Closing Bell - Markets Hit Record Highs as Tech Reshapes and AI Expands 10/28/25

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Stocks notch fresh record highs as investors weigh Big Tech’s next moves and massive AI investments. Brent Schutte of Northwestern Mutual and Malcolm Ethridge of Capital Area Planning Group break down what’s driving the rally. Mackenzie Sigalos reports on Amazon’s sweeping AI push and major job cuts, while Vivek Arya of Bank of America shares insights from Jensen Huang and Lisa Su on the state of semiconductors and the demand picture. We also hear from Check Point CEO Nadav Zafrir on earnings and Nvidia partnership news. Starbucks’ struggles with Jacob Aiken-Phillips of Melius Research. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Well, that's the under-regulation of Antis investors ringing the closing belt in the New York Stock Exchange by Odessics, doing the honors at the NASDAQ, and another record day for markets. The Dow hire, thanks to post-earnings gains from Sherwin Williams and United Health. The S&P 500 closing within a few points of 6,900 as we settle out here. It looks like 6890, perhaps. The NASDAQ just shy of up 1%. The Russell 2000, though, that turned lower and finished down about half a half. percent. NVIDIA's in focus as it holds a conference in Washington today, teaming up with Palantir to operationalize AI, also working with lows on supply chain logistics and investing

a billion bucks into Nokia, sending that stock soaring. We're going to hear from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong coming up and shares of Amazon moving higher after that company announcing a major job cuts saying it needs to make the changes to compete in the generation of AI. We've got more on this coming up in the show as well. Plus, a big deal. Among wireless chip makers, SkyWork Solutions is buying Corvo for nearly $10 billion in cash and stock. The gold trade, that's continuing to unwind down for the first time in six days, losing 10% during that slide. It's now on pace for its worst week since June of 2021.

The gold miners are also falling now having the worst month since 2023. And Apple and Microsoft crossing the $4 trillion market cap threshold. Microsoft managing to close above it. Apple closing just slightly below it. Well, that is the scorecard on Wall Street. Welcome to closing bell overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan. John Hort is off today. We've got another big day of earnings. Visa, booking holdings, Mondales, all expected to report in the next few minutes, and those are just the headliners. We're going to bring you those numbers as they roll in. Plus, Nvidia continues. It's March higher on the slew of new deals and the big outlook. Can this stock keep going as it does

close in on a $5 trillion market cap. Plus, one stock doing a deal with NVIDIA is Checkpoint Software. That stock popping on the back of a new deal and positive earnings, finishing the day up 6%. Company CEO will join us as well. But as we mentioned, another day, another record for the stock market. Tech, once again, the leader as Apple and Microsoft crossed the $4 trillion market cap. Let's bring in Senior Markets commentator Mike Santoli to break it all down, Mike.

Yeah, Morgan, just a way of accentuating both. how the P and the E are going up for these companies simultaneously. So earnings are moving in the right direction. You have a stock like Apple. It's over 400 billion in annual revenue, over 100 billion in net income. So that sort of puts the $4 trillion market cap number in some context, so it's not completely unhinged. However, investors also willing to pay up for these companies. They're both trading above 30 times forward earnings.

And it also is re-concentrating the very top of the index. the index. We had some gestures toward a broadening out move. Now with NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft moving the way they are, you've got pretty much 35% of the S&P back in the top seven names. So it's obviously, you know, reflective of the economy and the market that we're in where the AI theme is just sort of brute force taking over lots of the expected economic growth that we're going to be seeing here. And markets so far can't get enough of it. So investors are willing to kind of reward these companies for being in the right place at the right moment. How's breath, Ben? Pretty poor in the last couple of days. So, I mean,

in general, you know, it's been good enough on the way up before we had this two-week pause in the S&P 500. I don't think it's necessarily to the point where you'd say, wow, this is some kind of a dangerously bifurcated market, but it's clearly narrowed back out. And the AI names, The semiconductors in particular look very extended on their own kind of chart and based on their own history. It's obviously where the good news is. It's obviously where capital wants to hunt. But I do think you can suggest that the broader market is not necessarily in full participation mode. Maybe that's just hesitation about the real economy.

Who knows that the Fed decision tomorrow can unlock some of that. Yeah, we certainly still have a lot of catalysts for this market over the next couple of days. And in the meantime, Mike Santoli, we'll see you a little bit later in the next. the show. I'd also just note the current week stands out as the best for stocks out of the year. This is a seasonal stat over the past 75 years. So keep that in mind. Let's turn to the stock of the day, NVIDIA, announcing many deals and seeing aggressive, or I should say putting out aggressive targets. Our Christina Parts and Evelace sat down with NVIDIA, CEO Jensen Wong, and Christina joins us now from Washington with all the highlights, and there were many, Christina.

