The Rundown - Intel CEO Steps Down, 'Moana 2' Breaks Thanksgiving Record

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Stock market update for December 2, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zad Admani, and today is Monday, December 2nd. In today's episode, we recap the stock markets performance in November and tell you what to expect in December. We also recap a monster weekend at the box office and tell you about two CEOs that got fired today. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how much we're expected to spend

on Cyber Monday this year. It's the biggest shopping day of the year. All right. Let's go. Last week, the stock market continued to rally. Despite no trading on Thursday and only half-day trading on Friday, all three major indices finished in the green, with the S&P and Dow closing at record highs.

We also closed out the month of November, which was a pretty strong month for stocks. The NASDAQ was up 6.2%. The S&P 500 was up 5.7%, making November the best month of the year for the S&P. And the Dow Jones did the best overall up 7.5%. But no, nobody cares about the Dow. Now we enter the month of December, which has historically been a strong month for the stock market.

The S&P 500 finished higher in December 73% of the time, which is the best percentage of any month. I mean, it's been a strong year for the stock market overall, and it might just get even better. Let's run through some headlines. It was a huge Thanksgiving weekend for the box office. A record, $420 million worth of movie tickets were sold between Wednesday. and Sunday of last week. I mean, a lot of people were at the movies. There was a ton of options as well.

With Mawanna 2 for the kids, you had Wicked and you also had Gladiator 2 for the boys. Those three movies accounted for 75% of the ticket sales. Now, Moana 2 was by far the biggest winner, bringing in more than $221 million over that five-day period. That is a record for any movie during Thanksgiving. In fact, they crushed the previous record. The previous record was by another Disney movie,

Frozen 2, which made $125 million back in 2019. So Moana 2 made almost $100 million more than Frozen 2 did. Now, some people might be shocked about this, but I actually talked about how popular Moana was in an episode last week. Even though the original movie came out in 2016, kids are obsessed with this movie. It's been the most streamed movie this decade. My 5-year-old daughter is one of the people that used to watch Moana on repeat. So I took her to the movies to see Moana 2.

Pretty decent movie. The movie theaters were packed. And yeah, we had a good time. And I actually went to an AMC. So shout out to all the AMC bagholders that are still holding on. Disney has got to be loving this, though. Because remember, over the summer, they had a huge hit in Inside Out 2 and Deadpool. And now Moana, too, looks to be an absolute juggernaut during the holidays.

Let's shift gears and talk a little tech, because we just got some breaking news this morning. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is stepping down. This probably shouldn't be that shocking, you know, because Intel has really struggled this year. Their shares have dropped nearly 50% near to date while their competitors like Nvidia continue to crush it. For example, Intel reported a 6% decline in sales in Q3, while Nvidia's sales nearly double. So Intel is a mess right now. They are going through a restructuring where they plan to spin off their manufacturing business into an independent business unit or maybe an independent publicly traded company.

We'll have to see which direction they go with. And they also recently got an $8 billion grant from the federal government as part of the Chips Act to manufacture more chips in the U.S. So we'll see what happens with Intel. Right now the company's CFO will take over as interim CEO while the company's board looks for a new permanent CEO. They really need to nail this pick because I don't know how much longer Intel can keep screwing around. Markets seem to like this news, though.

Intel stock jumped 5% in reaction to the CEO stepping down. That's got to be a pretty bad feeling, right? When the stock jumps that much after you step down. I also like how the press release said that he was stepping down. I mean, come on, dude probably got fired. And speaking of tech drama, we got some beef between Elon Musk and Open AI. Elon Musk has asked a federal court to block Open AI from becoming a for-profit company.

Now, the reason he's doing this is because that Open AI is trying to block their investors from investing in their competition. And Elon Musk also has an AI company that he calls XAI. And he claims that Open AI's request to their investors to not invest in their competition is anti-competitive behavior. So now he's getting his lawyers involved. I mean, Elon has been beefing with Open AI pretty much all year. Elon filed a lawsuit against Open AI earlier this year, claiming that they violated federal racketeering laws, and now he's claiming that they're violating antitrust laws.

He's not a big fan of OpenAI anymore, even though he was one of the original co-founders and first investors in the company back in 2015. He ended up leaving the company in 2018. Elon Musk claims that he was swindled into thinking that Open AI would remain a non-profit when he originally invested. But he's saying that he was deceived by Open AI's founder, Sam Altman.

So we'll see where all these lawsuits go. It doesn't seem like these lawsuits are having any impact on Open AI so far because Open AI did raise more than $6 billion back in October. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the Gap are up this morning after J.P. Morgan upgraded their price target for this company to $30 a share. The clothing retailer is in the middle of a turnaround right now. The company reported solid earnings a couple weeks ago.

Shout out to their new CEO, Richard Dixon, for turning the company around and for having a pretty cool name. But yeah, JPMorgan sees some upside in the stock and shares of the gap are up around 5% this morning, trading around $25 a share. Tesla also got an upgrade this morning from the investment bang Stifeld. The bank is raising the price target for Tesla to $411 a share. The bank's analysts are bullish on Tesla's self-driving tech and the rollout of the robotaxies. Shares of Tesla jumped around 2% this morning in reaction to this upgrade and are currently trading around $350 a share. Now, on the flip side, it's a tough morning for car manufacturer

Stalantis after their CEO Carlos Tavares announced that he was stepping down. He's been the CEO of Stalantis since January of 2021, and things haven't been so great. Now, Stalantis is one of the biggest car makers in the world. They make cars like Jeeps, Chrysler's, Mazurates, and some other iconic brands. According to their latest earnings report, their sales filled by 20% year over year in Q3. And profits were down 50% in the first half of the year. So that's not good. One of the problems that Stalantis was having is that their cars are more expensive than the

competition that also led to increasing tensions with dealers, suppliers, and even politicians. So Carlos Tavares is out and Stalantis plans to hire a new CEO in 2025. Shares of the company are down more than 6% on this news. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. 13.2 billion dollars is expected to be spent today, Cyber Monday. That would make Cyber Monday the biggest shopping day of the year, even more than Black Friday, which was kind of surprising to me. I always thought that Black Friday was the day that people spent the most amount of money.

It's actually Cyber Monday. According to Adobe Analytics, about $10.8 billion were spent on Black Friday. So Cyber Monday is expected to put up bigger numbers by a pretty decent margin. I guess that kind of makes sense, right? Because today has to be one of the most unproductive days of the year. Because who's actually going to be doing any real work today? Great day to catch up on emails and scroll through Amazon. At least that's what I plan on doing, even though I did do a lot of damage on Black Friday.

So I don't know how much more I can spend on Cyber Monday. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. I thought it might be a slow week, but we already have two CEOs getting fired. So who knows what the rest of the week might have to bring. So make sure you guys are tuning in every day for these quick market recaps. And if you guys enjoy the show, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple and Spotify. Leave a comment on Spotify.

Leave a comment on YouTube. Vote in today's Spotify poll. All that engagement really does help us out. And it helps other people find the show. And if you guys are looking for some extra bonus rundown content, go check out our Saturday deep dive episode where we talked about tariffs. I thought it was a pretty good one. And let us know what other topics

that 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

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