Closing Bell - Tech Takes a Breather; Dyna’s “Taku” Robot Visits the Set 10/13/26

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Empower’s Marta Norton breaks down the market outlook and where she sees opportunities amid the pullback. Meantime, big bank earnings offer a fresh read on the economy while an AT&T downgrade raises questions about the telecom sector. RoboStrategy CEO Andrew Kang discusses the next frontier in AI investing and his Nasdaq-listed fund offering exposure to private robotics companies. He brings Taku, a robot from one of his portfolio companies to set. Alex Kantrowitz weighs Apple’s latest push into smart home products as the company approaches a $5 trillion valuation. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The bell's bringing out to the training day at the NYSC's Snowflake ringing the bell. And here at the NASAC, Robo Strategy, doing the honors. We're going to be joined on set by CEO Andrew Kang and a robot a little later on. That's quite a tease. Welcome to the closing bell overtime. We're live from Studio at the NASAC market site. I'm Melissa Lee, along with Mike Santoli. Stocks falling and giving up earlier gains, a Dow down about 200 points.

It was up 466 points at the highs of the day. S&P 500, flat once again. It hasn't had a daily move of 1% in either direction, since. September 21st, small losses for the NASDAQ composite and NASAC 100. Memory, a source of pressure once again, pulling the Sox index down for a six-straight session. It's about an 8% drop during that losing streak. We're going to have much more on the semis coming right up. We're also watching the banks, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, among those reporting, more on what we heard from the financials. And bonds trading today

after being closed for the holiday. Yields slightly lower, but just small moves. Let's get the first take on the close. And we were just talking before the show, Mike, about semis. and how it looked like it wanted to go higher around 1130. It sort of turned the corner, but memory is still the focus here in today's session. Yeah, memory could not come out of the trough. That was weakness from South Korea overnight. So that seems to be a big pressure point. Interestingly, though, yeah, Invidia up a few bucks from the late morning,

Broadcom participating too. And what happens in this kind of a market where it's always something going up and something has to be offset going down, it's Apple. I mean, Apple is the anti-Semis. It's traded that way. It's traded as defensive against the A&IRAs. AI hardware trade and Apple almost finished flat. So, you know, not only have we not had a 1% S&P 500 move, in two days, we haven't had a 0.1% S&P 500 move. It's been that fractional.

There are flat markets where it feels like people get complacent. They take it for granted. They don't think bad things will happen. It doesn't feel like this is one of those. There's anxiety being produced by the deep underperformance of everything outside of Mag 7. So we'll see how that, you know, resolves itself from here. At the same time, you could make the case if you wanted to be glass half full that we are close to that record high. Definitely. therefore we're churning here, and that's kind of good action in the face of all these fears around all sorts of AI trades.

It's absolutely a plausible take. If anything, a market that kind of refuses lots of opportunities to go down in a broader way is something you have to respect, at least on some level. I don't know if it's now or never for the rest of the market to participate, but you did have almost a 1% spread between Mag 7 and the rest of the index today. Let's get more on today's trading action. Sima Modi joining us now with a recap. Hi, Sima. Hey, we're talking a lot today about technology, Michael. Semiconductors recording the sixth down day in a row. That last time we saw this long of a losing streak for the semiconductors was in May of 2025.

Now, the selling was notable in the memory space. Overnight, Samsung, S.K. Hynix, and then dayside Micron, Sandisk, storage player Western Digital, all down around 1 to 3 percent off the lows of the day. Analyst pegging it to some nervousness growing ahead of earning season and whether the current run was overdone. others pointing to that looming competition from China. Market now awaiting results from ASML, which specializes in lithography machines

that print patterns into silicon wafers. Option market is pricing in about a 5% move. So we'll get that number one tomorrow morning. Apple did end the day higher following its new home product announcement, reaching that $5 trillion market cap, still right behind Nvidia. Elsewhere, energy outperformed,

really on a hot streak as of late, with oil prices moving higher in the geopolitical scenario also contributing to those gains. But we did see Caterpillar fall by around 3%. City analysts there are cutting their price target on the stock to 950. Guys send it back to you. Seema, thanks, Sima Modi. We've got some breaking news we want to get to from the Fed.

Steve Leeson's got the details. Steve. Hey, Melissa, Susan Collins, the Boston Fed president speaking at this hour, saying it is appropriate to raise rates, quote, a bit further by the year end. She's concerned that stronger demand from AI, along with, with elevated tariff and energy prices could lead to higher inflation. It doesn't seem much more, just a bit further, she said. She's higher productivity allowing the economy to grow faster.