Oh, I know the list goes on. Let's just start with the partnerships and list off. I won't go to details, but you've got Uber, you've got the Department of Energy collaborating with Invidia to build seven supercomputers, some which will go online within the next year. CrowdStrike, the CEO of CrowdStrike is actually just right behind me. I want to be chatting with him right after this. And Nokia, where NVIDIA will become an almost 3% shareholder. And Invidia also saying that the AEI-Rand market, which is really just telecom and stuff, will be worth about $200 billion by 2030. So there's that aggressive target you were referring to, Morgan. But the promise to spend,

And without, may I dare say, concrete timelines were just enough to move many of these stocks of these firms. You can see Nokia up 22 percent, for example, on that $1 billion investment. I interviewed both Jensen Wong, the CEO of Invidia, as well as Alex Carp, the CEO of Palantir, and asked specifically about AI efficiencies and what that does to the U.S. workforce, given recent job cuts that we talked about on our network today, here's Jensen's response. I think this idea that AI is going to take jobs, is going to change. change everyone's job, that's for sure.

But I think it's going to make companies more productive. We're more productive today because of AI, we're hiring more people. Of course, the leaders of many tech companies here are going to be incredibly bullish, that they're not displacing Americans, but you had, I've spoken to the Cori's CEO, Cade and CEO, Verte of CEOs, all seem incredibly bullish not only on finding jobs for American, but that the US is going to be able to adopt or adapt the American power infrastructure grid because of the President's goal to build here in America. Speaking of the president, we know the China-U.S. trade talks are underway this week very soon.

And guess who also is heading to Korea, Jensen Wong? And that's another big point, too, is that many CEOs here, Morgan, were saying that Nvidia, AMD, and the chip names could really stand to benefit from these conversations. Perhaps they know something we don't. I tried to get out of them, but no dice. Yeah, and of course, it gets back to this idea of AI and the tech stack to build out all of this AI being a geopolitical issue. and a global economic issue as well, perhaps. I want to go back, Christina, to this idea that NVIDIA is going to see half a trillion dollars of business

in the next six quarters. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that number for a stock that's closing in on a $5 trillion market cap here. An excellent example, and I'm going to refer to Corweb's CEO's answer to this, that he is sold out for all of the older chips, the A-100, and then you'd go the H-100, the H-200, all you need to know is that they're completely sold out.

So what he's saying is there's incredible demand for all those that are worried about the AI overcapacity build out. And so I think that's the narrative that Jensen Wong, too, is saying that the demand is just outpacing a supply at this moment. We even saw it with Intel, for example, obviously on older hardware. But one other thing, Morgan, which I think is really important, is that right now Jensen's downstairs. He's speaking to the Energy Secretary of the U.S., and they're talking about the China talks. And one of the statements they also made is Chris Wright. He said, and I quote, I feel quite optimistic that we will have a great outcome from these conversations.

So perhaps that's a sign. It was a little odd, though. He did say, problem with China is not the Chinese people. The problem is the government and some of their policies of the government, not the Chinese people in any form or fashion. So I know I just gave you a lot of info for that one answer, but China could possibly be adding to that revenue drive in the near term that's not modeled in Invidia's.

earnings reports for now. Yeah, and I know you tackled that with him in your amazing interview a little bit earlier this afternoon. Christina Parts and Avalis, great reporting on the ground in Washington. Thank you. Thank you. Visa earnings are out. Hughson has the numbers for us. Hi, Hugh. Hi, Morgan. Right, so that's right. So we've got Visa, you know, Visa out with its fiscal Q4 results, and it looks like a beat in both the top and bottom lines, excuse me. The payments network said that adjusted EPS rose 10% to $2.98 cents a share. edging out the $2.97 estimate. Revenue climbed 12% to $10.7 billion, which also exceeded the $10.61 billion estimate. This is happening in a 9% increase in total payments volume and a 12% rise in cross-border volume.

Last I checked, the stock was down approximately, well, a little bit less than 1%. We're going to dig into results further to find out why that is, guys. Back to you. All right. Yusan, thank you. Well, those shares down almost 1% now here in overtime. Another chipmaker in the spotlight today, though, is AMD. It is partnering with the dependent Department of Energy to build two supercomputers. And all of this is part of the acceleration of AI adoption. AMD CEO Lisa Sue says she's seeing. So here's what she told CNBC about this this morning.

