The Rundown - Nike Says Its Worst Days Are Over, Uber in Talks for Pony AI Investment

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Stock market update for June 27, 2025. Check out the Leading Indicator podcast.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 Zadadmani, and today is Friday, June 27th. In today's episode, we'll tell you the latest on the trade deal between the U.S. and China. We'll also dive into Nike's earnings and their plans to turn around the company. Then stick around to the end of the show for some listener questions. We've got a great show for you today. Let's go.

Stocks continued to rally on Thursday with the S&P 500 jumping 0.8% and the NASDAQ was up nearly 1%. And man, we came so close to hitting record highs yesterday. I'm talking a few points away for both indices. But we might finally get over the top today after we got some news that the U.S. and China have agreed to a trade deal. President Trump casually mentioned this at the White House yesterday and Chinese officials confirmed it this morning. Now, we don't have full details of this trade deal just yet, but reports say that this deal

is based on the talks the two sides had earlier this year in Geneva and London. So hopefully we'll get some more details soon on that trade deal. And then on top of that, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik said yesterday, the U.S. is nearing agreement with 10 other trading partners as well. So we got a lot of good news this week, starting with the ceasefire between Israel and Iran, and now this trade deal with China and potentially 10 other countries. investors are eating this up and the markets are set to hit record levels to close out the week. If we do hit record highs today, what an incredible way to wrap up the first half of 2025.

Let's run through some headlines, starting with Nike. Nike has been in a slump for a few years now and their latest earnings show that they're still trying to find their footing. Nike's revenues were down 12% to $11.1 billion last quarter and their profit. profits collapsed to just $211 million down from the $1.5 billion a year ago. Companies been losing ground to newer, busier brands like On and Hoka, which is impacting their sales all over the world. Their sales were down 11% in North America, 21% in China, and 9% across Europe and the Middle East.

And then just to add some extra pressure to Nike, the company says that tariffs are expected to cost them about a billion dollars this fiscal year. See, most of their production still happens in Vietnam and China, so they're looking to shift parts of their supply chain and maybe even raise prices to offset that hit. Now, there is some good news here. Nike says they expect the worst to be behind them. Their new CEO, Elliot Hill, is leading the turnaround of the company

by rebuilding relationships with retailers like Foot Locker and even Amazon. In fact, Nike is back to selling on Amazon for the first time since 2019. The company is also clearing out old inventory and planning to ramp up their marketing. and the early signs of this turnaround are promising, foot traffic to their stores are stabilizing, and some of their new running and training shoes are sold out. So we'll see if Nike can pull off to comeback here. Investors did like the new game plan.

Nike stock is up around 10% this morning in reaction to the earnings. But I mean, just zooming out a bit, they have a lot of ground to make up. Nike stock is down more than 30% in the last 12 months, and it's down over 60% from all-time highs, which was set back in 2021. Let's shift gears and talk about Uber. Uber is in talks with their founder and former CEO Travis Kalenik to help him acquire the

U.S. arm of the Chinese self-driving company, Pony AI. This is according to reporting from the New York Times. Now, this is pretty interesting because Travis Kalenik was famously forced out of Uber eight years ago and he left the board of the company back in 2019. But now the two sides might be teaming up together. So don't ever be afraid to text your X, guys. Now, the company they're looking to acquire is Pony AI, which was founded in 2016 in Silicon Valley, and they went public last year with Toyota as their biggest shareholder, owning around 16% of the company.

But Pony's main business is in China, and that's becoming a problem because new U.S. rules say that autonomous driving software can't be operated or maintained by Chinese entities, which means that Pony needs to sell off its U.S. division. And that's where Uber and Travis Kalenik come in. If this deal goes through, Travis Kalanik would take over running ponies U.S. operation and he'd work closely with Uber's current CEO, Dara Koshu Shahi. The reason that Uber is doing this is that competition in the robotaxy space is heating up. Uber sees robo taxis as their biggest growth opportunity, but it's also an existential threat for the company. Right now, Waymo is expanding into multiple cities and Tesla just started their robo taxi service in Austin.

