The Rundown - Bitcoin Spot ETF Approved, CPI Edges Higher

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Daily stock market update for January 11, 2024. SEC approves Bitcoin Spot ETF (sec.gov) CPI in December was up 0.3% compared to November, above the 0.2% that was expected. (WSJ) Amazon skips concessions to EU on iRobot deal (Politico) Intuitive Surgical stock rallies on sales forecast (MarketWatch) The content of the video is for general and informational purposes only. All views presented in this show reflect the opinions of the guest and the host. You should not take a mention of any asset, be it cryptocurrency or a publicly traded security as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold that cryptocurrency or security. Guests and hosts are not affiliated with or endorsed by Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. You should make your own financial and investment decisions or consult respective professionals. Full disclosures are in the channel description. Learn more at Public.com/disclosures. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. There is a possibility of loss with any investment. Historical or hypothetical performance results, if mentioned, are presented for illustrative purposes only. Do not infer or assume that any securities, sectors or markets described in the videos were or will be profitable. Any statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements are strictly based on the current views, opinion, or assumptions of the person presenting them, and should not be taken as an indicator of performance nor should be relied upon as an investment advice.

Welcome to the rundown. Your daily market update in under five minutes. My name is Aidan Mani and today is Thursday, January 11th. Guys, we have an action-pack show. Okay, we're talking inflation. We're talking Bitcoin ETF. We're talking robots. But let's start off the show by recapping what happened in the markets yesterday. Because it looks like stocks are starting to gain some momentum again. All three major indices finished in the green on Wednesday. The stock market got off to a pretty slow start this year, okay? But the S&P is now positive for the year and it's within 0.3% of all-time highs. At this point, last week, feels like a distant memory now. Let's talk about inflation because I feel like investors have been waiting all week for new

inflation data, and we just got the latest info this morning. And it looks like inflation came in a bit hotter than expected. CPI in December was up 0.3% when you compare it to November, which is a bit higher than the 0.2% that was expected. And the CPI was up 3.4% year over year, which is, again, more than the 3.2% that was expected. Now, inflation did cool off significantly last year and it was ahead of schedule to reach the Fed's 2% target. But December's CPI coming in a bit hotter than expected might be making some investors nervous because the market is not loving the news so far. The Dow, S&P and NASDAQ are all flashing red at the time of this recording around 10 a.m.

Eastern. A hot CPI report might mean the Fed might wait a little bit longer before they start cutting rates. Let's switch gears and talk about Bitcoin. Because after some drama, the Bitcoin Spot ETF was officially approved by the SEC on Wednesday afternoon. We all got dup with a fake approval on Tuesday when the SEC's Twitter account got hacked, but the SEC went ahead with the approval on Wednesday afternoon. The SEC approved all 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs, and some of them have started trading today. Remember, the spot Bitcoin ETF will track the price of Bitcoin in real time. We've had futures Bitcoin ETFs

for a while now, but this is the first time a spot ETF has been approved. This approval by the SEC opens up Bitcoin to a lot more people. Because even though buying Bitcoin before this approval, it wasn't really that hard. I mean, you could buy it using the public app or other crypto exchanges. Some people just didn't want to do that. They wanted to use their existing investment account. And now they can do that. And it also opens the door to buying Bitcoin using a retirement account, like a Roth IRA or 401K.

But just be careful, though, because, you know, Bitcoin still pretty volatile asset. After this approval on Wednesday, the price of Bitcoin didn't initially move much. But this morning, the price jumped above $49,000 for a hot second before dropping down below $48,000 at the time of this. recording around 10 a.m. Eastern. So the volatility is already starting. Bitcoin has obviously been a big winner this week. Let's talk about some winners and losers in the stock market. A big winner is Initiative Surgical, ticker symbol ISRG. The stock was up more than 10% on Wednesday. Initiative Surgical makes robotic surgical equipment. And that's pretty cool. And it's a pretty big company with a market cap of over $125 billion. Their stock jumped this week after they reported sales forecast for Q4 to be

hired than what Wall Street was expecting. And they're saying the jump in the revenue is due to to a recovery in their business in China. Now, I was curious about this company, so I checked out their website because, you know, robot surgical equipment. And yeah, the equipment looks really cool. It looks like it's straight out of a sci-fi movie. All right, sticking with the robot theme, a big loser from Wednesday was I-Robot. The maker of the Rumba Robot vacuum, stock was down nearly 20% on Wednesday.

And this has to do with their Amazon acquisition. So let me try breaking this down. Amazon has been trying to buy I-Robot for like 18 months now. The initially announced a deal to buy I-Robot back in August of 2022. for $61 a share for a total of $1.7 billion. Well, as with any deal these days, it's running into regulatory issues, especially in the EU. The EU wanted Amazon to make some changes to their business in the EU markets for this deal to go through. And Amazon was like, nah, we're not, we're not going to do that.

So this deal is kind of in limbo now. Also, the FTC in the U.S. is still reviewing the deals. So there's a lot of uncertainty around this acquisition. And that's why IROB's shares are down because investors aren't sure if this deal is going to go through anymore. Now, shares have recovered a bit today. IRobot shares are up 5% on Thursday at the time of this recording around 10 a.m. Eastern. Also, IRobot, great Will Smith movie from like 20 years ago. Highly recommended.

All right, let's wrap up the show with a fun fact of the day where I share some stats that I found to be pretty interesting. Today's fun fact, a record 58% of American households own stocks. I think it's great to hear that more and more households are buying stocks. But for some reason, I thought that number would be higher. Hopefully, the number continues to go up, especially because of apps like, public that make investing so approachable. So let's hope the numbers keep going up. All right, that's all I got for you today. Thank you guys so much for listening. Remember, earning season kicks off tomorrow with a lot of big banks reporting earnings. So we're going to be talking about

that. Make sure you tune in for tomorrow's episode. We'll see you then. This is public live, your real-time resource for news events and trends in the markets. All views presented in this show reflect the opinions of the guests. You should not take any mention of a publicly traded security as recommendation to buy, sell, sell, or hold that security. Public live hosts 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 slash disclosures. In paid partnership with Zaid Admani, brokerage services for U.S. listed, registered securities are offered by Open to the Public Investing Incorporated,

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