I think what we're seeing is that the addressable market for AI and inference is actually increasing. We're seeing an acceleration of the use of AI because as models get better, as enterprises are thinking about, you know, how they can deploy these models. There's a lot more compute that's necessary, and we're seeing that across the board with the KAPX spending, as well as in our direct conversations with customers. If you build it, they will come. So how will all this play out in the semis trade? Joining us now is Vivek ARIA from Bank of America.

It's great to have you back on, and let's start right there, because it was another gangbusters day overall for the semi-sector. How much further can AI drive this? Thanks, Morgan. I think that this thing can go on for at least another year to two years and perhaps even until 2030. And the reason is that most infrastructure cycles, you know, they tend to last for a decade plus. We have seen this with 3G and 4G. We have the 5G cycle that started. So these cycles can last for a decade or more. And if you look at when chat, GPT started, that was in late 22.

So we are just basically in the first three years of what could be a decade-long cycle. Now, it's important to understand why this is happening, and I think why this is happening is that there is this virtuous kind of flywheel that we have where there's infrastructure spending that is leading to the creation of intelligence, which is being monetized, which is then being fed right back into the deployment of more infrastructure, and I think semiconductors are absolutely in the middle of a lot of those very, very important building blocks. So whether it's AMD and their news with the Department of Energy today and some of the other deals they've struck recently, or NVIDIA, which I think closed up almost 5% today and obviously had a flurry of announcements out of its conference in Washington. Are these still the places that investors should be parking their money? Yeah, in fact, I'm at NVIDIA's show here at GTC, you know, very incredible presentation as is to be expected from their CEO. And I think he laid out a path to almost a half a trillion dollars of demand that they are seeing between calendar 25 and 26. And I think what's really important to understand is how leverageable this technology is in so many areas of, you know, what people refer to as a real economy. This is industrial. This is health care. You know, this is cybersecurity, this is defense, this is automation, this is automotive.

So this is not just, you know, high performance computing in isolation. This is actually creating, this has the potential to create a productivity benefits in vast areas of the economy. So now I think it's Nvidia. I think it's Broadcom, it's AMD. I think these are just exceptionally positioned companies in this environment. What do you think of some of the deals and some of the investments that Jensen Huang and NVIDIA has been making.

Yeah, I think some of these investments, it's important to realize that there is a vast amount of infrastructure that is being deployed by a very profitable company, right? These are the large public hyperscalers. If you look at the amount of KAPX, they are investing, it's only about two-thirds of their operating cash flow. So they can very well afford to invest in this infrastructure on their own. But there is an emerging group of companies, whether it is Open AI, right, or others who are investing at a much, much rapid pace,

they do need more support from the ecosystem. And I think that will have long-term benefits because these companies can, you know, as they say, kind of break things and move things forward at a pace, which is going to have a really stimulative and fly-deal effect on the rest of the industry. But if you look over the next five to six years, I think whether it's Nvidia's investments or AMD's investments,

they're probably going to be less than 10% of the overall investment. So I think there's a lot of headlines that go after just that 10% part. But no, this infrastructure build is really being promoted by some of the most profitable companies on the planet right now. Yeah, very quickly. MNA in the sector, we're going to get more of it, especially given some of the reports we got today with Corvo and Skyworks. I think what you're actually seeing, Morgan, is that it is the kind of the weaker parts of the semiconductor industry that have to do with consumer or smartphones, right, industrial automotive. Those are sectors that are not doing as well. When you look at AI, you know, yes, it's a sector that requires a lot of, you know, entry barriers are quite high.

But we do have really strong companies. So I don't anticipate as much in the AI and the data center part, but in other parts of semiconductors where I think things are not going as well. Yeah, we could see some more consolidation. Okay, Vivek, Aria. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, welcome. We've got more earnings to bring you. Booking Holdings results are out.

And that company beating on earnings. Listen to this. Earnings were $99.50 a share. Analysts were expecting only $9566. Revenue of $9 billion, also topping estimates. Booking says it is seeing steady travel demand trends so far in the current quarter. And you can see those shares are popping 5%. So perhaps an echo of what we've heard from some of the airlines already this earning season as well.

It's clear that the markets have been dominated this year by the tech trade. The NASDAQ 100 is outpacing all other indices. it's almost 18% above its 200-day moving average. That's the most since 2024 right before a correction. This is we go into the most crucial two days of the earnings season with Alphabet and Meta reporting tomorrow and Amazon and Apple reporting on Thursday, also Microsoft tomorrow.

Can the rally survive without the tech trade? Well, let's bring in Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management, CIO Brent Shudy and Capital Area Planning Group managing partner and CNBC contributor Malcolm Etheridge. It's great to have you both here. Brent, I will kick off this conversation with you because as we started this hour, Mike Santoli laid out how poor breath has been here as mega-cap tech has continued to lead the charge. Is that just the way we need to think about this market and how to be invested in this market at this point?

