Closing Bell - Closing Bell: What’s Next for Stocks? 1/24/25

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

Stephanie Guild from Robinhood, NewEdge’s Cameron Dawson and Ayako Yoshioka of the Wealth Enhancement Group break down their predictions for the market this year. Plus, star investor Benchmark’s Bill Gurley weighs in on the drama between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. And, shares of Novo Nordisk jumped in today’s session on some critical obesity drug data. We explain all the details and what it could mean for the rest of the GL-P1 space. 

All right, guys, welcome to Closing Bell. I'm Scott Wapner, live from Post 9 here at the New York Stock Exchange on this Friday. This make or break hour begins with another solid week for stocks and what lies ahead with mega cap earnings on deck and looming large. We'll ask super investor Bill Gurley who stands to win the AI arms race and the personality clash between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. He'll join me momentarily in a CNBC exclusive interview. In the meantime, the scorecard with 60 to go in the week looks like this. Lower across the board, a little bit of a holding pattern, I think you could say, ahead of next week's big earnings report. Sectors, they are mostly split today. There are, though, several tech names making news. Meta is higher,

planning to spend $65 billion this year on AI AI that's all. Alphabet on track to close above two hundred bucks for the first time ever it is right there right now. We'll watch every move into the close and how about Twilio today ripping after its investor day its buyback announcement. Lot of

optimism around that name today. We are watching shares of venture global to it's the biggest I. P. O. since July right here at the New York Stock Exchange. A report on that is coming up as well. It takes us to our talk of the tape, new records and what's next for stocks. Let's ask the panel. Stephanie Guild is Robin Hood's head of investment strategy. Cameron Dawson, chief investment officer with New Edge Wealth. Ayako Yoshioka with the Wealth Enhancement Group. Welcome, everybody.

It's good to have you with us. All right, Cam, you first. Chopped a lot of wood over the last couple of weeks. Now we're on this swing higher, today notwithstanding. How do we feel about the markets? We're sitting right near or right at that all-time high. We've moved a lot in the last eight days, but I think the important thing to notice that there has been a very pro-cyclical risk on tone to this market. Look at things like cyclicals outperforming defensives, high beta outperforming. That's a very good thing for risk appetite. The thing to watch is there's a little bit of a breadth divergence, meaning that we didn't get that typical kind of breadth thrust

coming out of the low off of that 100-day moving average. So maybe there's a little bit more volatility in wood to chop. But of course, earnings season coming in better than expected helps on the fundamental side. All right, Stephanie, no tariffs, no problem. I mean, is that the baseline of how we should view things, at least for the moment? No, I think tariffs will definitely, I think they could come for sure. And we need to be careful about that. But there are also a lot of good things that are coming out. Like I think deregulation as part of this administration is really driving markets. The IPO today, all of those things.

And while I don't completely agree on the breadth, Mark, because we're seeing mid-caps are outperforming and small caps doing better, and you're seeing industrials, even industrial production come in very strongly. So I think there's a lot of optimism. You think this is the moment for a real and legitimate broadening that actually lasts for a while? We've had this before. It just hasn't lasted. Yeah, I do. But I think that the risk in it is that we haven't actually dealt with the hard problem, which is interest rates in our deficit. That still hasn't come up in government yet. It's all the kind of good things that through executive order. But, you know, rates have come off the boil a little bit.

To Stephanie's point, you know, we're worried about tariffs and we're thinking about the deficit and we're worried about the Fed not cutting as much as we wanted to. But as long as rates stay off that burner, are we all right? I think so. You know, in 2025, I think the Fed's not going to be as front and center as it has been over the last couple of years. You know, they're on pause. And so it allows a lot of the companies within the S&P 500 or, you know, across small and mid-cap space for their earnings to do the heavy lifting. And so we expect that to continue to be the case in 2025. I know there's a lot of optimism and it's for good reason. It's for the deregulation that Stephanie talked about. It's for the tax cuts that many expect. It's a more pro-business

environment. Doesn't mean that there, of course, aren't any risks like the ones that Larry Fink was talking about with our own Sarah Eisen out in Davos about what might happen and what to watch out for. Listen. If you expand that throughout the world, this is my optimism about growth. But at the same time, we actually are going to have labor shortages, which is going to be driving up wages. I think we're going to see more persistent wages you know in some and that may be a good outcome but we it's going to be an inflationary outcome we're going to have material shortages with all this building out um and so i think we are somewhat complacent that that inflation can hit us again.

