The Rundown - Nike Sinks After Earnings, Weak Jobs Report Sends Stocks Higher

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Market update for October 2, 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 surprisingly weak jobs report—and why Wall Street is cheeringNike’s disappointing outlook and the question hanging over its comebackAnthropic’s push to go public before Thanksgiving at a potential $2 trillion valuationOnsemi’s deal makeover and the threat rattling Seagate and Western DigitalChina’s electric-truck boom and Tesla’s plans to ramp up the Semi

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Friday, October 2nd. In today's episode, we'll break down a surprisingly weak jobs report and why Wall Street is actually happy about it. We'll also tell you about Nike's earnings and why I think they might be fully cooked. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why electric semi-trucks are taking over China and why Tesla is trying to do the same here in the U.S.

We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks kicked off the fourth quarter with a small win on Thursday. The S&P 500 was up 0.2% snapping a three-day losing streak, while the NASDAQ finished basically flat as the bond market finally gave us a little breather. After hitting its highest level in 24 years this week, the 10-year treasury yield finally dipped to about 5.5.2. to 4% on Thursday, snapping a seven-day streak of rising yields.

But the big MacR News this morning is the September jobs report. It just dropped this morning, and it was a big miss. The economy added just 29,000 jobs last month, way below the 84,000 jobs that economists were expecting. On top of that, the summer months got revised down by a combined 60,000 jobs with July actually going negative. Not to mention, the unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.2%. So this report puts the Fed.

in a really tricky spot. Remember, the Fed hiked interest rates at the September meeting and they hinted at more rate hikes in the future. But they might have to hold off on hiking rates now because of this week jobs report because they don't want to slow down the economy even further and make the labor market conditions even worse. The market is now pricing in an 85% chance that the Fed does not hike at the October meeting. A week ago, those odds were just 25%. So there's been a big vibe shift over the last week or so on what the Fed will do. And that's why the stock market is loving that. flying this morning at the time of this recording. And this is one of those cases where bad news for the economy was good news for the stock market. It just goes to show you how fast the vibes

can change here. We'll keep tracking how this plays out. I think we're in for a pretty wild Q4. So make sure you guys are subscribed for the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Nike. Nike reported earnings last night, and I gotta be honest, it was another rough one. Revenues for the company fell 4% last quarter to $11.2 billion missing expectations. Profits did come in a bit better than expected at 48 cents a share compared to the 43 cents expected. The bigger problem for Nike though was the outlook. Nike now expects sales to fall by high single digit percentages this year, while analysts were expecting a drop of about 2%. In fact, Nike is now expecting their lowest yearly sales since 2020, which is a year to be a year. that COVID shut down the world.

And when you dig into the numbers, China remains a huge problem. Sales there have dropped 26% making that the ninth straight quarter of declines. Honestly, at this point, I think Nike might have completely lost the Chinese market to local Chinese brands like Anta and Li Ning. But this goes beyond just China.

Nike's sportswear division is down double digits. Converse is down 28%. And the Jordan brand is also struggling. The only bright spot that I could find from the earnings report was North America where sales were up 2%. When 2% growth is the bright spot, that just tells you how deep trouble Nike is in right now. So yeah, Nike stock has taken a beating this morning. It's down more than 8%.

And remember, Nike was already down nearly 50% this year. At this point, I don't know what it's going to take for Nike to turn things around. Like, the brand is just not cool anymore like it once was. My take on the whole Nike situation is that Nike became a household brand with incredible marketing in the 80s and 90s with Michael Jordan, and then they had LeBron and Kobe in the early 2000s. But marketing back then was about cool TV commercials and billboards and stuff. That stuff doesn't work anymore. Nike can't seem to compete with the up-and-coming brands and the constantly changing taste on social media. So even if Nike ran their 90s playbook, I don't think it's going to

work anymore. Maybe I'm being too pessimistic here, but yeah, Nike just might be cooked. It's been almost two years since Elliott Hill took over as CEO, and after some initial hype, I mean, he hasn't made things any better. Now, the company is still trying to turn things around. They revealed a new restructuring plan called PACE. This plan includes doing layoffs beginning in 2027. The company says they expect about $2.5 billion in savings through fiscal 2031, alongside a roughly $1 billion in restructuring charges.

Nike can keep cutting costs to protect their profits while their sales keep falling, but it doesn't answer the question of what Nike is going to do to bring customers back to buying Nike again. Maybe they have to get longtime board member Tim Cook to come in and take over his CEO to save the company. Or maybe they need to put Sidney Sweeney in more ads. I heard that seems to help as well. So let me know what you guys think. Do you think that Nike will make a comeback or is Nike just fully past its prime?

Top for thoughts in the comments on Spotify and YouTube. Let's shift gears and talk about Anthropic real quick because Bloomberg just reported that Anthropic is planning to go public by mid-November. In fact, they want to do it before Thanksgiving. According to this Bloomberg report, Anthropic expects this IPO to match or even beat SpaceX's record IPO from back in June, with investors targeting a $2 trillion valuation, which is absolutely crazy. I mean, if you think about it, Anthropic didn't exist six years ago, and soon they might become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Again, I'm really curious to see how this whole IPO process is going to play out.