No, I think the market's going to broaden out because the economy is going to broaden back out. And so if you think about the past couple of years, the economy has been heavily bifurcated. So manufacturing, housing, small-cap companies, lower-income consumers, things that are harmed by rising rates have been harmed in the market. Compare and contrast that to the higher income consumer, which has a wealth effect going on and the secular AI theme. And that's where you've seen a really narrow market for the past two years. In fact, it's the narrowest two years since 1998, 1999

when you had a similar backdrop. If AI does become what the analysts before was talking about in moving into the real economy, that's where I think you see the market broadened out into things like small caps, which are actually seeing rising earning estimates. And that's where I think lower rates possibly will help. And that's where I would expect people to remain diversified

because I do think you will move from a narrow market to one that is much more broad in the future, if history has any guide. Malcolm, we have a growing list of strategists and analysts who think we're going to hit 7,000 on the S&P before your end. Are you one of those bulls? I think it's very possible. I think considering what we're hearing right now and all the excitement that has ramped up over the last couple of weeks from all the deals Open AI was striking. Now you couple that with the day that NVIDIA has been having. And now we're finally about to get earnings from the most important five companies,

in all of the S&P over the next couple of days. I think that really could be the catalyst that pushes us across that mark before the year is over. And I really think that that AI narrative will continue for another couple of years now, especially if you take Jensen's timeline of six quarters, he called it, them showing that kind of revenue growth from just one product is indicative, I think, of the entire industry and the entire AI narrative continuing to carry. Brent, I want to go, I'm looking at your notes here, and you talk about the fact that there's less concern than you can really ever remember in your career

about what appears to be a weakening and slowing labor market. What is the data that you are watching right now and how much of a concern is this as we talk about a broadening market amid a broadening economy? Yeah, that's where I think the broadening occurs regardless of longer term. I guess the question is, do you have a hiccup between now and then? And the labor market, before when we had jobs reports, where it's down to a 27,000 average pace. And I know people talk about immigration, but that doesn't expect. why the labor differential in the conference board, for example, people are suggesting jobs are harder to find.

If you look at the University of Michigan survey, the people worried about more unemployment in the future is at levels that it hasn't been before without a possible contraction. And that's where I just think we kind of create these narratives on Wall Street about things continuing forever and when not to worry about things. And I think just right now when you've seen this narrowing of the labor market, for example, less than half the industries have been hiring last four months when we had jobs reports in that labor market report. That's where I think people need to be just a bit concerned right now about what is happening in that labor market and does that filter into the broader economy and cause some sort of a pullback in the future. Malcolm will put the same question of you, especially since we did get that announcement about job cuts at Amazon today, which are historic by that company's standards. Yeah, I think two things. I think all of the tech companies that have been reporting layoffs, Microsoft, Amazon, at Al, they're all trying to get to the productivity numbers that NVIDIA posts, right? Roughly $4 million per full-time employee is the metric on NVIDIA's workforce and all of the other tech companies that are in that same Mag 7 category are chasing that number. And so that's not surprising that we're seeing that level of layoff, especially as they incorporate AI into a lot of their different workflows.

They're basically messaging to their employees, figure out how to incorporate AI, focus on the thing that you do best and leave the rest alone. But I think to Brent's point, a lot of what we're going to see is a year from now, two years from now, just a retooling. of what America's workforce looks like. So yes, initially the knee-jerk reaction is let's lay off, let's scale back on hiring until we know exactly what our growth plan looks like. But I think what you're likely to see over the next year or two is companies starting to have that broadening effect that Brent mentioned simply because now we need to hire a different type of worker.

We don't need to just hire the worker that was doing the job that AI replaced. We need to now hire the worker that knows how to come alongside that robot and actually guided in doing its job. Sounds like the next sector. We're going to see some serious disruption is going to be education. Malcolm Methridge and Brent Shudy. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you. With the Dow, the S&P, and the NASDAQ up, Mondalese earnings are out. The stock beating on EPS and revenue. Volumes were down 4.6%. Pricing was up 8%. That's mostly overseas. North American pricing was up just one and a half percent.

The company is saying they're encouraged by recent moderation in Cocoa prices. Mondalese did cut its fuller organic revenue guidance by one percentage point. You can see those shares are down about three and a half percent right now. Well, Amazon continuing to pour billions of dollars into AI infrastructure,

but at the same time, the company planning to cut 14,000 jobs from its corporate workforce. We've got more on that coming up. We give you a little preview right there from the trader standpoint. UPS, also announcing major job cuts, 14,000 management positions,

34,000 in operations. The company not mentioning AI, but saying that it is in a position to run, its most efficient peak season in history, maybe not AI, but automation. Overtime is back in two. Welcome back to overtime. The idea that AI will not replace jobs is being put to the test today. First, Chegg announcing it will lay off 45% of its workforce, blaming the quote new realities of AI. We should note, Chegg is a very small market cap company these days.