So Uber needs to step up their game before they potentially get replaced. Since Uber's acquisition of the self-driving truck startup Auto in 2016 went sideways due to legal issues, Uber has pivoted to partnering with Robotaxies rather than building out their own autonomous tech. The company says they have 18 partnerships with AV companies, including Waymo, and they're aiming to bring all driverless cars into the Uber network. So this deal with Pony AI could shake things up when it comes to Robotaxies. Now, to add to the drama, Travis Kalenik just followed Tesla's Robotaxy account on Twitter. So there's a lot going on behind the scenes.

I wonder if Elon makes a move at Travis and hires him to run the robo taxi team. So we're going to keep an eye on this space, including Pony AI. Their stock did jump more than 12% on Thursday after this report. An Uber stock hit all-time highs earlier this week. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Core Scientific shares are surging on reports that the company is in talks to be bought out by CoreWeave. Core Scientific is a digital infrastructure company that powers Bitcoin mining and AI workloads.

CoreWeve actually tried to buy the company last year for $5.75 a share, but Core Scientific thought that offer was too low. Instead, Core Scientific preferred to continue working as partners with CoreWeave. The two companies have been working together for years now, and in last June, they inked several 12-year contracts worth over $10 billion for Core Scientific to provide megawatts to host CoreWeaves's operation. And that partnership helped Core Scientific emerge from bankruptcy in January and refocus on AI infrastructure and relist on the NASDAQ.

Fast forward to today and the company's market cap is five times higher than it was a year ago. Shares of the company closed up 33% yesterday and they're adding to those gains today. Now on the flip side, shares of concentrics, a firm focused on selling customer experience technology is seeing its shares dropped this morning after missing earnings estimates for Q2. The company did beat revenue estimates for the quarter and the company expects its AI investments that contribute to growth by year end. But that wasn't enough for investors. Shares of the company are down nearly 9% this morning on this news.

Let's wrap the show with some listener questions. First question is from Familia on Spotify. They asked, do you all think Apple will get ahead or caught up in AI by buying talent out? You know, Apple could make a lot of moves when it comes to AI. They could start spending unlimited amount of money like Zuckerberg is doing at Meta. Maybe they could acquire a AI company. But that's not really in Apple's DNA. The largest acquisition that Apple has ever made was Beats by Dre for $3 billion back in 2014.

And they might be too far behind an AI compared to companies like Google and OpenAI, which have been working on AI for a decade now. But that doesn't mean that Apple can't win here. They still make some incredible hardware that a lot of people have and they're probably not going to switch from. So they could partner with a leading AI company and integrate that AI tech on their phones. I actually talked more about Apple's AI plans with Trung Fan on the leading indicator podcast. We had a really fun conversation that episode should be dropping sometime today. We'll put a link in the description for that podcast feed.

So go check that out if you guys want to learn more. Now, sticking with the AI theme, the next question we have is from Ethan Smith on Spotify. He said with Zuck investing so much into bringing huge names in for Meta AI, what is meta's goal with all this? Are they looking to get into some AI products like OpenAI is teasing? I can't see how all of these investments will pay off significantly right now. I mean, yeah, Zuck handing out $100 million signing bonuses to any AI engineer he can find is pretty shocking.

But I mean, META has some pretty obvious use cases for AI. They can make their ads better on their platforms with AI. They could offer creators on their platform better tools when it comes to editing and content creation using AI. They also have their meta-rayband glasses and their VR glasses that are coming. And I think the reason that Zuck is just dropping so much money here is, is because he realizes that meta is far behind other competitors like OpenAI and Google, and he must believe that AI is that transformative of a technology where he doesn't want to be behind.

So for Zug, dropping a few billion dollars here or there is worth it because the upside is so much higher. Right now, investors don't seem to be punishing Zuck for spending all that money. Meta's stock is up more than 20% this year and they're hovering near all-time highs. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. It's been a pretty good week, I gotta say, and we might cap it off with stocks hitting all-time highs. By the way, keep an eye out for our deep dive episode coming out this weekend. It's about LaBoo's.

If you guys don't know what that is, you're about to find out because these things have taken over the internet, and the company behind them is profiting. So we'll talk more about that. Keep an eye on your podcast feed for that episode. And while you're at it, don't forget to hit us with a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast. All that engagement really does help us out, and it helps other people find this. show. 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 this weekend for the deep dive.