. Now, on the flip side, let's talk about Redcat. Shares of this military drone maker are down this morning after the company reported mixed earnings. Now, Q4 revenues were up 2000% from a year ago. I had to double check that number. And yes, that is correct. The company saw explosive growth when it comes to revenue, but the stock still sold off because Q4 losses were wider than expected, I think. More importantly though, the company did not give any formal revenue guidance to for 2026 on the earnings call, which is kind of a red flag. Investors don't like it when companies don't provide a forecast. And as a result, shares of Red Cat are down around 15% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. Meta is officially pulling the plug on the Metaverse. The company announced that Horizon Worlds will be going dark on June 15th. On the Quest VR headsets, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is finally admitting defeat. I mean, they went all in. They literally changed the name of the company from Facebook to Meta five years ago. You know, at the time, Zuck was calling the Metaverse the next frontier. He said that it would reach a billion people. And he then proceeded to spend an absurd amount of money trying to build it. Meta's Reality Labs division has lost over $80 billion since 2020. Well, the reality is, no pun intended, nobody cared about the Metaverse. Horizon Worlds never really caught on the platform, never had more than a couple hundred users. So now the company is pivoting completely. They've cut over a thousand jobs from the Reality Labs division. They're shutting down VR gaming studios and pivoting everything to AI and their smart glasses, which admittedly are pretty great. You know, my takeaway from all of this is that it just shows you how dominant Meta's underlying social media ads businesses. Meta stock has nearly doubled since their name change in 2021. So I guess the takeaway is that you can light $80 billion on fire and still be fine as long as 3 billion people are scrolling your apps every single day. 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 all guys back here tomorrow.