She is watching, however, whether AI and energy-related inflation broadens to other categories. John Williams, the New York Fed president, speaking to Bloomberg earlier in the day, saying he currently sees no need for more than one additional rate hike. He was unclear about whether he was for sure riding it off for 20, 27, but for the moment, he's no more than need for more than one more rate hike. Tariffs, he said, have played through the system, did not have a broader effect on prices. He sees inflationary pressures from the AI buildout and energy. Taking a look at the CPI expectations for tomorrow, looking for a hot headline, but a cool core, 06, and then 02 on the core, leading to a 3-6 year-over-year on the headline.

And just two and a half, it does end up the tick because of baseline effects. And look at the probabilities, not much impact. 90% for December with still 21 for October. And then the second hike still price for 81, June for 66. So this disparity between where the Fed thinks they need to go and where the market thinks the Fed needs to go is pretty strong. And you can see that in the two year, which, as you said, down just a little bit today, a couple ticks, even after Williams hinted at just one more hike. but the market still looking for about 100, Mike and Melissa. Yeah, I mean, I guess the market has now been jolted into a position of feeling like, we don't know exactly how it's going to play out, but maybe the direction of surprise is higher because of this focus on a timely return of inflation

down to 2% from Chairman Warsh. So, Steve, the CPI number tomorrow, I wonder if it's got the power to actually change the picture, much from here, given all the Fed speak leading up to it, and October being sort of eliminated as a hike possibility? It's a great question. Certainly an upside surprise on the core. We'll look at that metric that Kevin Warsh gave us, which is the percentage of the core CPI or core PCE,

that's over 3%. He had been talking about it being over 54% at one point in time. It was a big number, a broad dispersion, essentially, of inflation in the system. if that is higher, if the core is higher, that's going to be something. There was one hint yesterday, Hammack from Cleveland, saying that she wanted to do things quickly. And so she is not necessarily on board with the pause in October, but it sounds so far, Mike, like several key officials at the Fed are.

Steve, thanks very much. The semi-ETs posting their six straight negative day for the first time since May last year, as investors worry over AI financing and competition from China. And the latest comments from Broadcom CEO, Hock Tan, adding more fuel to the fire. Speaking at a conference yesterday, Tan said a lot of investors have no clue what they're investing in and set high expectations, only to find out they're in a casino gambling. Joining us now is Gil Luria from D.A. Davidson. Try to wrap this all together, Gil, you've had this overlay of skepticism on the semis for a while.

It's not because earnings estimates have stopped going up. It's not because anybody thinks the overall pie is not growing into next year, but unwilling to maybe give credit up front for how long this boom is going to last. Yeah, that's exactly right. Or at least it's giving the credit in an uneven manner. Because let's be clear, all the results that have been reported over the last eight to ten weeks have been not only positive, but companies across the value chain have said that the results have improved, that the outlook has improved, and the visibility has improved.

That's everybody from the chip companies that make the chip equipment, the companies that make the chip, the hypers, the model companies. Anthropics are going to show up tomorrow and give us probably a very positive outlook as they prepare for their IPO. So the news, the reporting from the companies has been very consistent. That comment from HockTang was in the context of the open AI mishap that happened last week where everybody had to dust off the definitions of gross revenue and net revenue, and that's all really that happened.

He was commenting on the fact that if anybody sold because they misunderstood the difference between gross revenue and net revenue, they're behaving as if they're in a casino. So the commentary from Broadcom, including his during the quarter, and over the last couple of days, has been consistently positive, results have gotten better, outlook gotten better, visibility's gotten better. Okay, but let's talk about why the chips are down at this point, Gil,

and specifically focusing on the memory space, I mean, one headline that really jolted this particular subsect of chips is CXMT coming out with a denser wafer by the end of the year. I mean, this notion that China will be able to scale very quickly, it had 9.5% of global RAM revenues in the last quarter versus 7.2, I think, the quarter before. So it gained two points in revenue share. And I'm just wondering, you know, is that something that investors should. factor in, that sort of China dynamic where they can figure it out, they can scale pretty quickly, and they can sell it for cheaper. That's right. We definitely have to factor for it, and that is what Riled investors in the Korean memory and in Micron today, having said that, when we say that we think that memory is going to continue to grow over the next couple of years, China has

been in the math and continues to be in the math. These companies are new. They're newly public, but they're not new. They've been catching up on the technology. Having said that, they only participate in the low end of the market. They do not participate in the high bandwidth memory part of the market. And by the way, they can't sell to American companies. Let's not forget. Micron's biggest customers, Microsoft, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Vividia,

