The Rundown - Novo Nordisk Plunges on Guidance Miss, Spotify Reports Surprise Loss

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

Stock market update for July 29, 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 Zaid Admani, and today is Tuesday, July 29th. In today's episode, we'll tell you about a huge railroad merger that could reshape the logistics in the U.S. We'll also recap earnings from Spotify, Boeing, and Nova Nordisk. One of those companies are in deep trouble, and it's not who you think. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how a Canadian vape company

saw their stock jump 500% with the help of crypto. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. The stock market got off to a mixed start on Monday. Things looked strong out of the gate with stocks jumping on the news of the EU trade deal over the weekend. But by the closing bell, most of those gains were gone. The S&P 500 basically finished flat for the day up just 0.02%. In fact, more than two thirds of stocks in the S&P were down on Monday.

The NASDAQ had a little more momentum rising 0.3% thanks to a jump in chip stocks. Now, sticking with trade, we are just a couple days away from the August's first deadline when the pause on reciprocal tariffs is set to expire. And President Trump on Monday said that he plans to move forward with a blanket 15 to 20% reciprocal tariff on imports from countries that don't have a trade deal in place with the U.S. Now, that was somewhat reassuring to the markets because the 15 to 20% range is in line with the deals the U.S. has reached recently with key trading partners like the EU and Japan. Now, the big wildcard here is China. A trade deal between the two largest economies in the world

is still a work in progress. Remember, the two sides agreed to a framework agreement a few months ago in London, and they gave themselves until August 12th to work out the final details. Now, the two sides are meeting in Sweden this week to talk trade, and according to reports, the two sides are expected to extend the tariff truce by another 90 days. So I think the tariff pause on China and the TikTok ban are the two things that we're just going to keep see extended. So yeah, you might be listening to this podcast in 2027 with me saying the same headline over again. But overall, though, at least the markets have clarity now on what to expect with tariffs. Yes, I mean, the rates are higher than what we started the year with, but there's still way below

the Liberation Day shock that we had back in April. And look, it might take a few months to see what kind of impacts the tariffs will have on inflation and company profits, but at least the tariff whiplash seems to be over. And I think the markets can live with that. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with railroad companies. Union Pacific is going full speed ahead on their $85 billion acquisition of their rival North Folk Southern. And this would be the largest rail deal ever.

Now, I know talking about freight rail companies isn't as sexiest talking about AI or self-driving cars. But this would be a big deal because this merger would create the first coast-to-coast. freight rail operator in the U.S., with a network that stretches across 43 states. Union Pacific dominates the west while North Folk Southern owns the east, and together they control nearly 40% of U.S. freight rail. Now, under normal circumstances, this kind of deal probably would get derailed by antitrust regulators. But these days, the rail industry is facing increased competition from trucking.

On top of that, the Trump administration has seemed to be more merger-friendly than the previous administration. So the two rail giants saw this as a window of opportunity to consolidate the market. The combined company would have a market cap of around $200 billion, putting it in the same league as AT&T, Pepsi, and Uber. And it would also put pressure on other rail companies like CSX and Berkshire Hathaway's BNSF, so we might see another rail merger soon. For some context here, the last big merger we had in the industry was Canadian Pacific's $31 billion takeover of Kansas City Southern. That merger created a single line from Canada down to Mexico. Now, this merger is more about dominating the U.S. domestic freight market. And if this deal does go through, it could reshape the

landscape of American logistics. Let's shift gears from rail to self-driving cars, because Google's Waymo just announced plans to expand their Robotaxie service to Dallas, Texas, next year, and they're teaming up with a surprising new partner, Avis, the rental car company. It's part of this partnership, Avis will handle all the behind-the-scenes work required to operate a Robotxy Fleet, like charging the EV robot cars, doing the maintenance on the cars, and managing the depot operations. This is the first time that Waymo is partnering with a rental car company, and both sides say that Dallas is just the beginning. They're planning to expand their partnership to other cities down the road. I mean, it seems like a pretty smart partnership for both sides.

