The Rundown - Apple's Siri is Getting an Upgrade, Gap Shares are Back in Style

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Stock market update for November 22, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown, your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Friday, November 22nd. In today's episode, we tell you about Apple's plans to upgrade Siri and when to expect the AI Siri to come out. We also tell you about changes coming to McDonald's menu. Then we recap earnings from Gap and Intuit and tell you about the hot new wine from Pizza Hut. All right, let's go. Yesterday was an interesting day for the stock market.

The S&P 500 added 0.5% with 438 of the 500 stocks finishing in the green. And the S&P would have had a better day if it wasn't for big tech stocks selling off. Six of the seven magnificent seven stocks finished in the red, with NVIDIA being the only one finishing higher for the day. And remember, the S&P 500 is a market cap weighted index. So the bigger the companies are, the more influence they have on the direction of the index. And that's also the case for the NASDAQ index, which is dominated by these big tech companies. And that's probably why the NASDAQ index finished flat for the day. Oh, and the Dow was up

1% yesterday, but nobody cares about the Dow. So all things considered, though, it's been a relatively good week. The three major indices are on track to have a winning week. And speaking of a winning week, gold is having a great week as well. It's gone up every single day this week, and the price is back up above $2,600 an ounce, which is close to its record highs that it's set back in late October. And Bitcoin briefly hit $99,000 yesterday, new record high, and that $100,000 is in sight. I wonder if it happens this weekend. Because that's the thing about crypto. It trades 24-7. I got to say, it's a pretty incredible time being an investor right now. Gold, Bitcoin, stocks, all hovering near all-time highs. So if you haven't checked your portfolio in a while,

if you haven't checked your retirement accounts in a while, just take a peek this weekend. And hopefully your screen lights up green. Right in time for Christmas. Let's run through. some headlines. And let's start with Apple, because Apple is working on making Siri smarter. Now, I feel like I've seen this headline every year for the last 10 years, but Apple is serious this time, and they plan to integrate AI into Siri to try to make it act more like the audio version of ChatGPT. Honestly, Apple should be embarrassed with how bad Siri is, and how bad Siri has been for a decade plus. It's useless. And if you compare it to these new AI powered assistants, Chad GPT or Gemini or meta?

I mean, it's a joke. So hopefully they get it right this time. Apple already has a name for this project. It's called Siri LLM. LLM stands for large language models, which is what powers these AI assistance. According to reporting from Mark Germann at Bloomberg, the new Siri is expected to be released in the spring of 2026.

Oh, this is a joke. Oh, but wait, Apple plans to show off the idea in 2025 at the earliest. So maybe we'll see it at WWDC next summer. longtime listeners know, I'm kind of an Apple stand. Okay, I like Apple. I have Apple products everywhere, but Apple's AI is so bad. I have the latest version of iOS with some elements of Apple intelligence that summarizes your notifications and stuff. It is terrible. I guess we shouldn't be surprised when we hear that Apple has spent the least amount of money out of all the big tech companies on AI. It clearly shows. Now, Apple is pushing a iOS update in December. That's going to integrate chat

GPT and it's going to improve Apple intelligence. Hopefully that's better than what it currently is, right now things are pretty bad. Let's shift gears and talk about McDonald's. They are rebranding the value meal. The new McValue meal is going to have a $5 meal deal, which will come with a McDouble, four-piece McNuggets, small fries, and small Coke. That's not a bad deal. And the menu will also include a buy one, add one for a dollar deal. So let's say you order a normal price Big Mac, you can add a second one for $1. This is going to come in so clutch for me because my wife is always asking for like a couple bites of your french fries and the next thing I know it's gone. You know, McDonald's has been starting to push prices lower this year to help

win back consumers. According to their Q3 earnings, their global same store sales fell by 1.5% in Q3 and 1% in Q2. So their sales have been declining and they're trying to get those back up. They first announced their $5 meal deal back in May and I guess they're going to keep it around for now. McDonald's needs this to be ahead because they continue to deal with challenges like the E. coli outbreak from a few weeks ago. And then just the other day, the company announced they're temporarily taking espresso drinks off the menu because of safety issues with their espresso machine. I had no idea that espresso machines were dangerous. So you can't get lattes from McDonald's temporarily, which is a shame because their lattes were pretty good.

Anyways, this new value menu will be going into effect at McDonald's starting January 7th. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the clothing retailer gap are poppin this morning after they beat Q3 earnings and expect a strong holiday shopping season. Gaps, revenues, and profits beat Wall Street estimates despite the company facing challenges of hurricanes and unusually warm weather. Obviously, we had significant challenges. There were two hurricanes, multiple tropical storms. These resulted in some store closures across our brands. In fact, at peak of the storms, we had almost 180 closures, half of which were old Navy stores. Gap CEO said that unusually warm weather probably hurt their sales by one percentage

point, but despite those challenges, the companies still reported solid numbers. And they also mentioned that the holiday shopping season is off to a strong start, and they expect their profits and gross margins to increase moving forward. I got to say, pretty impressive stuff coming out of Gap here. By the way, Gap operates multiple brands under its umbrella. There's the namesake Gap store, but they also operate Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. All four. of those brands saw an increase in sales, with Athleta seeing the biggest jump. So overall, great quarter for Gap and their new CEO Richard Dixon probably deserves some credit here. He took over the company back in August of 2023, and their stock has more than doubled since he

took over. On top of that, shares are up another 15% this morning in reaction to these earnings. So shout out Richard Dixon. Now, on the flip side, shares of Intuit are dropping this morning after the finance and tax software maker reported their Q3 earnings. The Q3 numbers were fine. In fact, they came in higher than estimates. Revenue was up 10%. And their adjusted earnings per share came in at $2.50. But the company reported lower than expected projections for this current quarter.

Intuit makes TurboTax, which is the tax prep software. And they might see declining sales as there's more and more free tax prep solutions out there now. And that has investors a bit worried. Shares of Intuit are down 6% this morning in reaction to these earnings. I was about to go on a rant about tax prep, but I'll save that for March or April. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Pizza Hut has come out with their own wine, and apparently it tastes like pizza. The wine is called tomato, or maybe it's pronounced tomato, I'm not sure, and they're selling it for $25 a bottle.

And that's not too bad. Actually, this thing has already proven to be a hit because according to their website, the wine is currently sold out. I guess people want pizza tasting wine. Apparently it's made from actual tomatoes. I bet we're going to see a bunch of TikToks and Instagram reels about this. This is going to be a hit at holiday parties. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week.

I mean, I got to say, it was a pretty memorable week. Invidia earnings came out. We got Bitcoin rallying like crazy, maybe potentially hitting $100,000 before the end of the week. So definitely one to remember. Now, next week will probably be a little bit more chill because of Thanksgiving, but we're still going to be coming out with podcast next week. So stay tuned for that.

And remember, we have another weekend. deep dive episode coming out tomorrow. So keep an eye on your podcast feed on Saturday morning and give that a listen. Let us know what you think. Leave us a comment on Spotify to let us know what topics we should cover on future weekend deep dives. Thank you guys so much for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor 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. 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. Reddown 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.

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