none of those companies can buy Chinese chips. So if there's an impact, there's some impact on Hynix and Samsung, it's not on Micron. Having said that, the Chinese are catching up. The other thing to keep in mind, though, is that the discrepancy of demand and supply exists in China as well, meaning these Chinese memory companies

can't supply enough chips to meet the demand in the domestic Chinese market, and they won't be for a while. So again, it's been in the mass. When Micron says that the tightness is going to get worse next year and even worse the year after that, they are fully aware of what CXMT

is developing their product roadmap, what they have, what they don't have, and how many clean rooms they're going to open. Gil, I have to imagine, I mean, it's impossible to kind of isolate this, but the psychology of investors is definitely also aware of the pushback on the pace of data center development and just how costly memory is in the entire kind of expense stack out there. And can they possibly maintain those economics, you know, beyond the several quarters we have ahead of us. I'm looking for ways to explain micron under six times forward earnings,

which is super cheap, but also where micron has tended to trade at cycle highs in the past. Right. And that's the big discrepancy in the market right now is the fact that you have, let's just use memory and CPUs as the two markets. The two markets

look almost identical in terms of the competitive nature, in terms of the exposure to the eye cycle, and yet you have AMD and Intel trading at 40. 20 times and above and micron is six times. That is a really big dislocation. The reason is that people, even if they just remember 2023, think of memory as a commodity that has its own cycle, that is no longer the case.

And as investors wrap their head around the fact that memory has a completely different role in the data center than it did in 2023, and that means that it's getting incorporated into its large customers, long-term planning. they're signing long-term deal that changes the competitive nature. So Micron no longer sells a commodity, A, and B, the cycle that impacts Micron is the cycle that impacts everybody else. We still think that as the market wraps its head around that, there'll be a convergence in multiples between AMD and Intel on one side and Micron on the other side.

So it's just a matter of time before the market realizes all of the bull case themes that you had laid out, Gil, because, I mean, the SOX is still down 18% from June high. and you had laid out the case before that the companies have been delivering. They've been delivering consistently. The message has been consistent. The stocks have not responded. What do you tell investors? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it, you mentioned psychology earlier.

Part of it is psychology. So first, the investors that bought micro at 100 and sold it at 1,000 think they're done, and they're very happy with what it contributed to their performance, then investors that missed it from 100 to 1,000 think that they missed it and they don't want to touch it. that's psychology. As the company continues to deliver, as it becomes clear that, again, it's one cycle, it's a non-commodidized product. People

will rob their head around it. The reason I'm confident that they've spoken with dozens of investors that are in the process of doing so, let's not forget, Micron was a small nichey stock as late as a year ago. Now it's a trillion-dollar stock, and it's not just semi-analysts that are looking at it. Generalists have to look at it. It's only 3% of the NASDAQ 100 by market cap, but it's 10% of the NASDAQ 100 earnings over the next 12 months.

So if I'm right, and they end up trading at a market multiple a year from now, that's seven points of performance from one position. Everybody's doing the work, and I think they're going to come to similar conclusions. All right, Gill, great to speak with you. Thanks, Gill, Loria, D.A. Davidson. Let's stick with the chip theme. Investors have big hopes for this earnings season with growth expected to come in around 30%, But if you look beyond the headline number, two companies will be driving a big chunk of that. Micron and NVIDIA alone are expected to account for more than a third of that growth this quarter.

So with so much of the profit story riding on a handful of chip names, should investors be concerned? With us now, Marta Norton, chief investment strategists at Empower. Marta, great to see you. Are you worried? Gill had mentioned the role of psychology in why these stocks are trading lower, despite the message being good from the companies. Yeah, you know, I feel like it's a distinction between. price and kind of business fundamentals. The business fundamentals are very strong. It's very hard to argue with the demand side of the story for chips. But how much of that is already in the price?

I think a lot of this information that people are pointing to when they're looking at Micron and some of these other names is something that's been understood for quite some time and helped fuel the rally that we saw on the first half of the year. So I don't know if we necessarily question how good those business fundamentals are as much as we question how much valuation is left in the space. And then if you are an index investor, you may be able to break it down and say, I'm exposed here. Like, I don't need to look for new ways to get access to the AI trade because, you know, 19% of the portfolio was semis or something like that for the S&P 500. The top 10 stocks are 40%. Maybe, you know, I'm good for now. I can't get over how much the U.S. market is an AI market.