Then there's the biggie, Amazon. The company announcing it's slashing approximately 14,000 jobs, and while they don't chalk it up explicitly to artificial intelligence, they do emphasize changes from AI and its commitment to invest in the technology. So for more, let's bring in McKenzie Segalos and Mac, those are just a couple of the announcements we've gotten in recent days. Yes, it is. And in terms of this Amazon announcement, it's a really striking contrast,

because you've got Amazon spending tens of billions of dollars on chips, data centers, and then that big equity bet on Anthropic, while cutting tens of thousands of jobs. So today's 14,000 layoffs are part of a broader push to flatten management and move faster, reallocating resources to high priority bets like its custom in-house tranium chips where it's trying to compete directly with NVIDIA.

But while Amazon slims down to operate more like a lean startup, it's pouring money into AI infrastructure without the public momentum of rivals like Microsoft or Google. There's no flagship chatbot, no Blockbuster AI hires. Alexa Plus has struggled to gain traction, yet the spending continues, even as AWS lags Oracle and Microsoft in deal backlog heading into earnings, and after last week's 15-hour AWS outage that raised questions about its legacy cloud infrastructure. And Morgan, it was just last week that Anthropic committed tens of billions to a cloud deal

with Google, not Amazon. So bottom line here is that Amazon is spending like an AI leader, but hasn't shown that it can win, and that gap may help explain why the layoffs are so deep. Yeah, it's super interesting. And of course, just in terms of some of the other layoff announcements, and I'm not saying that they're all due to AI or not that we've gotten in recent days, Target, applied materials, Rivian, Charter, Molson, Cores, and some even at meta. So it'll be interesting to see what we get in earnings over the next couple of days. I do want to shift gears, though, Mac, and I do want to get your take on The announcement we got from Open AI today, and thus the announcement, the disclosure we got from Microsoft in the wake of it, too, with that restructuring finally done.

So this is OpenAI clearing a major hurdle, because for months, this recapitalization was the one thing standing in the way of two massive moves for OpenAI. So one, unlocking that $40 billion soft bank-led funding round, and then eventually going public. And Sam Altman, I was just listening to a live stream, and he said that he thinks it's fair to say that an IPO is the most likely path to them, given the capital. capital needs that they'll have. Now, to get there, they had to finalize this restructure. And so one key takeaway here, Morgan, is that Microsoft now holds a 27% stake that's worth about $135 billion. It's the single largest investor in Open AI. All right. Mackenzie Sagalos, thank you. We'll share some video jumping today, up 10% in a week, getting closer to a $5 trillion market cap. As we discussed, the company announcing

several deals and partnerships today, more than several. Checkpoint Software was one of those companies. Teaming with NVIDIA on security for businesses, we're going to talk to the company's CEO about that and about its earnings report, which helped send the stock up 6% today. And you're going to need power for all those AI applications. So shares of Kamiko jumping today as it teams with Brookfield and the U.S. Department of Commerce to build nuclear reactors. That's sending nuclear stocks soaring today as well. Over time, we'll be right back. welcome back shares of PayPal moving higher today the company reported earnings that beat expectations but its new deal with OpenAI really push shares higher that got everyone's attention

PayPal's digital wallet will now be embedded into chat GPT so users can pay for items through the AI tool that adds PayPal to a growing list of consumer facing companies making deals with chat GPT, including Etsy and DoorDash. But let's turn now to another company making AI deals. Checkpoint Software. Announcing a partnership with NVIDIA, protecting the growing number of AI factories, safeguarding AI workloads and applications. The stock was already on pace for a strong day after reporting earnings that beat estimates on the top and bottom lines this morning and solid guidance. But joining us now for an exclusive interview is Nadav Zafrier, Checkpoint Software CEO. Nadav, it's great to have you back on the show. Welcome.

