The Rundown - Nvidia Unveils New AI Chips, Market Awaits Fed's Rate Outlook

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Stock market update for March 19, 2025.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zad Admani, and today is Wednesday, March 19th. In today's episode, we preview the Fed meeting and why the markets are hoping for Jerome Powell to save the day. We also recap all the big announcements from Nvidia yesterday, including how Nvidia is getting involved with Taco Bell. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how long two astronauts have been stuck in space and how they finally. made it home. Got a great show for you today. Let's go. Well, the markets were back in the red on Tuesday. Stocks sold off across the board with the S&P 500 down 1.1%. And the NASDAQ down 1.7%. Tech

stocks continued to get hit the hardest. All seven stocks in the Magnificent 7 were down with Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla all losing more than 3%. So this is a very different environment than what we had in 2024. Now, today should be very interesting because we have the Fed meeting, which we've been hyping up all week. At 2 p.m. Eastern time today, the Fed will make a decision on interest rates, and there's a 99% chance, according to the CME Fed watch tool, that the Fed keeps the rates the same. So that's not the interesting part. What is going to be interesting is getting an updated outlook from the Fed on what they think about the economy and also get an updated projection on the number of rate cuts they expect to do this year. In the last projection, the Fed expected to cut rates twice this

year. But since the last Fed meeting on January 29th, a lot has changed. The S&P 500 has dropped around 7% since then. And there's been some economic uncertainty around tariffs and President Trump's overall economic policy. So I wonder what the Fed feels about that. Maybe they increase the number of projected rate cuts this year. That's definitely something to keep an eye on. And also what Jerome Powell says at the press conference today should be really interesting. You know, I bet he's going to get a lot of question about tariffs and Trump. So I will see how he handles that. I think investors are hoping the Fed will inject some calm and confidence back in the markets.

Or, you know, Jerome Powell could cause some more mayhem. It could go either way. And that's why I'll be tuning into the press conference and watching the market's reaction. We're going to recap the best stuff from the Fed meeting in tomorrow's episodes and make sure you guys are subscribed to the pod to stay in the loop. Also, I wonder if Jerome Powell will switch up his tie game at this meeting. He's been wearing purple forever, but might be time to switch it up because markets aren't doing so hot right now. Let's run through some headlines.

And we got to start with Nvidia. The Nvidia GTC developer conference kicked off this week that some people are calling the AI Super Bowl. And yesterday afternoon, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave a keynote address and my man was cooking. Now, most of the announcements were very technical and nerdy because remember, this conference is for developers. Jenison started off by hyping up Nvidia's graphics cards, because remember, Nvidia still makes those and they are technically still a graphics cards company. He continued by hyping up Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips and Blackwell AI racks and said the Blackwell Ultra ships are coming out later this year. He also previewed the next generation of AI chips that they're calling Vera Rubin, which are expected to launch next year. So it looks like Nvidia is taking a page out of Apple's playbook and planning to launch a new AI chip.

every year at this point. I wonder if AI chips are going to turn into iPhones where the performance of the new chip isn't that much better than the previous one, and so maybe corporations don't upgrade every year. But Jensen doesn't seem to be so concerned about that. Now, beyond just new chips, Jensen also announced some corporate partnerships.

NVIDIA is partnering with GM to help build their self-driving car fleet. They're also partnering with Taco Bell's parent company, Yum, to accelerate the use of AI at their restaurants. So maybe in the near future, Taco Bell is going to know as soon as I pull up my car, then I'm ordering a Chalupa for the third time that week.

And no shame in that. And finally, Jensen also showed off some robots, which I predicted he was going to do at yesterday's show. Invidia has created an AI model specifically for robots, and they even showed off a humanoid robot doing some chores, which was running on Nvidia's model. So overall, it was a pretty awesome presentation. There was a massive screen on stage with great visuals.

There was also physical chips and robots on stage. And again, Jensen was in his bag. In fact, he started the keynote saying that there was no teleprompter or script, which is very impressive. I mean, doing that just off the dome, props to Jensen, man. The dude has aura, like I said yesterday. And the other thing that I noticed was there was so many corporate logos on screen that it looked like an F1 car.

Like every company was trying to associate themselves with Nvidia right now. But, you know, despite the great keynote address and all the hype around this event, invidia stock barely moved. In fact, it was down more than 3% yesterday. and it's up just 1% this morning. So not a huge jump, which might be another indication that the AI height, it's just not the same anymore. I mean, VINDA is out here showing robots and state-of-the-art chips. The market's like, eh, not impressed.

Let's shift gears and talk about the Trump administration. According to latest reports, the Trump administration is considering major funding cuts for domestic HIV prevention, and that's hurting shares of drug makers like Gilead. The plans, which are said to include deep layoffs to the CDC, could cover. as soon as this week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CDC has had a division of HIV prevention since the 80s, and last year the CDC was allocated $1.4 billion for the prevention of HIVs and other sexually transmitted infections. Now, Gilead is the maker of Bix-Tarvey and Discovery.

These are two drugs used to prevent and treat the virus. Gilliet has been pushing to get approval for its next-generation prevention treatment, which Morgan Stanley has estimated could generate more than $6 billion a year in sales by 2030. So I wonder if cuts to the CDC will end up delaying these next generation of drugs. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of Signate Jewelers, which owns brands like Blue Nile, K Jewelers, and Jared is up big this morning after delivering better than expected earnings and a strong sales forecast moving forward. Looks like people are out here buying overpriced diamonds again.

Their stock is up almost 20% this morning. What was also well received by investors was that Cigna plans to move about 10% of its stores out of malls to other types of locations. Signet used to get about 65% of its sales from malls about a decade ago, but now that's only about 35% according to the CEO. Malls are getting cooked. Now on the flip side, shares of General Mills are falling this morning after the food giant cut its sales and profit outlook for the year. General Mills says it's dealing with a ton of headwinds, including high competition, and lower demand for salty snacks per Reuters. We've talked about some of the challenges

that snack companies are having in our weekend deep dive episode. So go check that out if you want to learn more about the struggles in the snack industry. And General Mills right now is the perfect example of that. Their shares are down more than 4% today on this news. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. Two NASA astronauts are finally home after being stuck in space for nine months.

Astronauts Sonny Williams and Butch Wilmore went to space last summer, and they weren't expected to be there for like a week. Well, unfortunately, the Boeing Starliner, which they took to get to space, it had a bit of issues. Boeing famously had a bad run in 2024. I'm surprised they took the Starliner even up to space. NASA warned that it was too risky for the astronauts to return home on the Boeing Starliner. So the Boeing Starliner was sent back to Earth unmanned, and the astronauts kind of had to hang out at the space station. Fast forward nine months, the astronauts are finally back home on Earth.

thanks in large part to SpaceX. The astronauts boarded the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle on Monday night and they touched down on Earth last night. I wonder if it gets boring up there, you know? I mean, yeah, I'm sure it's cool for like the first couple weeks, but after that, I'd probably

be kind of annoyed. Especially if the Wi-Fi is bad? Like, having to watch YouTube videos on 720P? Yeah, that's not fun. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Did you guys enjoy today's episode? Consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple or spot- Vote in today's Spotify poll.

Leave us a comment on Spotify. All that engagement really does help us out, and it helps other people find the 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 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 of the guests.

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