I mean, if... Marta, I'm sorry. We got to pause here. We got some breaking news on bank. of America. Leslie Pickers got the details here. Leslie. Hey, Melissa, Bank of America facing $1.21 billion in penalties for violations of anti-money laundering and sanctions laws. B.A admitted that it, quote, willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act, Treasury said in a statement. The enforcement action is the third largest penalty in Treasury history and the largest in the history of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Fincens assessed the bulk of the penalty, which stemmed from what it calls B of A's failure to mitigate and report national security risks, including Chinese money laundering networks and illicit finance alongside the southwest border.

FinC then credits the OCC's $750 million penalty, which is due to what it said was, quote, deficient and ineffective anti-money laundering compliance. And OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, announced a separate $12 million settlement. over violations of sanctions programs, including those involving Iran, Russia, narcotics, and global terrorism. They all said in a statement also just received a statement from Bank of America where they say, quote, financial crime compliance is serious and we are responsible for getting it right. We worked with regulators to reach these penalty resolutions stemming from violations cited in the previously reported 2024 OCC consent order and FinC's investigation. They go on to say, of course, Bank of America is reporting earnings tomorrow morning, and they say that the third quarter results will include a non-tax deductible charge of $1.2 billion impacting net income by about 17 cents per share.

They note that they already have dedicated substantial personnel and resources to ongoing remediation efforts, and those costs are in the current expense base. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson saying in the release, quote, when a bank of this size fails to meet its anti-money laundering and sanctions obligations, the consequences extend far beyond its own walls, exposing the entire U.S. financial system to significant illicit finance risks. There is no asset cap requirement as part of this consent order, which is noteworthy, and no criminal activity by Bank of America. This is a technical compliance matter, according to,

a person familiar with the matter. But Treasury says B of A failed to timely report to FinCEN over $5 billion worth of suspicious transactions, and over $1 billion of that is implicated in national security-related risks. So, guys, you could see Bank of America shares down currently about 1.9% on this news that the Treasury is imposing about $1.2 billion worth of penalties against the firm. Guys, I'll send it back to you. Your sense, Leslie, though, is that once the penalty is paid for that there is no other further sort of punishment for Bank of America. So today's consent basically says that B of A needs to work with a third party to find suspicious transactions that went undetected and go through an independent review of its internal

anti-money laundering operations. We will actually be sitting down Mel with CEO Brian Moynihan tomorrow during Swak on the Street. We were planning to talk about. earnings, but now we have a lot more to talk about as well as it pertains to this news out of Treasury. All right. Leslie, thank you. Leslie Picker, Bank of American shares off of the lows on the back of the news down by 1.8% right now. We were talking about tech earnings. Why don't we just shift over to finances? We had a bunch of them report today. We've got a bunch reporting tomorrow. The bar was very low going into earnings season, and yet we didn't see much of a follow-through in terms of to the upside.

Even though some were beats. Yeah, I mean, the setup seems strong, right? You had this weaker performance. You had weaker sentiment, so it didn't seem like you needed all that much from a fundamental basis for the stocks to rally. And yet, I think the news was mixed enough that investors couldn't get overly excited.

There were some macro indicators, right? People talking about the consumer being relatively strong, that word resilience, which was, I guess, the word of 2026, that came up again. And so I don't think it was a bad, you know, earnings season for banks, but it wasn't something that really lit the world on fire. What's your message to investors were more than three quarters of the way through the year? Markets are up double digits, but there's so much divergence.

And I guess perhaps the move in bond yields has also scrambled the equation for some people. So is it an opportunity to add risk, take it back, rebalance, do what? I mean, it's a difficult market environment. To your point, we've seen the epicenter of performance. coming from a lot of the AI trade. We've seen it from energy. And then everything else is relatively flat, but the earnings have been okay. And so you have this valuation backdrop that isn't all that discouraging. I think the one thing I look at as an investor who's always looking for that valuation discount is that it just isn't screamingly obvious where that is. The one exception is

potentially within the bond market. And you know, you're pricing real risk, right? Risk that we haven't thought about for quite some time. But now you're seeing, the 10-year, we've higher close to 5.3 percent, you're getting paid for some of that risk. And so, in my minds, potentially, you can dollar cost average in here into the bond market. Where would you get the funds from in your portfolio to go into bonds? Well, I mean, if you've been writing this AI trade, I think that's not a bad place to turn. It's obviously turned over a little bit. I think there are other areas of the market that have done pretty well.