And I do want to start with the AI factories and this deal with NVIDIA. I think first, just like, let's take a step back. What are we talking about when we talk about AI factories and what is so special about them in terms of securing the data and the infrastructure? Yeah, hi, Morgan, and thank you. So as we are all struggling to stay relevant, we're moving through different phases of AI. In order to take raw data and create intelligence out of it, You need to run it on these new data centers

that are run, sort of AI data centers. Now, this actually promotes new kind of challenges for defense, because attackers are also going after these, and so prompt injection and model tampering are new kind of challenges that we need to take care of. This is important, and this partnership is important because by running on the chip level, on the card level, literally on NVIDIA's infrastructure, we can not only protect better, but also do it more

efficiently and effectively in terms of latency and time. So how did this deal come together? And perhaps just as importantly, what does it mean in terms of being able to offer checkpoint out to end users and customers? Is this part of a broader NVIDIA bundle, or is this through the company specifically, checkpoint specifically? It's through the company specifically. As you know, we are one of the leading podium players in protecting data centers, the legacy data centers, and this is the evolution of these data centers. And so by being able to protect the largest data centers in the world, this is sort of a natural next step for us to move forward. And as a company, we're looking at our customers adoption of AI through the different stages that they go through.

So from enhancement to replacement to negotiation and crossover agents, every one of these phases that our customers are going through introduce new kinds of security implications. And we're trying to stay one step ahead so that our customers can run through these phases as fast as possible. So on a day where you put up strong earnings and solid guidance, what does a partnership like this do to add to future business? You know, it just shows our commitment to build this full-stack AI security for all of the use cases. This is one use case, but we also just announced the closing of the acquisition of Lakira. This gives us the ability to have a deep, pre-trained model, which is unique, and again, enables us to go through these phases. So it's one piece in a big strategy for us to lead this journey of adopting AI by our customers. So when we do talk about your customers, I mean, there's been so much debate about whether the hype is matching reality right now,

what inning we're in in terms of AI buildout and adoption, and how meaningful this is actually going to be with all the investment that's being made by corporate America. What are you seeing from your key vantage point? I don't think we can exaggerate on how impactful this revolution is going to. to be. I think it's probably the biggest technological revolution of our lifetime, if not beyond our just our lifetime. We are in the first inning, in my opinion. We're really, most of the organizations that are still in the first phase moving to the second one. And, you know, I speak to customers all the way down from their boards to their CEOs, their CEOs, their CSOs. This is top of mind. Because on the other one hand, we all understand that if we don't embrace this new

reality, new technology, we're going to be left behind and become irrelevant. On the other hand, we all understand that this introduces new security challenges. And I can tell you that we look at it not just from our customer's perspective and the technology perspective like we're doing with NVIDIA, but also from the attacker's perspective. And they're notorious for being able to harness these great technologies for their bad deeds faster than weak and on defense. Yeah. Adavs are freer. It's great to have you. John, CEO of Checkpoint Software. Thank you. Well, it's time now for CNBC News Update.

And for that, we turn to Christina Parts Nevelas. No, Kate Rogers. Surprise. Hi, Morgan. And Israeli official says Hamas attacked Israeli forces in the southern Gaza city of Rafa today, prompting forceful strikes in response. The official said the exchange should not be seen as a violation of the U.S. brokered ceasefire deal.

Hamas denied responsibility for the Rafa attack and says it remains, committed to the ceasefire. Vice President J.D. Vance said the deal is holding despite the strikes. A federal judge indefinitely barred the Trump administration from carrying out mass layoffs during the government shutdown. She granted a preliminary injunction that bars the firings while a legal challenge filed by unions representing federal workers plays out. The judge has said the layoffs are likely illegal and in excess of authority. And NASA's X-59 supersonic research aircraft took flight for the first time today in the California desert. The task flight of the jet, which is developed by Lockheed Martin,

is a first step toward the X-59's ultimate goal of traveling faster than the speed of sound while reducing the sonic boom to more of a thump that would be acceptable to the public, Morgan. Back over to you. I love that. That's in the news update. Kate Rogers, thank you. Thank you.

We've got more record highs for the markets today. Two days after closing about 47,000 or above 47,000 for the first time, The Dow is already flirting with 48,000. Is there anything that can stop this rally? Well, any storm clouds on the economic horizon? Our market meteorologist, Mike Santoli, is going to take a look at the weather. He's going to join us next. Another record date for the markets, record closing highs for the Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASAC,

which was the big outperformer, powered higher by semiconductors in particular, NVIDIA, which is up 5% today, 11% in a week and getting very close to $5 trillion in market cap. As goes Nvidia, so goes the broader market. That is something that a lot of traders like to say out there. The company holding a big conference in Washington announcing several deals, setting aggressive growth targets, Seagate, jumping, and after hours as well. That stock is beating on EPS and revenue, guiding above estimates for next quarter, increasing its dividend by two cents as share. Stocks up 158%. So far. this year. It's the fourth best in the S&P 500. It's up another almost four and a half percent

right now. Plus, Caesars, that's lower after hours. The company posting a bigger than expected loss, also missing on revenue, blaming weakness in Las Vegas, fewer people visiting, and those who did visit lost less at the tables, though the company is seeing improvements in Vegas in the current quarter. You can see those shares, though, are down 7% right now. So with the Fed decision on deck, we are flagging areas in the data that could challenge the strength of the economic expansion and test market confidence. Senior markets commentator Mike Santoli joins us with more and specifically what he's looking at. Mike.

