The Rundown - SoftBank to Invest $100B in U.S., Drone Stocks Take Off

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Stock market update for December 17, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Admani, and today is Tuesday, December 17th. In today's episode, we tell you about TikTok's plan to avoid a band, including an interesting comment from Donald Trump. We also discussed Waymo's first international expansion and Masa Sun's plans to invest $100 billion in the U.S. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out which app was the most downloaded in 2024.

Honestly, the top two were kind of surprising to me. All right, let's go. The stock market started the week off breaking records. Well, at least the NASDAQ did. The S&P 500 was up 0.4%. And the NASDAQ really stole the show up 1.3% to close at a new record high. Big tech stocks continue to cook. Apple, Google, and Tesla all closed at record highs.

And I think I should mention Broadcom again, because it's getting Nvidia levels of hype right now. The chipmaker jumped another 11% on Monday after rallying 25% on Friday and crossing $1 trillion in market cap. I know that last week I said that Broadcom had no Riz for a trillion dollar company. I gotta say they've gone full Rizzler lately and they're catching the attention of investors. Broadcom stock has gone up more than 40% within the last week, which is just nuts. And speaking of NVIDIA, it's catching a rare L right now.

NVIDIA shares are down 10% from its all-time highs that it's set back in November. So it's technically in a correction right now. The Broadcom is stealing all the hype from NVIDia. Also, the Dow has gone down for eight days in a row. So good time to be a Dow hater. Just saying. Now, I forgot to mention this on yesterday's show, but this is the last full week for the stock market in 2024.

The next two weeks are a short week because the markets will be closed on Christmas and New Year's. Now, this week, everyone has their attention to the Fed meeting, which is happening on Wednesday, but there are a couple notable companies reporting earnings this week as well. Nike, FedEx, and Darden restaurants, which is the parent company of Olive Garden, all report earnings on Thursday. So we'll recap these earnings later in the week. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Nike has to say. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already. Let's run through some headlines. The TikTok ban is set to go into place on January 19th, and TikTok is really hoping the Supreme Court will temporarily block this ban.

TikTok is appealing the law that would ban the app saying that it violates their First Amendment rights. Now, TikTok's legal challenges haven't been successful so far. Appeals court recently ruled against them. But TikTok is appealing this case all the way to the Supreme Court. And they want the Supreme Court to temporarily block this law while the Supreme Court hears the case. That's not an unusual request. So it could happen. Now, just as a reminder, this law was passed back in April of this year with bipartisan support on the grounds of national security.

This law requires that TikTok's parent company, BightDans, which is based in China, to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company or face a ban. Now, BightDance doesn't seem to want to sell the app, so they're fighting the ban in court. They don't have a lot of time, though. By the way, TikTok's CEO, Shao Z. Shu actually met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago yesterday. I wonder what those two talked about. What's interesting is that in a press conference on Monday, Trump was asked about the TikTok ban, and he said that he actually had a warm spot in his heart for TikTok.

So I don't know what's going to happen, man. Six months ago, if you asked me, I would have said there was no shot of this band going through. Now, I don't know. By the way, Trump was pretty busy on Monday. He also met with Japanese CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son. Masa Son is a legendary investor. We don't have enough time to cover all the investments that Masa has made.

This dude has made some of the best and some of the worst investments of all time. Look up Masa Sun. We work if you want more insight on that. We might have to do a deep dive episode on this. But yeah, Masa Son, with Trump on Monday and he announced plans to invest at least $100 billion in U.S. projects over the next four years, which he thinks could create over 100,000 jobs focused on AI and other emerging tech. Masa is getting back into the game. We are so back. Now, I mentioned Masa's son is Japanese,

and he might soon be able to take a robot taxi from his private jet to his house when he's back in Tokyo. Because Waymo announced they're going to start testing autonomous cars in Tokyo in early 2025. Now, this is a pretty big deal because this would mark Waymo's first international expansion. Waymo said they're going to start by mapping the streets of Tokyo and doing a close course test in the U.S. to mimic driving conditions in Japan. Because, yeah, I imagine they're a lot different than driving conditions in Phoenix or L.A. Waymo has been on a role lately. They're expanding to many cities in the U.S. next year, including Austin, Atlanta, and Miami, and now they're going to Tokyo. I got to say, it's been a pretty great couple of weeks for Waymo's parent

company Google. Quantum computing, new AI models, now Waymo expansion. They are on a role, and that's why their stock has been ripping over the last few days, hitting all-time highs. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Let's start with drone stocks. There's been a lot of talk about drones these days with those mystery drones flying over New Jersey, and investors are now paying attention to drone stocks now. Dron stocks had a big day on Monday. A drone company he called Red Cat Holdings saw their stock jump 25% on Monday after announcing a partnership with Palantir. Another drone stock catching people's attention is unusual machines. This drone maker will have Donald Trump Jr. joined their board and their shares jumped 18% on Monday. But it looks

like both these stocks are giving back some of those gains. Unusual machine stock is down around 4% in pre-market trading and Red Cat Holding stock is down 15% after they release their quarterly results and reported a loss of 18 cents a share on $1.5 million of revenue. That's not a lot of revenue. This is a pretty tiny company, but yet they still have a market cap of nearly a billion dollars. This stock has been on fire this year. It's up more than a thousand percent and it's currently one of the most talked about stocks on Reddit's Wall Street bets. So anything could happen at this point. It's already having a pretty wild week. Now speaking of mysteries, let's talk about the health insurance industry because insurance stocks are having a tough week. Shares of insurance companies like

CVS, Cigna, and United Health fell on Monday and continued to slide this morning after Donald Trump made comments about eliminating pharmacy benefit managers or PBMs. In a press conference on Monday, Trump called PBMs middlemen and blamed them for higher prescription drug costs in the U.S. And he wants to eliminate them. PBMs seemed to be getting a lot of attention from lawmakers. Last week, a bipartisan bill was introduced to force insurance companies to spin off PBMs. So I've no idea where this is all going to go. But investors seem to be kind of I'm kind of nervous right now. Insurance companies have been on a slide for the last couple weeks, and they continue to slide today. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. The most downloaded iPhone app in the U.S. in 2024 was Timu. This is according to the list that Apple released yesterday. Not going to lie, I was kind of surprised by that. Like, I know that Timu has been pretty popular in the U.S. for a couple years now because we're all addicted to buying cheap stuff from China. Guilty as charged, by the way, all right? I use it all the time. I just didn't expect their app to be number.

Number one. Actually, now that I'm looking at this list, I think the second most downloaded app might be even more surprising. According to this list, Threads was the second most downloaded app on the app store in 2024. Threads is Facebook's Twitter clone. I might need to start using threads more. Now to round out the top five is TikTok at number three, chat GPT at number four, and Google at number five. Those all kind of make sense. Now, this list could look pretty different next year because TikTok might be banned, so it's not going to be on this list. And if Trump goes forward with major tariffs against China, well, that could impact Timo's business. So yeah, I feel like this list could look pretty different in 2025. Well, all right, guys, that's the

rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. By the way, we did record this episode at a slightly different time than usual. Typically, we record our shows the morning of that they are released. Mike, Connor, and I wake up super early every morning to do the research for the show, to write the show, and then ultimately record and publish the show every morning. And we try to incorporate the latest news from that day. But for this show, I'm recording it. on Monday night because I'm going in for eye surgery on Tuesday morning. So if we miss any major breaking news from Tuesday morning, our bad. But we will cover it on Wednesday show, so just stick around for that.

There's probably going to be something crazy that it happens on Tuesday morning. I know it. 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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