Health care is now screening pretty aggressively expensive in our views, so that may be an area you could show them well. Marta, good to see you. Thank you. Marta Norton. Well, at the top of the show, you saw a robot ringing the closing bell here at the NASAC market site. We'll be joined by that robot and a human to discuss investing in physical AI.

And we want to show you CFA Society, Chicago, ringing the closing bell at Cebo in Chicago, ending the regular trading day for options. Stay tuned. Shares of AT&T is slightly higher today, but still down 7% in the past week as SpaceX disruption fears hit telecom again. Today, Bernstein downgrading the stock to a market performed from outperform, but not making any changes to its estimates for the company, instead making the move due to investor debate around Starlink impact and the likelihood for volatility.

Two numbers that stand out first with the recent declines in the stock, AT&T's dividend yield is now around 5%. Second, if you combine the market caps of AT&T with Verizon and T-Mobile, you get about $500 billion. That's less than a quarter of SpaceX. It's interesting that it's not a fundamental outlook on the business that has changed. It's just sort of the worry that is going to continue to plague the stock, which seems like a very interesting. Yeah, it's the overhang, the perceived overhang. And that's, by the way, also including T-Mobile for $500 billion. So it's like essentially the entire wireless communication sector, if you say SpaceX is going to swallow it up over time, you know, it still doesn't get you that far in terms of SpaceX's valuation. And it is no doubt probably going to cause price competition, a little more churn.

So it's not as if it's a phantom threat, but it's something that nobody really knows how. quickly it'll happen, and it's very contingent on, obviously, the pacing of their launches and everything else. But these have been kind of friendless stocks for a while, AT&T and Verizon, and their yields have been a lot higher in recent years, 6, 70%. We should note, too, that this particular analyst note points out not only just the price competition in wireless, but also in broadband. Broadband, yeah.

Yeah, and that the cable companies will have to defend their sort of standard core business along with price cuts. And so that's a whole other overhang for that industry, which is already. even so do. I mean, connectivity is almost like one big industry now. It depends on how you, I guess, frame it from what they used to be in terms of their business at the core. Well, with bond yields rising to more than 20-year highs, many are wondering whether it's worth it to take all the risk to come along with owning stocks instead. Up next, we'll explore the real return. Stay with it. So many ways to compare the values of stocks versus bonds. Here's another one based on how much is

paid out to the owners of each. So right here, the blue line is. It's shareholder yield, which adds a dividend yield plus the stock buyback yield. So essentially adding up dividends and buybacks, dividing by the price or the S&P 500. And you see that yield has gone down here to around 3%. It's like 1.something percent dividend yield. And then the rest is buybacks. And it's pretty historically low, going back 25 years. And now it's well exceeded by where the 10-year treasury yield is.

Most of that is obviously share prices have gone up, but also big tech, not buying back as much stock, plowing. to CAPEX. If you go back to the early part of the 20th century, you did see this dynamic as well. And in fact, you know, bonds did pay you pretty well over those first few years there relative to what stocks were able to do. I guess the argument is you own equities because you think all the capax that's depleting the buybacks is actually going to have a big payoff down the road in productivity and in earnings. Is this sort of a limited way of looking at the comparison between holding stocks and bonds? Because you're not capturing, obviously, total return. Oh, 100%. It's really not so much.

about the projected returned. It's more about like the cash here and now that's coming out of each of those instruments. And I think shareholder yield is a little more of a holistic way of thinking about how companies are sharing their profits because many of them just don't think dividend payouts

are a tax efficient or wise way to do it. Time now for CNBC News Update, the Sima Modi. Melissa, Mike, here's what we're watching. The Justice Department announced a $315 million settlement today with CBS over allegations it unlawfully dispense unnecessary opioid prescriptions. The deal resolves a 2024 lawsuit accusing the pharmacy giant of fueling the nation's opioid epidemic

by prescribing massive amounts of the drugs. CVS says the settlement admits no wrongdoing in that it disputes the claims made in the lawsuit. Former gang leader Dwayne Keefe D. Davis was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison today for orchestrating the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur. Davis was found guilty back in August in the. says he will appeal his conviction. He's the only person who has ever been charged in Tupac's killing, which for decades has been one of the most notorious cool cases in the U.S. And the Vatican says Pope Leo's surgery to remove a lung nodule ended positively as expected.

The Pope underwent the procedure earlier today in a hospital in Rome. Pope Leo said on Sunday the growth was spotted early during a recent checkup. The Vatican says his recovery is expected to take about one week. Mike, back to you. All right, Seema, thank you. Yeah. Well, the next wave of AI may be physical AI robots, and whether you're excited or fearful, you might as well try to make money off the trend.

