The Rundown - Micron Posts Monster Quarter, Apple Readies Smart Home Devices

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Market update for October 1, 2026Limited Time Promo: Sign up for a Public account, deposit $1,000 and get $100 in free stock (LINK)Follow us on Instagram (@TheRundownDaily) for bonus content and instant reactions.In today’s episode, Zaid covers:A wild Q3 for stocks and bondsWhy Micron’s monster earnings barely moved the stockApple’s smart-home plans and its new CEO’s push to move fasterAccenture’s earnings jump as AI reshapes its businessGoogle’s new AI model and its aggressive pricingWhy Americans keep carrying cash they rarely spend

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Thursday, October 1st. In today's episode, we'll break down Micron's ridiculous earnings report and why the stock is falling despite their blowout numbers. We'll also tell you about some new products that Apple plans to launch in October. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why everyone just pays with a credit card these days. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go. Wednesday was a mixed day for the stock market. The S&P 500 slipped by 0.3% while the NASDAQ added 0.2%. The S&P was actually in the green for most of the day after the cool PCE inflation report, but then sold off right before the close. We actually covered the PCE report on yesterday's show, so go check that out if you missed it. Now, if you zoom out, September was a mixed back for the market as well. the S&P ended up falling half a percent, while the NASDAQ gained 1.9%.

But if you zoom out even more and look at the full third quarter, the S&P and NASDAQ both gained more than 2%, and both are still up double digits for the year. So I got to say, given everything that's going on right now with the Iran War and rising oil prices and rising interest rates, the market continues to be resilient. And a big reason for that is tech stocks. Four stocks pretty much carried the overall index in Q3, Microsoft meta, and VIII. and Apple each gained more than 10% during the quarter. Meanwhile, when you look at the equal weight S&P 500 index,

which gives every company the same influence on the index instead of the bigger companies dominate, that fell by 2.3% in Q3. And if you look at Russell 2000, which is made up of smaller companies, that index dropped by 7.5% in Q3. And that kind of makes sense to me because the big tech companies are less sensitive to things like rising oil prices and interest rates

compared to smaller companies. Now, speaking of rising interest rates, the 10-year treasury yield did put up a historic quarter, climbing nearly 0.9 percentage points, which is the biggest quarterly increase since 1994. Just to put this into perspective, at the start of July, the 10-year yield was under 4.5%, and now it's over 5.3%. And as I've been talking about for the last few weeks, that impacts things like borrowing costs across the economy, from mortgages and car loans to interest that companies pay on their debt. Another issue for many companies is rising oil prices.

Brent crude jumped about 42% during Q3, which increases input costs for many companies and adds inflation pressure. And rising inflation is what forced the Fed to raise interest rates at the September meeting with more rate hikes on the table. But again, despite all of what I just said, the market is still near record highs. Now, we'll have to see if that continues in Q4 or if something actually breaks. I think once again, earning season is going to be a big test. You know, these companies continue to deliver strong profits like they've had all year.

The market could keep rallying despite all the headwinds that I just talked about. So we'll see what ends up happening. I mean, 2-4 could have a lot of action. We'll continue to stay on top of all of it for you guys. So definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already. And tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Micron.

Micron has been one of the biggest winners of the AI boom. Their stock has gone out more than two. 100% this year because they make memory chips which has seen an explosion in demand from AI data centers. And Micron is cashing in on that demand. Micron reported earnings last night and the numbers honestly sound fake. Revenues came in at $54.2 billion for the quarter, which beat expectations. And what's crazy is a year ago in the same quarter, the company did $11.3 billion. So that means in one year, the company nearly five X their revenues.

which is absolutely insane at this scale. And they're not expecting a slowdown anytime soon. They expect revenues to climb to $61.5 billion in the current quarter, which is also above Wall Street estimates. Now, one of the big stories this year has been the shortage of memory chips, and because of that shortage, Micron can charge pretty much whatever they want for their chips. The company reported a gross margin of 87%.

For some context, Nvidia's gross margin is about 75%. So Micron is out marginating. Nvidia by selling memory chips, which are almost like a commodity. But, you know, despite the monster numbers that I just talked about, Micron stock is actually down 3% this morning. Now, there might be a few reasons for that. One could be that Micron expects their margins to dip to about 86.3% this quarter, which is slightly below the 87. They just reported. And they're saying that's because they have to pay their employees more money. But I think the bigger issue is that Wall Street just doesn't

believe that this memory boom and massive gross margins will last. A memory has a lot of. Memory has historically been a boom and buzz business. When prices go up, companies build more factories, then supply catches up, and then prices tend to crash. And that's probably why Micron currently trades at less than seven times next year's earnings. For context, the S&P 500 as a whole trades at around 18.5 times forward earnings. But look, Micron is trying to break the boom and bus cycle. They're locking customers into five-year deals that include price floors, customer deposits, and commitments to take the chips or pay anyways. So those, those kind of deals give Micron more protection when supply eventually catches up. In fact, the CEO said