I think Cameron and Larry Fink gets paid a lot of money to worry about that kind of stuff. And others in the banking industry have talked throughout the last couple of years about similar risks. Are we too complacent about inflation coming back,

in part because of Trump 2.0 policies? I think we have to appreciate the uniqueness of the last two years that allowed inflation to moderate without having it impact growth the fact that you had a big surge in low-cost labor come into the u.s you had a productivity surge coming out of the worst of the covid low all of that led to this ability to be able to see disinflation without it impacting growth but we still have this tight labor market

if you start reducing immigration, if you add tariffs, which can cause disruptions to supply chains, and you start spending more money, and even if you add on top of that the potential that the Fed could continue to cut rates, you've set up for an environment where inflation could be a lot stickier and not get to that 2% target. I mean, there is, Stephanie, a reason why people are more optimistic about other parts of the market beyond tech, in part because of what Larry Fink was talking about. I mean, the environment's good, whether it leads to inflation is going to be anybody's guess.

But small caps, mid caps, you actually think you could have really, really good returns in those areas this year. Yeah, because two reasons. One is earnings growth, I think, could actually meet or beat expectations. They're expected to be double digits. But also because it's where there are decent valuations that, you know, mid caps, I actually am a little bit more bullish on mid caps than small caps. The reason being is if we do have an issue with inflation or interest rates start to rise for other reasons, like our deficit, then mid-caps should fare better because small caps tend to have a lot more floating rate debt and more leverage on average. That being said,

valuations are much more attractive there than they are in the large cap space. Aya, 20% returns, maybe in mid-caps, maybe small caps. Does that match with what you think? You know, I think we are going to get a little bit more sort of bang for your buck out of especially that mid cap space. And even in the small cap space, you know, I think what everybody's looking at is quality growth. So you want companies that have a solid balance sheet generating free cash flow and can operate in this environment of higher interest rates without being impacted too much from a leverage standpoint. All right. Let's go. Let's go big. Go big or go home time in the show. Because it's all about the mega caps. Right. All right, Cameron, what's at stake next week? You're going to have three of the group reporting next week.

How good do these reports have to be now? They have to be stellar. But we're still in this environment. Look at Meta today announcing a big increase in CapEx and the stock is rallying. We remember the days that if Meta announced a big increase in spending on anything, the stock would positively sell off. So we're still in an environment where mega caps have this halo around them where you have an AI rush to spend. That does not mean that they cannot show growth and they cannot deliver on margin expansion. So the bar is very high because we've seen these rallies

over the last couple of months. And given the fact that this is still a fairly narrow market from a leadership perspective, the overall market is certainly riding on these names to deliver. Aya, you guys have six of the seven MAG7 names, all but Tesla. Now, not all are reporting next week. We're going to have to wait for a few of the other names. But what really is at stake here? Sure. So market leadership is at stake, right? Just given the concentration of the S&P 500 index with these MAG-7 names.

However, you know, a lot of them are driven by very long-term growth thematics. And I think you don't want to completely abandon them, you know, just because they potentially miss earnings. I think they could be buying opportunities over the long term, but it really depends on your overall portfolio. I mean, one of the biggest questions I think is about that stock right there at the top of your screen right now. Let's put that back up, if we could, please. I mean, it was Apple. The stock is below a number of key technical marks. Your customers at Robinhood have been selling that stock lately a little bit.

They were selling it into December when it was doing a bit better. But our customers as a whole tend to trade around the volatility. And so we haven't looked at the numbers yet for the month, but I would not be surprised if it was a place they were actually adding to because they like to look for opportunity. Buying on the dip. I mean, it's having its worst month in something like two years, maybe even a little bit more than that. Does Apple matter to this market as much as it once did? It certainly matters from a weight perspective. We've seen this divergence within the Mag7. I think it's important to note with Apple is that over the last couple of months,

the rally was completely driven by multiple expansion. It got up to trading to 34 times forward. So the perennial question with Apple is how much do you pay for a company that has a huge amount of cash on its balance sheet to buy back shares, has the best brand in the world, but only grows earnings by 8%, 9% a year? It's something that's constantly debated, which is why we see this multiple being the key thing that drives the stock. All right, let's take a breath for a minute. I'm going to talk about this IPO today. Venture Global making its debut here at the New York Stock Exchange, the largest IPO since July. We haven't had all that many, which is why we've asked Leslie Picker to come on now,

our senior banking reporter, and talk about all this, because the banks are sure hoping that this is the first of many. They certainly are, and it was a big one. It did get done, but as you saw and as you said, Scott, venture global shares are slipping today after downsizing its IPO on muted investor demand. The liquefied natural gas producer raised $1.75 billion, the first mega cap IPO of the year and of the new Trump administration. Venture Global says that its differentiator from kind of other LNG players is the cost basis by which it's able to develop projects that allows companies to get nat gas into the market faster and cheaper.