Up next, we'll talk to a man who runs a fund investing in private robot companies and one of his robots. There it is. Well, AI has so far transformed much of our experiences online in the real world, it remains nascent. But Jensen Huang has said the physical AI total addressable market will be $40 trillion, while Morgan Stanley's Adam Jonas forecast a $25 trillion robotics market by 2050. So where are we now in the growing industry and which companies are best positioned? Joining us now in an exclusive interview with Andrew Kang, co-founder and CEO of Robo Strategy. It's a first closed-end fund list on the NASAC that has investments in private robotics and physical AI companies.

He brought his friend Taku with him. Hello, Andrew and Taku. Hey, what's up, Mike? Thanks for having me. In that same report from Morgan Stanley, they write that prototypes are easy, but scaling is hard. So how far off are we? We all know about robotic arms and industrial uses on factory lines. How are we from seeing robots like a taku at scale? So robots like taku are actually being deployed today. They're not being deployed in the millions yet.

They're starting out in specialized tasks like napkin folding, laundry folding, data center operations. and you can think of it as essentially the Waymo approach, where a lot of physical AI is being developed for these narrow tasks, and eventually over time the models get better and better, and then they start to generalize and they're able to act in the world that humans are able to do. That Waymo analogy implies just, I don't know, billions of hours of real world kind of experience

to build the intelligence models? Is that what a lot of your companies are executing right now? Yeah, exactly. So there are a few companies. that have actually been developing their models for almost a decade. Path robotics, for example, they're focused on AI-enabled welding. And that has taken hundreds of thousands of welding hours of data to make their model actually commercially viable.

And so today, you start seeing companies like Path deploying with companies like Honey and Ingalls, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world. They recently signed a $600 million contract. We're showing TACU now, doing what TACU may do best, which is picking up cloth. I mean, he said that he operates in the hospitality industry, hotels, restaurants, et cetera.

So what would Ataku do? And how should we think about the role of Ataku in that industry? Is it a job taker? Is it just increasing productivity for those companies? Yeah. So, you know, there's actually a taco deployed in the Thin Taifung in New York. Oh, the dumpling restaurant. Exactly.

Exactly. And, you know, that restaurant has hundreds of employees. and they actually have sometimes multiple employees folding napkins for shifts on end. And so a lot of that tedious work that happens in these restaurants in hospitality, there's a lot of towel folding, clothes folding, work that needs to be done is taken off the hands of those employees so that they can do, you know, higher-skilled jobs elsewhere. Like making dumplings. Like making dumplings.

Eventually, I would assume, or you would hope, I guess. to what degree as you look across the landscape of potential investments? Do you think that it is sort of smaller startups with a specialized approach, or is a lot of the value going to be realized in Tesla and SpaceX and Amazon and other larger companies that are also pursuing similar work? I think it's going to be both, but I think a lot of the most interesting companies in the robotic space are private. If you look at one of the most prominent companies, Figure AI, for example, we think their humanoid is just as advanced. not slightly more at advance than Tesla's optimist. And we think there's going to be a lot of different winners in this space. It's not going to be winner take all.

We think it looks something like the automotive industry where you have, right, the BMWs of the world, the Lamborghinis, the Ferorries. You have all these different market segments where you might need a specific robot to fit that segment for. And so a lot of those companies are private today. And as you saw with Anthropics, SpaceX, OpenAI, these companies stay private for longer and longer. Now it's until they're a trillion dollars that they start to go public. And we think that trend is going to continue. There's just so much money from corporations, sovereign wealth funds,

other big pots of capital going into let these companies stay private. How do you think about commercial applications versus defense applications? The government has recently blacklisted a number of Chinese companies relating to physical AI, whether it be LIDAR manufacturers that go into a lot of robotics in autonomous vehicles or unitary, for instance. Does that create a huge opportunity for some of your portfolio, companies which may offer defense use robots? So we've invested a little bit in defense. Our main focus is on robots for the real world for commercial services, for commercial services, for homes. We think there's a tremendous

opportunity in America, especially with the FCC ban that just occurred. The American government has made it clear that it's very important that America should reindustrialize. They should build factories here. They should start building things in America again. and you've seen them support industries like the rare earth's companies providing these really large, long-term loans. You've seen them invest directly in semiconductor companies. And I think if you look at the actions from the government, it's very likely they're going to support the robotics industry in a similar way. There seems to be, you know, on some level, a little bit of a disagreement or a debate about whether, in fact, humanoid robots that are actually kind of meant to mimic the functions of a human being are kind of a dead end, or is that the way to go? In other words, why, if you're building something from the ground

