← The Rundown
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Public.com presents the rundown your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaidad Mani and Today is Monday, November 24th. In today's episode, I'll tell you why investors are moving on from the AI trade and focused more on rate cuts. I'll also explain why Meta is under investigation by the US Senate and Tesla's plans for in house AI chip development. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why movie theaters might be cooked. We had a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets are coming off a wild but ultimately disappointing week with the S&P 500 dropping around 2% last week and the NASDAQ was down 2.7%. Honestly, it would have been way worse though if not for the surprise rally that we got on Friday. The S and P and Nasdaq both jumped around 1% after New York Fed Governor John Williams hinted that a December rate cut was still on the table. Investors ate that up and markets are now pricing in a 70 chance of a rate cut at the December meeting, according to the CME Fed Watch Tool. Now here's the weird part though. The optimism around a December rate cut didn't really help AI stocks on Friday. Nvidia, Microsoft, Oracle, AMD and more were all down on Friday and down pretty big for all of last week. So it's another sign that investors are legitimately worried about AI valuations and concerns around an AI bubble. Like you can make the case that the bubble has already popped for some names. Oracle is down around 40% from its peak back in September. That being said, Google seems to have single handedly captured all the AI hype. Their stock was up 8% last week off the backs of the Gemini 3 announcement and they leapfrogged Microsoft to be the third largest company in the world. Their stock is up another 4% this morning in pre market trading, so they're closing in on a $4 trillion market cap and with their current momentum they might end up being the most valuable company in the world in the next few weeks. So that sets up a very interesting environment for the next few weeks and the rest of the year. As always, we're going to be staying on top of all the major news. Now. As a reminder, this week is a short week. The stock market is closed on Thursday for Thanksgiving, so no show from us that day. But we are going to have a show on Friday to wrap up the week. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Now, usually this week tends to be pretty slow, but with the way things are going in the markets right now, it could end up being a pretty eventful one. Let's run through some headline, starting with Meta. Meta is facing some heat from Politicians A pair of US Senators, Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, are calling on the FTC and the SEC to launch formal investigations into Meta after a Reuters report revealed that Meta may be generating nearly 10% of its revenues from scam ads. If you do the math here, that works out to roughly $16 billion a year coming from ads promoting banned goods, crypto scams fake government benefits and other fraudulent activity. Now, Meta has already fired back saying that this Reuters report is exaggerated and they say that scams have dropped 58% on their platform over the last 18 months. But the senators aren't buying it. They argue that Meta has cut safety staff while pouring billions of dollars into AI projects, which has allowed scam ads to take over Facebook and Instagram. The senators even pointed out that Meta's own ad library still shows obvious scams. So yeah, Meta is facing the heat. Now. We'll see if the FTC and the SEC end up launching a formal investigation, but investors can't be feeling right now. It's already been a tough couple of weeks for the company. The stock is down nearly 20% since late October as investors become concerned that all this AI capex spend by the company won't pay off. So I can't imagine this investigation is going to help investors feel any better. Let's shift gears and talk about Apple. Apple launched the iPhone Air this year. It was their big design shake up. It's the thinnest iPhone ever. But that hasn't translated to sales. Sales for the iPhone Air have been so bad that Apple has cut the phone's production in half within weeks of its launch. And I think this confirms that people care more about battery life and camera when it comes to buying their phone. Over a sleek look and thinness. The iPhone Air does look pretty great, but it only has one camera, it has terrible speakers and terrible battery life, and it's only $100 cheaper than the Pro model. So it's easy to see why this phone has been a commercial flop. Now if you are a listener of this podcast, you already know this was going to happen because Bloomberg's Mark Gurman was, who's very plugged into Apple, came on this podcast right after the phone launch and said this was gonna happen. Now if you do go back and listen to that interview, just Ignore the part where I said that the iPhone air could be a surprise hit cuz I obviously don't know what I'm talking about. Now Mark Gurman also said in that interview that the iPhone air was just a test run for Apple's first foldable phone which is expected to launch next year. It seems like the foldable phone is gonna be two iPhone Air stuck together and I think if Apple's able to put back all the advanced cameras and good battery life into the foldable phone, that might end up being a commercial hit. So we'll have to wait till next year. But overall though, I think the iPhone 17 lineup has been a pretty big hit. The pro models and the base models are selling pretty well, so I don't think Apple is sweating this too much. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Tesla stock is out this morning after CEO Elon Musk went on X and talked up Tesla's in house AI chip roadmap. According to Elon, Tesla is now planning to roll out a new AI chip every 12 months and the team is already working on the A15 and A16 chips. On a side note, I don't really the naming here from Tesla because Apple also uses a similar name for their iPhone chips, so that could get a little confusing. But yeah, Tesla has already deployed millions of its in house AI chips across its cars and data centers. The A14 chip is currently running in Tesla vehicles right now and these chips are what power the company's full self driving push. Elon was also deep in his bag. He said that Tesla's AI chips will eventually run the Optimus humanoid robot and that these AI chips could reach more volume production than all other AI chips combined. I'm not sure if he's taking a shot at Nvidia here, I don't know. But Elon was back to making his bold statements. But investors loved it. Tesla stock is up 2% this morning at the time of this recording. Now on the flip side, Novo Nordisk stock is getting crushed this morning after a highly anticipated Alzheimer's drug trial failed to meet their main goal. The company was testing whether semi glutide, the same ingredients in Ozempic and Wegovy, could help slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer's patients. Novo Nordisk was hoping to see at least a 20% slowdown in disease progression. Unfortunately, the trial missed that target. Now the drug did improve some biometrics, but those improvements didn't translate into slowing the disease itself. As a result, Novo shares are down around 10 this morning and just hit their lowest level in four years. So yeah, it's been a tough year for the Danish pharma giant and it just continues to get worse. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. Wicked for Good just had the second biggest box office weekend of the year, making $150 million at the domestic box office on its opening weekend and over $226 million globally. The only movie to have a better opening weekend this year was the Minecraft movie. I think the bigger story here is that movie theaters might be cooked now. October was the worst month for the US box office since 1998, not counting the Pandemic year, of course. The only movies that people pay money to go see in theaters now are big blockbuster IP driven franchises like Wicked or superhero movies or sequels. Zootopia 2 is another great example of that. It's coming out this week. I'm going to go see that with my kids because they've seen Zootopia 1 like a billion times on Disney Plus. So I bet Zootopia 2 is going to put up big numbers. But any non superhero IP type movie just doesn't do well in the theaters anymore. Like there's no rush to see a rom com in the theaters. The audience will just wait till it comes out on streaming in a few weeks and I don't see that behavior changing anytime soon. So I think movie theaters and the entertainment industry at large might be in for some more pain. I've been saying this for years now. Movie theaters need to convert into like a full on entertainment megaplex where there's more to do than just watch movies. On top of that, they need to start showing like sporting events at movie theaters because I would pay money to watch a big game on a giant screen at a movie theater packed with fans. If someone from AMC is watching this free strategy advice right there. Make it happen. 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 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. Also as a reminder, we posted a deep dive episode over the weekend about on which is the Running Shoes company and also a fantastic interview on Sunday with semi analysis Doug o'. Laughlin. That man is very plugged into the semiconductor industry. We had a fantastic conversation, so I highly recommend checking that out, especially if you want to learn more about what's happening in the semiconductor space. 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.