However, the top and bottom lines for this company did decline in the nine months through September. CEO Michael Sable talked about the future earnings potential this morning on Squawk on the Street, where he said they're going from operating 18 liquefaction trains to 90 in the future. And as you turn those trains on, more of the commodity is produced, and they expect to earn a lot more money from that. Venture Global is also going through litigation with some of its biggest customers over allegedly reneging on some long-term commitments to profit on the spot market. So there are a lot of elements that investors really had to sift through with this one, Scott, which is possibly why you're seeing some muted activity today. Let me just ask you, since it's the end of the week and, you know, yesterday was obviously a

big day of conversation in the banks, as we know, because of the comments that the president made in Davos regarding Bank of America. Any more on that today? Has Bank of America or any of the other firms, after giving you those statements yesterday, said anything more about this issue? And do you expect that this is going to go away? Yeah, no, they haven't said anything more, Scott. Our colleagues in D.C., Eamon Javers and Megan Casella, they actually did some reporting earlier this morning and found that the White House actually hasn't heard from the banks, hasn't heard from Bank of America as of, you know, earlier this morning when they reported it. So it seems like there hasn't been as much of a direct communication back and forth over the issue.

That said, it was absolutely trending on Twitter. A lot of people were kind of tweeting about their own bank accounts being canceled. Again, it's always difficult, and we talked about this a lot yesterday, always difficult to know the full picture because the customers and former customers are not always, typically not, given a reason for why their accounts are closed. So it's easy to kind of draw conclusions where it might be, you know, another cause entirely that has prevented the bank from doing business with any particular person or business.

Notable, too, Les, don't you think that, you know, Bank of America was a big winner yesterday, even after President Trump said what he did. Yeah. And it's green again today. And let's not forget that the earnings most recently for the whole space were pretty good. And the optimism around this area isn't waning one bit, seemingly, pardon the pun, trumping what the president himself had to say yesterday. Yeah, it magically has been the biggest outperformer among the six, the big six yesterday. And I believe the same is true today.

It's actually generated some decent returns. And I think that speaks to this element that we talked about on Halftime Report yesterday, Scott, which is that, you know, how much of this backlash or how much of this, you know, negative narrative surrounding Bank of America ultimately filters through into the bank's bottom line and into their ultimate financials. And one element that makes the banking industry different than a lot of other industries is just the stickiness of their customers. You know, if you are already a customer of Bank of America, there's kind of a higher bar to take your money out and move it to another bank. People just don't tend to do that. Not that they can't, but it doesn't tend to happen en masse if, you know, you're a big, stable bank, too big to fail like Bank of America. I mean, it's a nuisance. I think we all know that. It's a nuisance to have to do it no matter

what size your bank account is. Leslie, thank you. Leslie Picker. We'll see you soon. Cameron, I don't know of another sector in the market that has as much optimism around it than financials. Justified? Well, they've delivered. Not a single financial company has missed earnings this earnings season. So about two thirds of the sector has reported and you've not seen a single earnings miss, which just suggests that there is good earnings momentum. Technically, there is a lot of momentum within the stock prices.

You have seen valuations expand a lot. The thing to watch is with IPOs, there's a lot banking on this investment banking revenues starting to come back in full swing. We certainly saw a recovery last year. We're well below where we were in 2021. The good news on that, the IPO index has actually outperformed the S&P 500 by 20 percent over the last two years. So it's sort of like jumping into the deep end and saying the water's all clear that you've seen some of these stocks do well coming right out of the gate.

Last point, Stephanie, you like the space? I do. I think interest rates and the direction of them, potential direction of them, and the difference between tens and twos will continue to help them. All right. Good weekend, everybody. Thanks for being here. Stephanie Guild, Cameron Dawson, Aya, we'll talk to you soon. Ayako Yoshioka joining us as well. All right. To Christina Partsenevelos now for a look at the biggest names moving into this Friday close. Christina.

