The Rundown - Amazon Crosses $2 Trillion Market Cap, Micron Shares Fall After Earnings

Starting point is 00:00:00 Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Thursday, June 27th. In today's episode, we tell you about Amazon's AI plans and their moves to take on Sheein and Timu. Then we tell you why the stock for AI chipmaker Micron dropped despite beating earnings and Nvidia's shareholder meeting recap. Then stick around to the end of the show to learn a shocking stat about EV chargers in the U.S. All right, let's go.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Stocks are having a nice midweek rally. The S&P and NASDAQ both moved higher on Wednesday, carried by tech stocks. What else? And we have to give a special shout out to Amazon because Amazon's market cap passed $2 trillion for the first time yesterday. Amazon now joins the other big tech giants, Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Google, all the names that you know in the $2 trillion club. Now, to be totally accurate, Apple, Microsoft, and NVIDIA are all worth more than $3 trillion.

Starting point is 00:00:57 So we have three companies in the $3 trillion club, two companies in the $2 trillion club, Amazon and Google, and one company in the $1 trillion club, which is meta. Kind of funny how that worked out, just a total coincidence. Now, going back to Amazon, I know the other tech companies that I've mentioned are getting a lot more shine right now, you know, because of the AI boom. Everyone's talking about Microsoft and Nvidia and Google, of course, and Apple as well after their WWDC.

Starting point is 00:01:21 But Amazon has quietly had a solid year, and the stock is up almost 30% this year, outperforming both Microsoft and Apple. And Amazon, for their part, aren't just sitting out the AI race. There are some reports that Amazon's working on a chat GPT like AI chat box. I personally think that we've kind of hit peak AI chat box. I mean, there's so many now with chat GPT, there's Gemini, there's Claude. But I guess we'll see what Amazon cooks up. Now what can make Amazon's chat box a bit different is that they have my order history

Starting point is 00:01:50 going back to like 10 plus years ago. They could probably utilize that to make like the ultimate, AI shopping chat box, which actually sounds pretty cool, and then they're probably going to ruin it by filling it with a bunch of ads in like three years. Let's run through some headlines. And speaking of Amazon, they announced yesterday that they're ready to take on their rivals Timu and Sheein. Amazon is planning to launch a section within their website that will host lower price fashion and other products. You know how you go on like Sheein and Timu and you see a dress shirt for $3 and some shorts for $1.50? Yeah, apparently all that is now.

Starting point is 00:02:25 going to be on Amazon pretty soon. Amazon's going to be partnering with these discount sellers in China directly. Products for this new section of their website is going to be all under $20, according to CNBC. I guess Amazon really sees Timo and Sheehan as a real threat. And they probably should because Timu and Sheehan have been two of the most popular shopping apps in the U.S. the last couple of years. The problem that I have with it, though, is that Amazon's search results are already so messy that adding all these additional cheaper products might make it messier. But I don't know. I guess we'll see. Let's shift gears and talk about AI, specifically Micron, one of the AI darling stocks over the last

Starting point is 00:03:01 year. They reported earnings yesterday, and while they crushed it, the stock actually moved lower. The reason for that is because the forecast for their future business came in a little bit lower than when Wall Street was expecting. So the thing is, Wall Street has such high expectations for these AI companies to continue to grow like crazy that whenever the forecast comes in under that, investors tend to get a little nervous. And that's kind of what happened with Micron.

Starting point is 00:03:23 Remember, investors don't care about how the business did in the past. They care about how the business is going to do moving forward. As far as what Micron actually does, they make computer memory and storage. They specifically make the memory that's needed to make AI GPUs, like the ones that are made by Nvidia. So obviously, the demand for that has exploded over the last year, and the demand for that continues to be pretty high moving forward. The company has sold out all of their high profile AI memory chips in 2024.

Starting point is 00:03:46 That still wasn't enough to make investors happy, and the stock is down more than 4% in the pre-market. But like zooming out, though, Micron stock is more than double. in the last 12 months. So if you invested a year ago, you're fine. In other AI news, Nvidia had their shareholder meeting yesterday. No major headlines came from it. CEO Jensen Huang outlined Nvidia's plan to continue to be the number one AI chipmaker, despite all the competition they're going to face from big tech companies developing their own chip. Jensen Huang highlighted that Nvidia's AI chips provide the lowest total cost of ownership if you add

Starting point is 00:04:15 in the fact that they're the highest performance. So he's pretty confident in the fact that Nvidia can kind of keep doing their thing. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Starting with Blackberry. Apparently, they still exist. The company reported earnings and beat Wall Street estimates. Now, for the younger listeners out there, Blackberry was the smartphone of choice before the iPhone came around back in 2007.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Every business person you know had a Blackberry. Okay? I mean, it was everywhere. But then the iPhone came out and BlackBerry really didn't take them seriously and they never really innovated and, you know, the rest is history. But apparently now, they've pivoted to being a cyber security company. And while the company hasn't been profitable in a while, they're almost there. They lost $42 million last quarter, but they're on track to be profitable

Starting point is 00:04:58 by the fourth quarter. So there you go. Blackberry still out here surviving. And the stock got a nice bump this morning up more than 8% in the pre-market. Good for them. I'm not going to lie. I kind of miss Blackberries. I mean, obviously these modern smartphones are great, but the physical keyboard was pretty nice. Okay. I kind of miss it. Now, a stock not doing so great this morning is Walgreen. Their stock is down big this morning after they reported disappointing earnings. Walgreens lowered their profit outlook for the year saying that they expect worse than expected U.S. consumer environment. Things haven't been going great for Walgreens recently.

Starting point is 00:05:31 It's the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 this year, down more than 40% as of market closed yesterday, and things just got worse. The stock is down another 14% in the pre-market today following these earnings. So, yeah, they're going to have to figure something out here. All right, let's wrap the show with a fun fact. And today's fun fact is a shocker. One in five EV chargers in the U.S. don't work, according to a study from Harvard.

Starting point is 00:05:56 Charging infrastructure is definitely one of the issues holding back mainstream EV adoption. Imagine pulling up to an EV charger with 2% battery on your car. And you find out the charger doesn't work? I mean, that's got to be frustrating. I recently got an EV, and thankfully I've never had an issue where the charger doesn't work, but I do get range anxiety all the time. And now knowing that there's a 20% chance if I pull up somewhere to charge my car, car, the charger's not going to work, that does increase my anxiety a bit, you know? So I think we want

Starting point is 00:06:23 wider adoption of EVs, like the infrastructure has to improve. Or otherwise, I'm not sure if EV sales are going to rebound. One in five. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like eight seconds, please give this podcast a five-star rating on whatever platform you used to listen to podcasts. Apple, Spotify, we'll take it. And if you're on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. All this engagement really does help us out. Thank you guys again for listening. Shout out to honor in Mike for all the help behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow. This is the rundown, your real-time resource for news events and trends in the markets.

Starting point is 00:06:57 All views presented in the show reflect the opinions of the guests. You should not take any mention of a publicly traded security as recommendation to buy, sell or hold that security. Rounddown guests are not financial advisors and are not affiliated with public holdings or its subsidiaries. You should make your own financial and investment decisions or consult. Respective professionals. Learn more at public.com disclosures. In partnership with Zayid Amani. Brokridge services for U.S. listed, registered securities are offered by Open to the Public Investing Incorporated, member FINRA and SIPC.

The Rundown - Amazon Crosses $2 Trillion Market Cap, Micron Shares Fall After Earnings

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