I'm surprised that Waymo didn't do this before. See, now Waymo can just focus on improving the tech behind the Robotaxie and Avis can do what they do best, which is managing a fleet of cars. They've been doing that for decades when it comes to rental cars. I'm sure it's similar when it comes to managing a robot car, right? I also wonder if this sets the table for Avis to eventually start renting out these Waymo autonomous cars to people in the future. No, that could be two, three, maybe five years down the line, but that would be pretty awesome, right?

Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Boeing shares are up this morning after the company posted a smaller than expected loss and showed signs of getting back on track. Boeing has started to increase plane deliveries, especially commercial planes, which was up 63% year over year in Q2. Now, Boeing 737 Max production is still capped to 38 per month by the FAA after that terrifying Alaskan Airlines incident where a door plug ripped off mid-flight back in January of 2024. But Boeing says it plans to request an increase to 42 planes per month later this year. So yeah, Boeing continues to turn things around and the stock is up nearly 2% this morning. Now, on the flip side, Nova Nordisk is in free fall this morning, down more than 20% after the company cut its full year guidance and announced a new CEO. The Danish pharma giant now expects revenue growth of 8 to 14%, which is down from the 13 to 21% range they gave earlier.

And that's mostly due to a slowdown in U.S. sales of their blockbuster weight loss drug, Weigovie and OZemPEC. You know, these days, there's a lot more competition in the GLP1 weight loss space with Eli Lilly's Manjaro and Zepbound gaining market share. And even copycat GLP1s are still eating into WeGovie's growth. To make matters worse for Novo Nordus, their next-gen-gen-gen-obicity drug trials have been disappointing. So the vibes are not great at Novo Nordus. In fact, the company has now lost half its value from its peak last summer.

We might have to do a deep dive on this because it's kind of wild what's going on over there. And finally, let's talk about Spotify. We love Spotify here at the rundown, but their shares are taking a hit this morning after the streaming giant missed Wall Street revenue estimates and swung to an unexpected loss last quarter. The company reported an 86 million euro loss, which was down from a profit of 225 million euros a year ago in Q2. Spotify blamed the surprise loss on higher social charges, which are payroll-related costs,

tied to a rising share price. Now, that says Spotify's subscriber growth was a bright spot. Monthly active users hit 696 million, and premium subscribers came in at 276 million. Both those metrics coming in slightly higher than expected. But I guess that wasn't enough to shake investors' confidence, and Spotify shares are down around 7% this morning. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Crypto treasury companies are all the rage right now thanks to Michael Saylor and MicroStratology

buying up a ton of Bitcoin and seeing their stock price rocket. But this trend is starting to get out of control. The latest company we have jumping on this trend is a Canadian vape pen company called C-E which trades under the ticker symbol VAPE because of course it does. The company saw its stock jump more than 500% after announcing plans to become a treasury for Binance coin. Their plan is to raise $500 million through a private stock sale and just park it all in BNB. That's the crypto token created by Binance, one of the largest exchanges in the world. So yeah, we live in a world where a Canadian vape pen company is now buying a half a billion worth of finance coin.

That sentence right there sounds like a crazy finance madlibs or something. Now, CEA is a small company in the grand scheme of things. Even with the stock jumping over 500%, their market cap is less than $50 million. And their core business has been struggling. Sales of vape pens dropped 59% last year. So yeah, instead of trying to fix the vapeaes, pen business, they're just yoloing half a billion into an alt coin. Makes total sense. I mean, it's hard for me to hate though, because that move is paying off and their stock price is up.

Michael's Saylor and Micro Strategy have just opened the floodgates for every struggling company to pivot to a crypto treasury company. I'm sure this will all end well, right? Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did, and you have like six extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to your podcast. We recently crossed 5,500 5 star ratings on Spotify, and we're also closing in on 50,000 subscribers on Spotify as well, so hopefully we can get there in the next week or two. Again, thank you to everyone that's taking the time to give us a rating and subscribe to the podcast, and a special shout out to everyone that takes the time to comment on these episodes

on Spotify or YouTube. You know, all that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys again for listening. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the help behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys. back here tomorrow.