that 75% of Micron's 2027 supply is already spoken for. So I think we'll continue seeing a shortage of memory and higher prices for the next couple years, but I still feel like prices will come back down to earth at some point. Again, I could be wrong, but the market seems to think so as well. Let me know the comments on what you guys think. Do you think the market is reading this one wrong? Do you think that Micron will avoid the memory bust this time? And do you think the stock should be trading at a higher multiple. Drop your thoughts on Spotify and YouTube. Let's shift gears and talk about Apple. Apple is gearing up to release some new smartphone devices pretty soon, according to Bloomberg reporter Mark German, who's a friend of the show. He reported that Apple plans to show off their

new smartphone devices on October 13th, including a new Home Hub, an updated HomePod Mini, and a new Apple TV. I have an Apple TV from like five years ago. It's finally starting to show its age, so I'm really looking forward to this. The new sexy item is going to be this home hub which will have a six inch square display that can sit on a countertop or be mounted to a wall. This hub will show you your calendar messages and contacts and it can recognize who is using it so if someone else walks up it can switch to their information. Honestly that sounds like a pretty awesome feature for families. What doesn't sound awesome though is that this hub will be powered by Siri and I hate to say it this new Siri still isn't great. So we'll see what the integration

looks like, I don't have my hopes up there. By the way, the other detail from the Bloomberg report is that we might be getting more frequent product launches from Apple. Apparently, new CEO, John Turnus, wants more frequent product launches throughout the year instead of just concentrating on Apple's traditional spring and fall schedule. John Turnus is also cutting cost at Apple by reducing management layers. In fact, the cost cutting has even reached a holiday party. Some teams were told that they can't bring a plus one this year.

That seems a little silly for a company as profitable as Apple, but Seems like John Turner isn't messing around. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of the consulting firm Accenture are surging this morning after the company reported strong earnings. Essentially is a consulting firm that helps big companies implement technology and run parts of their operations. The stock has been struggling this year down more than 30% because investors were worried

that AI could automate some of that work and undercut the company's business. But this morning's numbers were encouraging. Quarterly revenues grew 7% to $18.7 billion. That beat expectations. And new bookings came in at $22.2 billion versus roughly the $20 billion at Wall Street expected. So Ascensure is not dead yet. In fact, they're growing their business faster than expected.

And Ascensure has made some headlines recently signing some big clients. A couple weeks ago, we talked about how Ascensure signed a deal with Anthropic to test their models for AI safety. Accenture also announced deals with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services during the quarter. So Accenture seems to be finding their groove again. And you know, I think with AI advancing so fast these days, many corporations might turn to Accenture for implementation help. Essential stock is up more than 15% this morning following their earnings, and it could be

a start of a turnaround. Sticking with the winners, let's talk about Google. Their parent company, Alphabet stock is up around 2% in pre-market trading today after they showed off a new AI model called Gemina. for Argonne. Now, Google has been kind of quiet this year when it comes to new models. Anthropic and Open AI kind of stole their spotlight. But Google says their new Argon model beats the top models from OpenAI and Anthropic on things like coding and math. Now, that's based on Google's internal tests. We'll have to see how the model performs when

it actually gets released to the public, which it hasn't yet, but I can't wait to try it. The other story here is the price that Google is releasing it at. Argon launches at an introductory price that is half of Anthropics' top model and one-fifth of Open AIs model. Now, obviously, it helps that Google makes a ton of money from their search business, so they can afford to subsidize their new models. What I really want Google to release is a personal AI agent app, kind of like how Meta has Muse. You know, if they release something like that with all the data they have on people from emails,

calendars, Google Docs, I mean, that could be huge, and I think it could spark a rally in their stock similar to what we've seen in meta over the last month because of Muse. If you zoom out on Google stock chart, the stock is only up 8% this year, which is underperforming the S&P. But who knows, maybe they've been cooking in the lab and we could be in for a strong Q4 if Argon is legit. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Credit cards have now become the most common payment method in the U.S. The Pew Research Center just published how payment habits have changed over the past decade. The results aren't that shocking.

These days, people are using cash way less and using credit cards, way more. Back in 2015, cash accounted for about a third of all payments. By 2025, that fell to just 14%. This is according to the Federal Reserve payment data. Credit cards, on the other hand, went from 18% of payments in 2015, up to 34% of all payments by 2025, making them the most common payment method overtaking debit cards. Debit card usage has actually stayed relatively steady over the last decade at around 30% of payments. And honestly, I think the rise of credit card rewards are are a big reason for this. Pretty much every credit card these days

have solid perks and cash back. So it makes sense to just pay everything with a credit card as long as you pay off your balance every month. Now interestingly enough, cash isn't totally dead. According to the survey, 46% of Americans say they carry cash always or most of the time. So people are carrying cash, they're just not using it to buy stuff.

And I feel like the survey describes me perfectly. At this point, I pretty much always pay with a credit card, but I do like to keep 20 to 50, bucks in my wallet at all times, you know, just in case. What I want to know is, is there anyone out there still paying everything with cash these days? Like just the other day, I was at the grocery store and I saw someone in front of me pull out a wad of cash to pay for their groceries. I don't think I've seen that in a long time. If you're someone that's still using cash most of the time, please let me know in the comments on Spotify or YouTube.

Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.