You know, the first step is going to be the S-1 where we get a peek at the financials. What do they like? How profitable is the company? I mean, there are so many questions right now, and we should be getting answers pretty soon. But, you know, I think it's pretty smart for Anthropic to IPO right now with OpenAI delaying their IPO to next year. Because every fund manager and retail investor who wants AI exposure beyond just the chip stocks is going to want to get a piece of Anthropic. So I can't wait. And, of course, we'll break everything down here on this show as we get closer to the IPO.

So definitely get subscribed if you haven't already. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of On Semi and Synaptics are both up this morning after On Semi reworked their deal to buy synaptics. Now, some quick background here, On Semi is a company that makes chips for automotive and industrial markets. Back in June, they agreed to buy a company called Synaptics, which designs chips and software for edge AI cases. So things like robotics and self-driving cars. As part of that initial deal, On was paying $7 billion in a all-stock deal. The problem is that on stock has dropped by about a third since the summer.

So that lowers the value of the deal. So On has now come back and reworked the deal and they've agreed to pay $123 a share in cash, which values Synaptic at $5.7 billion total. Synaptics shareholders are happy about this because they now get cash instead of the on-semies stock, which was worth less. And on-semi-shareholders are happy because the company won't have to issue new stock to pay for the deal and therefore not diluting existing shareholders. So it seems to be a win-win scenario.

That's why shares of OnSemi are up around 7% this morning, while Synaptics is up around 14%. Now, on the flip side, shares of Seagate and Western Digital are both getting hammered this morning. These two companies make hard drives, which has seen a huge surge in demand because of the amount of data in AI data centers. And the hard drive market is currently dominated

by three major companies. You have Seagate, you have Western Digital, and you have Toshiba. Well, according to a report from the Niki, Toshiba plans to invest about $400 million to double their hard drive production capacity by fiscal 2027. And more capacity from Toshiba could put pressure on pricing. This is very similar to the Micron story that we covered yesterday. Whether it's the AI memory trade or the AI storage trade, they're built on shortages.

Right now, these big tech companies are desperate to get their hands on memory and hard drives. So the few companies that make this stuff get to charge whatever they want. That's why Micron's gross margins are at 8. 87% right now. But as these companies start adding more capacity, that's going to reduce the pricing power of these companies. And that's why shares of Seagate are down 11% and Western Digital is down 7% at the time of this recording. If you zoom out, though, a Seagate stock was up 240% this year coming into today. It was one of the best performing stocks in the S&P. And Western Digital stock was up 170%. So investors are using this as an opportunity to take some profits while they can. Let's wrap the show with a fun. In fact, electric semi-trucks are on pace to account for nearly one-third of all trucks sold in China this year. For some context here, a couple of years ago, that share was just 8%. In fact, sales have jumped almost 80% in the first half of this year compared to last year,

and a big reason this is happening right now is because of rising diesel prices. Bloomberg got a whole story about this. It's a great read. One truck driver in China told Bloomberg that it cost him about $30 to charge his truck, which is less than a third of what he used to pay to fill up on diesel. Now, these electric trucks do cost about 50% more up front, but with the lower operating cost today compared to diesel, you can make up that difference within two years.

It also probably helps that China has supported adoption with subsidies and investments in charging and battery swapping stations. Here in the U.S., electric semi-trucks aren't really a thing, even though Tesla is trying to change that. The company actually made their first delivery last week, almost nine years after Elon Musk first showed off the first Tesla semi. Now, Tesla did deliver their first pilot production semi-trucks to PepsiCo back in December of 2022, but it's been a slow rollout.

That being said, Tesla is ready to press their foot on the gas, no pun intended. The company said their goal is to scale up their new Nevada factory and eventually build 50,000 semi-trucks a year. On top of that, Elon Musk said that the semi-truck should be driving by itself by the end of this year or early next year. I'm not sure if I'm quite ready to believe that timeline, but you know, self-driving semi-trucks does sound really cool and also kind of terrifying. The big issue right now with electric semi-trucks in the U.S. is that the charging infrastructure is very limited along freight routes. So there's going to have to be a lot of investment in the infrastructure to see

a wider adoption. Not to mention these trucks are more expensive and heavier because of the batteries. Right now, the long-range version of the Tesla semi can go up to 500 miles fully loaded, on one charge. I don't know if that's going to be good enough for a truck driver. So there's going to have to be a lot of charging stations for more and more companies to buy these trucks. That being said, a coalition of major shippers did recently place an order for 2,500 of the Tesla semis. And you know, with diesel being expensive, maybe more and more companies will make that investment moving forward. Let me know what you guys think. Do you think electric semi-trucks are the future or is it just not practical at this point?

Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. heads up. We have a great interview coming this weekend. We're talking all things Apple, so definitely keep an eye on your podcast feed for that. 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 for the interview.