Well, Scott, President Trump's rather not comments on tariffs sparking a rally for Chinese tech stocks. Shares of PDD, which is the parent of Timo and Pinduoduo, they are positive. And she shares up 6 percent. And that's a positive spillover as well on JD.com and Alibaba, just on that softer rhetoric. NextEra Energy, the top S&P 500 stock, up about six and a half percent right now, despite earnings miss. And guess what saved the day? The CEO's promise to capitalize on the demand for AI and data center power. To do so, NextEra and GE Vrnova will be joining forces to build natural gas power solutions. Next, they are also looking to reopen a nuclear pent in Iowa. Scott.

Christina, thank you. Back to you soon. Christina Partsenevelos. We're just getting started here. Up next, star investor, Benchmark's Bill Gurley, standing by for an exclusive interview. We get his take on this week's big AI announcement, the drama between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Big earnings next week. All things tech with Mr. Gurley next. All right. welcome back. AI taking center stage at the White House this week with the announcement of Stargate, a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank.

President Trump hailing the investment as a, quote, resounding declaration of confidence in America's potential. Only hours later, though, presidential pal Elon Musk publicly questioned the money behind the deal, which led to a back and forth between him and OpenAI's Sam Altman on X, just the latest incident in their ongoing beef. For more on what it all means and where this all goes from here, let's welcome in Bill Gurley. He is general partner at Benchmark. It's a CNBC exclusive. It's nice to see you again. It's been a while. We're really glad to have you today.

It has been a while. Good to see you, Scott. You as well. So what is your view of Stargate? Well, I've been trying to figure it out, and I think there's a chance that they may be too. It looked a little rushed on the announcement, and that would make sense, right, because President Trump wanted to have some big wins early on. And so I think this thing got pulled together. I had a lot of questions. I actually posted those questions on X. And in the past 24 hours, I'll tell you what I think I've learned, but I've heard this from others. So I don't have access to the direct source. People are telling me it's going to be a prop co-op co-structure, which I didn't even know it was 24 hours ago. But it's like one person owns the property, the other one is the

lease tenant of that property. They're potentially rolling in assets from Oracle that are in Abilene. There's a company called Crusoe that's been involved in the build of that. And OpenAI would be the sole customer, is what I've been being told. And I have three observations if all those things are true. One, I'm curious why SoftBank would want to be part of a private credit pool. It's not what they've typically done. I think it's clear from some of the back and forth with Microsoft that came out right around the same time that that relationship, we knew there was tension. I think it's probably got more tension than even we thought before. And the third thing I would note is if it is a prop co-op co-structure, this represents a big lease liability or the equivalent of a lease liability for OpenAI. So this company already had probably the most complex cap structure of any company like it that we've ever known.

And they're going to be putting one more complex piece on top. It's interesting. I mean, when you use, you know, the word like, you know, suggesting it might have been rushed, are you suggesting that it's not necessarily what meets the eye, that you have some level of skepticism around this project, about the money and whether it actually comes to fruition? Well, I think a lot of people have voiced questions about that in the past 24 hours, and they certainly didn't release a bunch of details. So it's easy to be somewhat skeptical. I would also add there's been a lot of hyperbole in the AI market. And when you get Trump and Massa and Sam in a room together, like, I would expect some amount of overpromotion. And, you know, just because there's hyperbole doesn't mean these things aren't real.

You can have prosperity and hyperbole at the same time. I think we have many times in the past. But, yeah, there's a certain amount of promotion. We're trying to figure out the details. I think there's probably going to be debt involved. So it's not like they're out raising 500 billion in equity. And and they're probably starting with a much smaller number and hoping to grow into that bigger number. You also suggest, I think, that while many people are focused on Oracle and the stock was up a tremendous amount, obviously,

when the when the announcement came out, you seem to be more focused on the fallout, if you will, from Microsoft. And maybe there's more fracture between this relationship and the fallout for it could be perhaps more dramatic that investors need to take note on. Is that correct? One of the reasons I enjoy just digging and looking at this stuff so much is just how unbelievably interesting it is. I mean, this is better than a season of secession, right? All these different players. You mentioned earlier the Elon Sam back and forth right after.