Yeah, Morgan, so the job market and the housing market have been two well-known sort of softer areas within the whole economic matrix. Here's a reading from today's Consumer Confidence Report called the Labor Market Differential, which essentially is the number of people or percentage of people who say that jobs are plentiful minus those who say jobs are hard to get. It's been around a long time. It pretty much is in sync with overall employment measures as well. You see a pretty steady downtrend here. It's still positive, though. So it's still kind of got 18 percentage points more people saying jobs are plentiful than they're hard to get. And you see in recessions, it plunges pretty hard below zero. So we're still

obviously in the mild expansion zone, but in the absence of official jobs data, this is the kind of thing that we have to at least use for clues. And of course, there is a debate as to whether whether it's all about labor supply constraints or these layoffs building up on the demand side of labor as well. Now, for housing, the K-Shiller numbers are metric of home prices. They're reported with something of a lag, the national measure, you know, it doesn't tend to move super fast. But we have seen it come down to about a percent and a half year-over-year gain. And that's well off of, obviously, the pandemic highs, but also kind of a stall speed reading. If you look in the past, now this was coming off the housing bubble.

immediate crash, wouldn't expect anything like that. The big question is whether lower mortgage rates are really stoking more buyer demand for homes, even as inventories have built up and housing price appreciation is moderated, or if the psychology is going to switch and we still think that there's going to be better deals down the road. So I think those two areas are cool spots in the economy. They're not driving the overall economic story, but we'll see if Chair Powell has much to say about those areas tomorrow. It's super fascinating. If we just stick with home price appreciation slowing down. I mean, doesn't that ultimately make its way into inflation readings and specifically the services side with shelter prices, which have long been sticky and also

a very long lagging indicator? Yes. There's no doubt. As a matter of fact, the CPI data we got on Friday showed shelter disinflation was a big part of the slightly more benign number than we thought. And look, the market is essentially setting aside inflation concerns. We're going to get a rate cut tomorrow with CPI at 3% with PCE inflation above 2.5%. You know, that suggests that the Fed is kind of looking through the inflationary implications of whether it's tariffs or anything else. So I do think you have to look for more data that redeems the market's stance that says inflation was yesterday's challenge. If you see quickly, if you see a Fed that slows down with quantitative tightening, could that be more meaningful to the longer end of the curve and thus

to something like the mortgage market? I think it may. might be, I think they're going to be doing it mostly to make sure that there's sufficient reserves and liquidity in the overnight lending market. So you're seeing a little signs of tightness there in the last couple of weeks, but it certainly wouldn't hurt in terms of restraining longer-term yields as well. Yeah, I don't think we've been talking enough about that. Mike Santoli, thank you. Up next, we're going to look at why India is getting shut out of trade deals during President Trump's vision to Asia. And what that could mean for tech giants doing business in the country. Plus, check out the huge rally in furniture retailer Wayfair. This has

been bucking the slowdown in that industry. The company beating Wall Street's profit and revenue estimates. That's thanks to a jump in delivered orders near record high margins. Those shares of 23 percent today. Tariffs on furniture? What tariffs on furniture? Overtime. We'll be right back. Welcome back to overtime. President Trump is hoping to sign trade deals with several major Asian countries, including Japan, during his trip to the region this week, but one major country appears to be getting shut out of trade talks. Sima Modi joins us now. She has the details. Hi, Sima. Morgan, foreign policy experts agree that India should be the linchpin of President Trump's Asia

visit. Two largest democracies in the world, billions of dollars invested by hyperscalers in the country, and yet trade talks continue to break down. I'm hearing that Prime Minister Modi's decision to skip the Asian summit in Kuala Lumpur, where other heads of state are convening to meet Trump signals that both nations are still not close to finalizing a deal and the biggest hold up I'm hearing is oil. India has increased imports of discounted Russian oil after Russia invaded Ukraine. The Trump administration, their new tariffs on Russian oil, is forcing the country to scale back its purchases at a much faster pace than they initially planned. Cooling tensions between the two nations are now forcing investors to be more selective on where they're putting

money to work overseas. Take a look at this. You're seeing China rebound, Japan and Argentina at new highs. In India, while higher on the year, it's still considerably trailing its peers. Now, we spoke to UBS's CIA of emerging markets who says that the 50% U.S. tariff put on India is putting considerable pressure on India's economy. Right now, they're expecting a deal to come together, but for now, they're more bullish on Chinese tech, Morgan. So what do you think it's going to take? Is it really just oil? That's the crux of this breakdown in trade talks between the two countries. And if that's the case, do you need to get the Europeans on board to move past that?