up, do you use the form of a person to be the thing that makes sense? So the human four factor is the most general purpose form factor. And we think general purpose is important because if you actually look at the biggest companies in the world today, Apple, Nvidia, they have general purpose devices. Your smartphone, you can do 100,000 different things. The GPU can compute a thousand infinite amount of algorithms. And so what of that, we believe that's important because it allows you to scale, scale to hundreds of millions,

billions of units, something you can't do as much with a specialized device. We think specialized robotics is also going to be a large market, but there's room for both to grow. Okay. Great to see you. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for having me. We should mention Taka was being operated

remotely here, right? It didn't train to be here on the desk. Exactly. Yeah. But someday. There we go. All right. All right. Good body of you both. Thanks very much. Well, Apple falling just short of closing above the $5 trillion market cap level for the first time as it launches a new smart home lineup to take on Amazon and Google.

Up next we'll discuss whether these new products will move the needle even more for the stock or if it's still going to be all about iPhone sales. Closing about overtime. We'll be right back. Domino's pizza, one of the big losers in the S&B 500 today, the pizza chain beating Wall Street's expectations on earnings. but same-sor sales rising, just 0.3% down from more than 5% a year ago because customers are ordering fewer items during the call with analysts, the company's new CEO, blaming a challenging macro environment. It's been a challenging year for the stock falling nearly 30% in 2026.

Well, shares of Apple hit an all-time high this morning after unveiling its new HomeView smart home hub as it looks to highlight Siri AI's abilities opening the door to more direct competition with Amazon's Echo Show and Google's Nest Hub. The product is designed to recognize multiple people in a household by their face and automatically switch into their personal profiles. It's Apple's second major launch under new CEO John Ternis, who announced the company's first foldable phone called Duo in September. Joining us now is Alex Cantor. It's founder of big technology. Alex, good to see you. Good to see you. So, I don't know. Is the world asking for this? Did Apple deliver something that is a real step forward, do you think?

Today, no. And I think the important thing to say about this is that ambient computing, the type of AI that you might have in your kitchen or in your living room or in your bedroom, that this disembodied voice, maybe with a screen that you'll use to do computing tasks, that's coming. And what Apple's doing today is introducing its device, right? They had a false start with HomePod. Now they have a device. It looks a little bit better. They have some better AI in it with Siri. But the cool thing about these is that when AI gets better, you can update them. And so today what we saw was a lot of information retrieval. I'm in the kitchen. Where's the recipe? Let me FaceTime with friends. I think tomorrow what you might see is that voice can do things for you, right? You can say, book me a restaurant, call me an Uber, and then do some work for me. And as AI gets more advanced, that is going to be the use case, which obviously takes the voice

becomes prominent, the AI becomes prominent, the screen becomes less prominent, and now Apple's competitors look more like the open AIs of the world than, let's say, the Amazons of the world with the echoed as it is today. How do you think, though, about the cannibalization of the various devices within the Apple ecosystem? If you have these devices at home, you won't need potentially as many devices at home if you've got sort of this ambient computing going on just in whatever room you walk into. So near term, I think people are going to have the iPhone, the MacBook, the iPad, maybe, the watch, and this device within the house. house. But I think you're absolutely right. That long-term, the threat is that ambient computing makes like the phone in your hand or the computer that you use less important because the AI is doing all the work in the background for you. And that's why this is an important launch for Apple

because it needs a device like this to take off. And also just to be there for when the AI gets good enough that when that update comes, it happens on an Apple device with Apple AI and not on a Google device or an Amazon device or on a forthcoming Open AI device. think that threshold level of when AI gets here is for Apple, for consumer devices like that? I mean, you know, aside from doing the task of the restaurant or something that you command it to do, is it going to be learning from you? Is it going to be anticipating your needs? Yeah. I mean, I think we're getting there very quickly. Quicker than a lot of people imagine, including myself. We were talking a couple weeks ago about meta muse, and I didn't give it a big

chance to succeed. And I'll stay right here. I was wrong that it's much more capable than I anticipated. And the reason is because standard models, so not the frontier models, the best models from OpenAI and Anthropic, but just the basic models coming out of places like meta, like XAI, are doing a really good job at this point. So we are not going to have to wait much longer for these agenic type use cases to be available in places like the iPhone, in places like meta properties and Mews. And so I think it's important for Apple to get on this trend now and not wait and be behind like it has been on Apple Intelligence, for instance. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly, but I seem to remember that you came on saying you didn't

think Muse is going to work because people don't trust meta, that there is an inherent distrust of the company and what they do with your data. Have you used it now to the point where you think it's a good enough product where you yourself would hand over the keys to your financial kingdom to Muse to do whatever, switch bank accounts or whatnot? So you're remembering, right? There was two parts to this. One, it was the trust factor, and the other side of it was that Open AI and Anthropic, they have AI that's much better than Metas.