We've never seen this kind of thing before. The deal between Microsoft and OpenAI, as it's been reported, once again, I've never seen it. Sounds like one of the more complex deals of all time. They have profit rights up to like $90 billion. No one's ever signed a piece of paper like that before. And so they also, we don't know, you know, it sounds like OpenAI wants them to convert to equity. And we have no idea whether they're willing to do that or not. And I think all of the things that happen on the field, whether it's Sam talking about AGI is coming and now he's backing off of that or this

announcement, I think they're all chess moves in a much bigger game in terms of them trying to figure out that relationship. This beef between Altman and Musk, I'm assuming you know both personalities reasonably well. Are you all just sitting out there with popcorn in hand, wondering what's going on and where this is all going? I mean, like I said, it's better than an episode of Succession. I think it's super interesting and nothing we've ever seen before. And we've moved to this world where these types of executives have this active voice on X, which gives us this kind of real-time view into it. But it's ultra-interesting.

Obviously, they've had a much closer relationship than I've ever had with either one of them, right? And that obviously is frayed. But, I mean, it seems to be at least partly centered on OpenAI's ambition to morph from a not-for-profit into a for-profit entity. Obviously, Elon has competing interests with his own XAI. Those came after that beef was kind of uncovered, right? And you can imagine, like, you've done well in life. You decide you want to start giving back. You help prop up a nonprofit to solve some type of world problem that you think needs to be out there.

And then you turn your back, and next thing you know, people are putting billions of dollars in their pocket. I could see how that might upset somebody. Are you an investor in either open or AI? No, I am not. I am not. Neither. Did you have the opportunity to and just passed? I did not.

I did not. Okay. You've been thinking a lot about AI regulation and what's known as regulatory capture. Now, we don't talk about it all that often, that specific, you know, verbiage, if you will. But you did say at an event some 18 months ago, and I want to quote and get your reaction to this. You said there's a really scary thing in this AI space. The incumbents that are running to meet with the governments are spreading something that I don't think is accurate or fair. They're spreading a negative open source message.

And I think it's precisely because they know it's their biggest threat. Now, Sam Altman has obviously said there needs to be more regulation. Are you suggesting that he thinks that and is arguing that because it will help him and open AI and hurt whatever startup competitors might be there either now or in the future? Yeah, I do believe that's the underlying motivation. And there's Politico articles that show not only since SBF has any startup put together this amount of of of of a kind of force in Washington, D.C., to try and get their their their policy written.

And people that are investors in that company, and Anthropic as well, have been beating the drums trying to get regulation passed. They helped push through the Biden executive order. And they're still pushing. They're pushing in like 25 different states. We now have a whole bunch of states threatening to do what California tried to do before Newsom vetoed it. And so the good news is, from an open source standpoint, I think enough people spoke up and not just me, many, many other people to push back. And I think there was a wonderful piece that I'd like to link to that Deidre Bosa just did on DeepSeek. But like the open source performance is right there now. And I don't think you can put the

cat back in the bag. Who do you think is going to win this this whole arms race if there needs to be, you know, one winner? But if we're going to give a gold medal and you're going to have a have a medal stand, who do you think stands to to be the best? Is it open AI? Is it what what, you know, Google's doing, Gemini, Meta, Lama, Perplexity? How do you see it? I mean, I think certainly to date it's been open AI. And keep in mind, these companies are doing something that's also unprecedented on the liquidity side. They're giving employees that are two years in secondary stock. So they're winning already. They're putting cash in their pockets. Right. And so in some ways they've already won from that standpoint.

If you look back at the Internet, something really interesting happened. You had at the beginning of the Internet, you had every startup developing on Sun and Oracle. It was the highest performance. You weren't worried about cost optimization. You were worried about being first to market. You went out and rushed out and bought the best that you possibly could. We may be, and I think Deidre also did a great piece on whether or not we're hitting scaling limits,

we may be moving from performance at all costs to the optimization phase of AI. And we will at some point in the future, even if it's not today. And that may mean that there are different companies that are doing different things. It could be positive for open source. It could be positive for these inference clouds that are working on super high performance inference.

