The Rundown - GoPro Joins the Meme Stock Party, Goldman & BNY Team Up on Digital Tokens

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Stock market update for July 23, 2025. This video is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the host and guest, not Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. Mentions of assets are not recommendations. Investing involves risk, including loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. For full disclosures, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Public.com/disclosures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zad Admani and today is Wednesday, July 23rd. In today's episode, we recap the latest trade deal with Japan and why it may be a sign of more deals to come. We also discuss Elon Musk's plans to spend billions of dollars on Nvidia chips and the latest meme stocks making moves. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much money, South Park is getting for their streaming rights. It's a lot more than I expected.

We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Tuesday was a mixed bag for the stock market, with the S&P 500 spending most of the day in the red, but pulled off a late day rally to finish up 0.1%. Meanwhile, the NASDAX snapped its win streak and closed down 0.4%, dragged lower by the dip in tech stocks. But the main character this week continues to be meme stocks.

Coles became the latest stocks to randomly pop this week, jumping 37% yesterday. Shout out to everyone using their coals cash. But Open Door, on the other hand, started to lose some steam. We're going to talk more about these meme stocks later in the show. In the backdrop of the meme stock madness, we had a surprising trade update yesterday. President Trump announced a new trade deal with Japan. According to the president, Japan's new tariff rates will be set at 15% down from the 25% that he had threatened earlier this month. And as part of this deal, Japan is.

is also pledging to invest $550 billion into the U.S. and open their markets to more American exports, including cars, trucks, rice, and other agricultural products. So that was a major development yesterday, especially since Japan is one of the largest trading partners for the U.S. And I think it's a sign that more major trade deals are on the way. We only got eight days left in this month before the high tariff rates kick in. And I'm sure all sides are eager to get a deal done.

So that being said, we got a lot going on in the next week and a half or so with the trade deals and earnings like Google and Tesla reporting tonight. We're going to be talking more about those earnings on tomorrow's episode. So if you're a new listener here, it's a great time to get subscribed to the rundown if you aren't already. Let's run through some headlines. We have more big banks jumping into the crypto hype train. This time, it's Goldman Sachs and BNY.

These two big banks are teaming up to bring money market funds to the blockchain. According to CNBC, institutional investors, will now be able to buy tokenized money market funds, meaning digital versions of one of the most boring but massive corners of finance. These tokens will trade on Goldman's blockchain platform and BNI will offer them to their client. See, money market funds are basically super safe, short-term investments that pay interest, kind of like a high-yield savings account, but for institutional investors. It's a massive $7.1 trillion market. And now with tokenizations, those investments can now become more liquid, more flexible, and tradable,

24-7. You don't have to wait for market hours to settle them. And Goldman Sachs says the real power here is unlocking efficiency. Instead of someone selling a money market fund to free up cash for a trade, you can just use the tokenized money market funds in the trade instead. It's way faster, it's way cleaner, it's modern. It's like upgrading from a fax machine to using Slack. It just blows my mind sometimes seeing how archaic some of these financial systems are. Both BlackRock and Fidelity have agreed to buy into these digital funds, along with Goldman and BNY's asset management division. It's also worth noting that this comes right after President Trump signed the Genius Act, which gave the greenlight for regulated stable coins. That bill has created a lot of

momentum around blockchain adoption and traditional finance. In fact, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink even said that every stock, every bond, and every fund could end up being tokenized. So yeah, if BlackRock is calling this the future, then it might be a space worth watching. Let's shift gears and talk about Elon Musk's startup XAI. According to the the Wall Street Journal, X-A-I is trying to raise up to $12 billion to buy even more Nvidia GPUs for their next massive data center, which they're calling Colossus 2. And this news comes just weeks after X-AI raised $10 billion through stock and debt sales, and apparently they've already burned through most of that money.

X-AI has been investing a lot of money in building out their AI infrastructure. They built the original Colossus Data Center in Memphis, Tennessee, late last year, which has over 200,000 Nvidia GPUs. But now they're trying to go even bigger. The company says they eventually want to get up to 1 million GPUs to power their AI chat box GROC. No, XAI just launched GROC 4, which they claim beats chat GPT on certain benchmarks.