It's a great point. Oil really seems to be the big hiccup here in not allowing both sides to move forward on finalizing a trade deal. You know, Russia has been a great friend to India for so many years. They've been the second biggest buyer of oil over the last two years. And it takes time to figure out how much they can scale back at what percentage and to ensure they're not alienating the Russians, but also not, you know, not also distancing themselves from President Trump. So it's a delicate balance, and they're hoping in the next coming months to get some type of deal.

But in the meantime, that short-term impact of tariffs certainly hits. All right, Sima Modi, thank you. Well, check out the huge slate of earnings coming up your way. Tomorrow, right here on overtime, we've got Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Chipotle, Starbucks. We're going to dive into all those names next. And it's been a rough sailing for Royal Caribbean. The stock posting is worst day since April and is one of the worst performers in the S&P 500 today after a revenue miss offset a profit beat and an improved full year forecast.

Those shares finished down 8.5%. The move taking the rest of the cruise lines lower as well. Stay with us. Welcome back. Let's get you set up with tomorrow's trade today. Pending home sales is the only economic data on tap, but we will get a ton of big earnings. Dow components, Boeing, Caterpillar, and Verizon, as well as CBS Health and Kraft Heinz will report before the bell. And then buckle up because right here on overtime, we will break down

numbers from Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Chipotle, and Starbucks. And oh, by the way, we do have a Fed monetary policy decision tomorrow, too. Well, Starbucks has been under pressure this year. It's down 5%. That's on concerns over weakening sales, increased competition. So let's get you set up ahead of those results. Joining us now is Jacob Aiken Phillips of Millius Research. Jacob, it's great to have you on. You got a sell rating on Starbucks. We know this is a turnaround play right now. What do you need to see to feel like the turnaround's taking root? Yeah, so I think that most people are going to be focused on the traffic number more than EPS.

I think people would be willing to accept some marching compression or some EPS pressure if they're able to accelerate traffic. But that said, they've just rolled out the green apron across their entire network, which started to in August. So I'd expect to see more pressure on the labor line than I would incremental traffic growth. And people will be focused on commentary about how those stores are performing and what that's going to look like for the coming year. How important is pricing in this conversation, especially since we know coffee prices have been a record highs and there have been tariff impacts and the like on that side? Yeah, so the pricing is what underpins my thesis. I think that they've taken a lot of pricing over the years. and the experience and the quality hasn't kept pace with that.

So while they've been hesitant to use promotions or lower price, they view themselves as the premium brand, and they are, and they've been focusing on fixing the experience side of things. But I do think that they would do themselves as service by lowering prices or maybe introducing some more entry-level price points that will cause some pressure with the increased copy prices, which will more fully flow through in the first and second quarter of the coming year, but it would help the traffic numbers, which investors are really looking at.

Do you think Starbucks is going to sell a stake or maybe even outright sell the business in China? There have been so many reports and rumors about it. Yeah, I mean, Dave, so much has said that they're looking, but they need to find the right strategic partner. The China business has been under pressure because I've been of Luckin and Connie Coffee of convenience concepts based in China, who, looking actually, is in New York. now. So yes, I do. It's just a matter of what price and what the actual outlook of that business looks like going forward, and if that partner can help turn the tides.

Yeah. Quickly, I want to get your thoughts on Chipotle because we get those results tomorrow, too, and that's another name that has been underperforming this year. Yeah, I mean, I think expectations are relatively low. It's a similar story that people are going to be looking at the traffic number. There's been pressure on the fast casual space because of maybe a bit too much pricing taken there as well, as well as the advent of a bunch of different fast casual concepts. Some people would say an oversupply. So I think Chipotle's top line might be a bit pressured, but we'll see if it meets expectations or not. Okay. Jacob Bacon-Philips, Amelia's. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. So here's a stat to leave you with.

Bespoke just put this out. Today was the S&P's worst breath day ever for an upday since 1990. The S&P has never had a weaker breath on a day that it closed positive. There were 104 stocks up, 398 down. And we do know it was those mega-cap tech names, particularly NVIDIA and the semiconductors, that powered stocks to record highs. That certainly sets us up for hyperscaler earnings that kick off right here. 23 hours from now on overtime. In the meantime, that does it for us here on overtime.

And fast money begins now.