It could be positive for non-GPU startups like Grok or Cerebrus or even Google's TPU or Amazon's Tranium. All those things could be better positioned in an optimization phase than maybe they were in the build-out phase. I'd love to get your view on just, I guess, what you can call this remarkable transformation of Silicon Valley and its major players, at least from a political standpoint. You saw the pictures, like everybody else did, of who had the best seats in the room for the inauguration. And maybe we can show that if we have it. There it is on your screen. You know, a lot of heavyweights, obviously. And then you have, you know, Marc Andreessen, David Sachs,

Elon Musk. They're all now in the room where it happens. I'm curious your view, because you did say at the same talk I referenced earlier, quote, the reason Silicon Valley has been so successful is because it's so effing far away from Washington, D.C. Well, not so much anymore. And the cynics in the room might say, I mean, Silicon Valley doesn't want Washington anywhere near it unless it can be directly helpful to it. How would you respond? I would agree with that cynicism. Like my talk was about the startup world and, you know, early stage startups and the problems that regulation could cause in that formation stage. Clearly, big tech has arrived in Washington and that may actually be bad for

startups. Right. If they have They may start to do the type of regulatory capture that has happened in finance and telecom and all these other industries, pharma in America. And so it actually could be bad for early-stage startups. I think it's good for a few things. It's obviously good for crypto. There had to be some weight on crypto stocks that had to do with regulatory risk. And I don't think they could have imagined a better outcome than they just got in the past 48 hours. It could be good for M&A. M&A has been really quiet and people anticipate that that door will open.

I don't know if it'll be good for IPOs. There's something broken with the IPO market. And I have no idea if Paul Atkins is aware of that or wants to fix it. In terms of what's broken, I mean, I understand that, you know, more companies want to stay private for longer. They don't need the access to capital, I suppose, so desperately as they once did. There's just other sources for it. We just had the largest IPO, I said, down here at the New York Stock Exchange today since July. What needs to be fixed if it is, in said, down here at the New York Stock Exchange today since July. What needs to

be fixed if it is, in fact, broken? Well, I was going to say, if you look at the IPO count, this may be dollars. If you look at the IPO count, we're way off of any trend line that's ever happened. I would say another thing, which is we used to always talk about the IPO window being open, and it was heavily correlated with the performance of the markets. Well, here, the markets are performing just fine. So there's no reason to suggest that the correlated with the performance of the markets. Well, here, the markets are performing just fine, so there's no reason to suggest that the problem with the IPO market is due to the performance of the market itself. So I don't think the window is closed for that reason.

It may be because of what you talked about, and I think that's certainly a part of the problem. I personally, and I've been on this for a long time, think that the lack of efficiency in how the IPO market works is a huge part of the problem. I personally, and I've been on this for a long time, think that the lack of efficiency and how the IPO market works is a huge part of the problem. If you're going to underprice every IPO by 30 percent and there's a super active liquid private market, you're just going to get outbid. There's going to be no reason to go to public market because it's more expensive than the private market. You know, now I remember, I mean, you and Brad Gerstner and I went deep on that on one of my visits out to the Bay Area. So your

points are well heard. It leads me to, you know, Brad, when I was last out there, revealed that he had sold Uber, in which you were an early investor, obviously. And one of the reasons he did that was because he now thinks that Tesla has such a huge advantage in full self-driving. I'm curious as to how you view those two stocks, specifically Uber, whether you're still an investor in that name, whether you would be, and just how you view it overall based on what, you know, your now podcasting partner, Brad Gerstner, told me the last time I was out there. Yeah. Yeah. I am still a shareholder and I've been been super both appreciative and impressed with what Dar has done in the CEO role. It's clear that one of the questions about the stock is now tied to self-driving. I would I would offer a few points to think about. One, the overall market is still growing. I think the move that it takes for people to move from car ownership, from three cars to two, two to one, is a very slow process.

And the awareness of Uber and like it just keeps unlocking. it's going to see 10%, 15% growth for 10, 15 more years because we've been so obsessed with car ownership, and now people can start to think about what it means to not have it. The other thing about autonomy is if you're going to build a fleet, I always say this, you're going to build to peak or average, and both of them are bad answers. If you build to peak, most of your cars are sitting around, so your utilization rate drops to the floor. If you build the average, you're never available exactly when people need you the most.

And so I don't think autonomous alone works. Obviously, one of the approaches that Uber is taking is partnering with all the different autonomous makers. I personally think the right move, and this was, I think, the right move many years ago, but still today, would have been for Uber to help lead an open source movement here to help commoditize the autonomous car. We've watched Meta do that in AI extremely well just here in the past four years. And I think that's the better playbook. They're not operating that right now. I'd like to ask you one more question, and I'm not sure if you're an investor or were in ByteDance or not, but how do you think this whole TikTok saga ends?