They also rolled out GROC 4 Heavy, which uses AI agents. That's the hot new thing these days. But building all this infrastructure is coming at a huge cost. XAI is projected to burn through $13 billion. in 2025 alone, which is why they're trying to raise more money. I mean, we'll have to see if all this pays off, because Elon is calling in all the favors to raise this money.

Elon is working with one of his longtime investors, Valor Equity Partners. Valor is kicking in some cash themselves and working with private equity funds to secure the rest of the money in this deal. And this deal is expected to close within weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal. We'll see if this gamble pays off

because Grock is competing against big tech giants that have tons of resources like Google, Meta, and Open AI. You know, Google already has their cloud infrastructure. Meta is dropping a billion dollars on salaries. And OpenAI has the most popular AI app on the planet. So we'll see if Grog can make a dent here. It's clear though, Elon Musk is sparing no expense when it comes to competing. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. And let's start with more meme stocks. Crispy Cream and GoPro are the latest shares to skyrocket this week as we enter into full-on meme stock mania. GoPro stock is up more than 80% this morning and Krispy Kreme is up more than

30% at the time of this recording. And this is happening after both these stocks were up big on Tuesday as well. And just to reiterate, there are no news or deals pushing these stocks higher. It's all vibes and post on Reddit. Retail buyers are jumping into options trading. Krispy Kreme saw over 100,000 call contracts traded on Tuesday, which is equivalent to 71 times the average daily volume over the past four years, according to Bloomberg. And GoPro also saw their highest call volume since 2021, with over 56,000 contracts traded. So it's definitely giving 2021 vibes when GameStop and AMC were doing it. But I feel like it's all happening at a faster pace.

Like Open Door, which started this meme stock cycle this time going from under $1 to over $3, is already losing steam down more than 40% from their highs on Monday. So all I'm saying is, just be careful out there. Now, on the flip side, shares of Texas Instrument are taking a hit this morning after the company's third quarter forecast came in lower than expected. The company reported earnings and their second quarter earnings were decent. Revenues were up 16 percent. Profits were up 15 percent, both beating Wall Street estimates. But their guidance moving forward came in softer than expected.

And the company is a key supplier of semiconductors to automotive and industrial uses and they're expecting a slowdown there. As a result, the stock is down more than 10 percent this morning. side note, I need to see how Texas Instruments graphics calculator business is doing. I wonder if high school kids are still rocking the Ti-84s like we did back in the day. I don't know if they're still doing that or just pushing everything in the chat GPT. If you're in high school or know someone in high school, let me know in the comments if graphic calculators are still a thing. The kids these days don't know, but these graphics calculators is how we kept ourselves entertained in class. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. South Park just signed one of the biggest streaming

deals ever. Paramount agreed to pay South Park $1.5 billion for the exclusive streaming rights to the show. It's a five-year deal which works out to about $300 million a year. The show had been streaming on HBO Max since 2019, but that deal expired in June of this year, so now South Park is headed to Paramount Plus. And to be clear, this deal is to stream the previous 26 seasons of the show. Paramount has a separate deal with the South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, to make new seasons of the show. In fact, the 27th season of South Park is premiering tonight on Comedy Central.

And here's a bonus fun fact. Thanks to a deal signed back in 2007, the South Park creators get half of all the streaming revenues through a joint venture they own with Paramount. Paramount gets the other half. So essentially, Paramount is going to be getting half the money back that they're paying for this deal. Hollywood accounting is weird, man.

But yeah, shout out to South Park. They are still crushing it all these years later. I have no idea if this show is any good. used to watch every episode when I was growing up, but I haven't watched it in a while. I might have to tune back in to see what the vibe is like now. I would imagine they've toned it down since the heyday is like 20 years ago. Or maybe not. I don't know. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. We got a big one for you tomorrow. Tesla and Google both report earnings tonight. A lot of people are going to be paying

attention to Tesla. I'm actually more interested to see how Google's going to do. Everyone's talking about how chat TPT is taking a bite out of their business. We'll get some real numbers tonight. We'll talk all about it on tomorrow's episodes and make sure you guys tune in for that. And if you guys have been enjoying our show and get some value from it and have like eight extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. If you are listening on Spotify, don't forget to vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify.

All that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening and watching. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the help behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.