That second part holds true. The AI in products like Dots from Open A.I. is better, but the gap between a Dots and a MUs isn't massive, even though they're built for two different uses, Mews for consumer and dots largely for enterprise. So that's the part that I'd say, you know, Maya Kulpa on, and I've learned my lesson. The trust thing remains. So if you ask me, like what I'd, give meta the keys, even though it's like in a virtual machine and it's segmented and it's supposedly safe, would I give meta access to, let's say, my health records, my email, my bank account like I have. And maybe this is also a bad idea to chat GPT. I would not give those to meta yet. And that will still be the uphill battle for them. But, you know, one thing that I think is true as far as people's adoption of tech products go, there is a willingness among folks to overlook some of the risks if the product gets the jet.

job done for them. And for a lot of people, Mews is getting the job done. But again, this is going to be very competitive. Open AI has a product here. And soon enough, we'll probably see the Apple product show up on these new Homeview devices as well. Alex, thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Anthropic is on the verge of disclosing new revenue numbers up next to find out what that could mean for its upcoming IPO and the tech sector. Closing Bell overtime live from the NASDAQ market site. Be right back. investors could soon get more insight into Anthropics financials ahead of its potential IPO. Kate Rooney has the details. Hi, Kate. Hey, Mike. So according to sources, now Anthropic does plan from what we're hearing to disclose its third quarter financials tomorrow.

This will be at an investor day here in San Francisco. This is according to two people familiar with the matter. It does come as the AI giant is right now plowing ahead on what could be the largest IPO in history would potentially top SpaceX. It's now holding meetings with institutional investors here in the Bay Area. And Anthropics revenue growth guys is going to be closely watched, especially given just how much the growth of private AI giants lately has mattered to the broader markets. Open AI and Anthropic are some of the largest customers as well of chip names like Nvidia and major cloud providers. Many of the Mag 7 names. We should also mention are investors in Anthropic ahead of the IPO.

We did have some confusion last week on a report detailing rival OpenAI's revenue and then a change in accounting. That at the time, dragged down some of the major semiconductor stocks and the broader NASDAQ as well. And Propic has filed confidentially with the SEC that was earlier this year, but it has not made its S-1 financials public company will reportedly list in November. You can check out more on CNBC.com. Shout out to Leslie Picker, who also had some reporting on this one for us, guys. Yeah, we definitely need these numbers and some legal documents with some footnotes so we know what we're dealing with, Kate. I guess we'll get those things. Soon enough. Also need to ask you about this breaking story related to Open AI and having found some kind of recording device in one of their offices.

So, Mike, this did just cross. The news about an hour ago was, yes, that Open AI found this recording device planted in the office. They said they terminated an employee and that they reached out to the FBI. We did just get an update that the FBI has arrested and charged a former Open AI employee. they say here with endeavoring to use an electronic device. And this is a Saudi national. They say this is just breaking. But Jay Clayton here, the Director of National Intelligence, also the AIsar, we should add. The newly appointed AISR calls in a serious situation says it underscores why winning the global superintelligence race is a national security prerogative. Again, this is a Saudi national who was an Open AI employee.

But that's what we know so far, guys. but that's the latest. I mean, very interesting in the first place that there was a recording device planted. I mean, it speaks to the trade secrets that all of these companies say that they have when it comes to what they're doing, the AI models that they're building,

and the efforts by employees on the inside, in this case, at least, from what it appears, to get a hold of some of that. And who knows, we'll hopefully find out more in terms of what the situation was here, what they were planned to do with that information. but FBI just confirming that they have arrested somebody. Yeah, you got to wonder if this is going to sort of make these companies look inward at who they're hiring.

Oh, I really imagine. You know, what countries they are actually from. Kate, thank you. Kate Rooney. More bank earnings tomorrow and then CPI. We'll see if that's a market mover with the bond yields coming in off their highs. A lot of people saying maybe we actually saw a little bit of a short-term peak in yields. We'll see if that happens.

that does it for overtime. Fast money starts right after this quick break.