Well, my own interpretation of what went down recently is the following. President Trump is notorious for being a dealmaker, right? And he saw an asset that was about to evaporate. And if it evaporates, I'd say most of the value goes to meta, maybe a little to snap, right? Like that's where all those people are going to move. And so it's like, oh, wait, there's an asset. Let's not let it go away.

Let's see if we can trade it for something. I've never heard of putting equity on the U.S. balance sheet. I'm open to how that might play out. I think when we bailed out Goldman and United, like that's what we should have done then. I think we have done it in the past with banks, but we'll see. I think based on my interpretation of law, he's really only got 90 days. And the company had plenty of days before that to do the exact kind of thing they would need to do now to get around the law. So I don't know what's new other than he's going to stir up a lot of debate and conversations. To say the least. I've liked our conversation very much. It's good to have you back, Bill. Take care. We'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Take care. You as well. That's Bill Gurley of Benchmark.

Up next, Bank of America's Jill Kerry Hall is revealing her outlook for the small caps 2025 after this break. Back S&P 500 hitting a record high earlier today before turning lower. Meantime, the Russell 2000 still well off its own November peak. Here to share her own outlook for the small cap space is B of A Global Research Head of U.S. Small and Mid-Cap Strategy, Jill Carey-Hall. It's good to see you again. Thanks for having me. All right. A lot of people think this might be your moment.

I don't know. You tell me. Well, I think this is going to be a year where you want to own mid caps over small. I think it's still a tough backdrop for the Russell 2000. And, you know, the profits growth recovery story that that a lot of investors were bullish on last year, that's just continued to get revised down, pushed out further into 2025. So small cap profits have continued to disappoint. And you know you've still seen negative year of year earnings growth that size

segment the fundamentals have been better in mid cap so if we do see a market that broadens out. We think mid caps are actually the the size segment that could offer the best risk reward. Especially if you're down in an environment where.

Multiple rate cuts have gotten priced out of the market are our kind of city of a are expecting the fed Fed stays on hold from here and doesn't cut any further. So small caps obviously have a lot of refinancing risk and that risk has sort of reemerged as the rate risks have gone up. So mid caps have better balance sheets, better fundamental trends. So that's where we would would position, you know, within small and mid. So it's still matter rates still matter more than anything else, because I was going to say with all the optimism around the economy going forward and policies from Trump 2.0, if not now, when I be when waiting and waiting and waiting for some sort of sustainability from this space. Sure, we've seen great moves, but they've been short-lived.

Right. I mean, I think, you know, after we've seen this decade of underperformance for small caps, you know, historically speaking, we're due for an outperformance cycle. And that's what relative valuations would suggest. So I do think if you have a longer time horizon, you know, over the next decade, which is when valuations tend to be the most predictive, that small caps could offer the best price returns of the size segments over the next decade, which is when valuations tend to be the most predictive, that small caps could offer the best price returns of the size segments over the next decade. But, you know, this year, I think there's sort of after all the underperformance, it's a high bar for investors. They're sort of nervous about jumping back into small caps. I think there's definitely optimism there, optimism around the economy, optimism if we see deregulation. But the profit story,

you know, I think we'd like to see a more convincing turn and, you know, rates stabilizing or, you know, perhaps if cuts get put back on the table, you know, those would be beneficial for small caps. The Fed and expectations have been one of the biggest drivers of the rallies and the sell-offs that we've seen in the Russell over the past year. December was the worst relative month for small caps versus large that we had seen in over 25 years. And a lot of that was right after the more hawkish Fed meeting. So I do think there's a lot of opportunities still within domestic SMID caps. And so I really think this is a year where you want to be selective.

And it's going to pay to be selective rather than just owning a benchmark. If you can own small, smaller mid caps that have, you know, profits, less leverage, less refinancing risk or economically sensitive. I think those are well positioned. I think pockets of the market are certainly going to benefit from from the backdrop that we're seeing if there is deregulation, if there is an M&A pickup. So financials look well positioned in our work. And just simply owning stocks that are seeing estimates go up rather than down has been one of the best factors within small and mid caps recently. We'll talk to you soon. Jill, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Up next, the biggest movers into the close. Christina is back with that. Tell us what you see. Love's algorithm paying off as one dating app sees its shares double in a year

and chip makers hit a bumpy road. Details after this short break. We're about 10 from the bell back to Christina now for the stocks that she's watching. Hi there. Grinder. Hi, by the way. Grindr is on fire, up over 6.5% today, with shares more than doubling just in the last year. The company's full-year revenue target getting a bump thanks to growing subscriptions and ad revenue. It's also smoothing on its Warren structure, which could ease investor concerns about potential share dilution. And it's actually up almost 8%, I should say. Texas Instruments CEO warning on the earnings call last night that they, quote, haven't seen the bottom yet in core auto and industrial chip markets.

Other issues weighing on the semiconductor maker? Gross margin pressures, lower Q1 earnings per share guide, and increasing inventory shares down 7%. Scott? All right. Thank you very much. That's Christina Partzenoglis. Still ahead, Nova Nordic shares are jumping today. We'll explain why in the Market Zone next. All right, coming up next, Novo shares jumping on some critical obesity drug data.

The details inside the Market Zone next. All right, we're in the Market Zone. CNBC Senior Markets commentator Mike Santoli here to break down the crucial moments of the trading day. Angelica Peebles on a major win for Novo. That's where we'll start. Give us these details, if you would, Angelica, and why Novo shares are on the move. Yeah, Scott. So today, Novo is sharing some promising early data for one of its next generation obesity drugs.

That drug, Omicratin, helping people lose up to 22% of their body weight. And that puts it on par with lily's zep bound. And the total could go even higher as Novo continues to study this drug over a longer period of time. Now, there are some caveats. This is an early-stage phase 1-2 study. And so there was only 125 people in here. And Novo at this point is not telling us too much about the side effects, just saying that it's in line with what we've seen with other GLP-1s. But that's a key question

going forward for all these next generation obesity drugs. And of course, though, this is a much needed win for Novo after what's been a pretty rough few months. They've had some setbacks and disappointments in their pipeline, and that stock has not done too well. So now this is a much needed win for them. Scott. All right. And yep, Angelica, thank you very much. Angelica Peebles with the latest on Novo shares today. Mike Santoli sitting next to me. We'll go into the weekend here. Are you feeling pretty good about where we are overall? Generally good about how the market responded over the last two weeks to what was really kind of an internal washout. And so we got oversold. Sentiment got a little

bit concerned and we managed to capitalize on that. So to me, that's the first test. As yields come in, can the market actually find its footing and get back to the highs? It did. In fact, in the last few minutes here, we're also kind of perking up a little bit toward that 6100 level. Second day after a new high, you don't want it to fall below the old high. That was 69. So all to the good. I don't think it was the most assertive, high-momentum buying binge. It was much more about, hey, we're getting back on trend. And that makes a lot of sense. Tactically speaking, there's a bunch of little short-term gaps underneath this market just on a technical basis

because this move higher in the last 10 days has been kind of jerky. So 60-50, 59-50, it wouldn't be that shocking to back up. Today is also really about NVIDIA. You had more stocks up than down today. And NVIDIA is having a little bit of a rethink on the AI hardware story. I mean, we have to brace. Let's not forget, look,

we're only a handful of days into the second Trump administration. Don't know exactly the schedule of when things are going to come down. We're still presumably waiting on tariffs. Maybe we need to react to some things next week. On top of that, you have the mega cap earnings. So it could be full next week. And I do think that's the direction of risk when it comes to policy influence. We're priced for a pretty good scenario right now. We're priced for no immediate punitive tariffs. And I think if the

market goes searching for something to get concerned about or have an excuse to back off a little bit, it's not going to be hard to find it when, you know, when we're talking about, you know, trying to get Greenland and, you know, anything like that. So it's fine. But I do think that you have to be aware that we do have that influence that could, in fact, create an excuse for volatility that we've just not seen the last couple of weeks. We've got to watch the dollar, which is getting a little bit of a break today, but it's been a big story as well. So has crude oil.

Yes. Dollar is definitely a tariff trade as well as, of course, a Fed trade, which we're going to get next week. Oh, yeah. And we don't really expect anything, but you never know. I mean, the commentary is more valuable than the move in this case. Good weekend to you, Mike. And certainly all of you,

as the bell rings, we'll go out red. I'll see you on the other side in the overtime with Morgan and John.