The Rundown - Stablecoin Issuer Circle Makes IPO Debut, Reddit Sues Anthropic for 'Scraping'

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Stock market update for June 5, 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 Zadadmani, and today is Thursday, June 5th. And today's episode, we'll tell you about our crypto company going public today and why there's a lot of hype around them. We also tell you why Reddit is suing the AI company Anthropic. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out Amazon's plans to replace human drivers. We got a great show for you today.

Let's go. Wednesday was shaping up to be a pretty solid day for the stock market, but then stocks did that thing where they fell apart in the last couple hours of trading. The S&P 500 gave up most of its gains, but still managed to squeeze out a 0.01% gain. The NASDAG did a bit better holding on to a 0.3% gain. The Dow, on the other hand, snapped its four-day win streak closing down 0.2%. But, you know, nobody cares about the Dow. So, now stocks started to drop yesterday after.

the Federal Reserve released their beige book. The beige book is a report that the Fed publishes eight times a year, you know, once every six to seven weeks, and this book is essentially a report of the overall economic vibe check across the country. This book publishes a collection of economic anecdotes from businesses and consumers from each of the 12 regional Fed banks. And according to the latest beige book, which came out yesterday afternoon, the Fed notes that the economic activity has declined slightly since the previous report, which came out

April 23rd. Now again, the beige book is not based on hard data. It's more based on conversations with businesses and consumers and economists, but it's an interesting perspective, especially with markets nearing all-time highs again. Main Street doesn't seem to be feeling as optimistic as Wall Street. Now, we are going to get some hard data tomorrow. The May jobs report drops tomorrow morning, and economists are expecting the U.S. economy to have added 125,000 jobs last month. So we'll get those official numbers tomorrow morning and break that down for you guys in tomorrow's episode. So make sure you guys tune in for that. Let's run through some headlines. And let's start with some crypto news this morning. The crypto company Circle is going public today. Circle is most known for

their stable coin called USDC, which allows users to easily move tokens that are pegged to the US dollar across the blockchain. Think of it like a Venmo or Zell, but on the blockchain. And Circle seems to have solid demand for their IPO. Their stock will be priced at $31 per share at the open, giving them a market cap of around $6.8 billion. That's above the expected range of $27 to $28 a share, which is a sign for positive demand for the company's stock. I mean, there is a lot of hype these days around the future of stable coins. You have banks and fintech firms and even governments starting to explore how stable coins could play a role in traditional finance, and then add on the fact that the Trump White House is opening up the regulatory floodgates and rolling back restrictions

and supporting legislation that is pro-crypto and pro-stablecoin. So Circle is well positioned to become the go-to name in this space. The stablecoin market is currently around $227 billion, and Circle's USDC is the second largest stable coin in the world with 27% market share. The largest stable coin right now is USDT, which is run by a company called Tether. They dominate 67% of the stable coin market, but Tether isn't based in the U.S., unlike Circle, which I think gives Circle a pretty big advantage. So yeah, keep an eye on the market today for Circle's IPO. Their ticker symbol is CRCL. We might have to do a deep dive on stable coins and Circle pretty soon, because it is a pretty interesting space. Let's shift gears and talk about Apple because the company

just hit a roadblock in China. See, Apple's been trying to roll out Apple intelligence on iPhones in China. Apple has a partnership with Alibaba to integrate their AI into Apple intelligence and onto iPhones for Chinese users. But that plan is now being delayed from Chinese regulators, thanks to the rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China. According to the Financial Times, Chinese regulators are dragging their feet when it comes to approving Apple intelligence. And the problem is, while Apple is waiting for Beijing to give them the green light, competitors in China aren't slowing down. Like Huawei just launched a new foldable phone called the Pura X, which runs.

on their operating system called Harmony OS. And Harmony OS comes in with a built-in AI chatbot developed by the Chinese tech giant bite dance. That's the parent company of TikTok. And Huawei is gaining some serious ground in China. In Q1, they grabbed 19% of China's smartphone market compared to Apple's 15%. So Apple has a tough hill to climb right now.

They're trying to play catch-up in China when it comes to AI. But because of regulatory delays and trade tensions, homegrown Chinese rivals seem to be outpacing them. Now, sticking with the AI theme, let's talk about Anthropic. Because the AI startup behind the Claude Chatbot is being sued by Reddit. Reddit is accusing Anthropic of scrapping Reddit's data to train their AI models without permission. So the issue is that Anthropic never signed a data licensing deal with Reddit. The two companies have had discussions, but they never came to an agreement.

And Reddit is accusing Anthropic of accessing their site more than 100,000 times after Anthropic agreed that they would stop. So now Reddit is calling their lawyers. See, Reddit is a big target for AI models because their platform is rich with data. And there's new data on their every day with over 100 million daily active users. And because of all this new data being created there, Reddit has signed licensing deals with other AI companies like OpenAI and Google. These licensing deals are trying to become a significant part of Reddit's revenue, and it gives the company a way to monetize outside of just advertising.

So they can't just be having an AI company like Anthropics scrap their data for free. We've also seen this play out with the New York Times. They sued Open AI in Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement. But then just last week, the Times signed their first AI licensing deal with Amazon. So I think we're going to see more lawsuits and more licensing deals play out with content platforms and AI companies. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Five below is getting a nice pop this morning after the discount retailer delivered strong earnings and some solid Q2 guidance. Sales jumped nearly 20% in Q1, and same store sales were up more than 7%, which is pretty

impressive for a discount retailer. Now, 5 below credits the strong performance on their choice of merchandising, which means that people like the stuff that 5 below put on the shelves. They do have a lot of great stuff for the summer, like we picked up some pool noodles there recently. And investors are liking this too. Shares of 5 below are up nearly 8% this morning in reaction to the earnings. Now, on the flip side, Chewy stock is slipping this morning after the investment bank Jeffries

downgraded the pet e-commerce company from a buy to a hold. Jeffries is concerned about Chooey's valuation. Chewys stock has been on a tear recently, climbing more than 50% over the past six months, and Jeffrey's technical analysis shows signs that the stock being overbought. So they're turning to the charts and downgrading the company. As a result, Chooey's stock is down nearly 3% this morning on this downgrade.

Now, Chewis does report earnings next week, so they might be able to prove Jeffries wrong pretty quickly. Let's wrap the show. show with a fun fact. Amazon is creating robots to one day deliver packages. According to reporting from the information, Amazon is working on humanoid robots. Their vision is for the robot to hitch a ride in the back of an Amazon delivery van that jumps out to drop the package off at your door while the human driver handles another stop. So this is basically tag team delivery with a robot sidekick, and this would make deliveries even faster. Now, I'm not really shocked to hear this because Amazon is a low-key,

leader in robotics. They've been using robots inside their warehouses for years. So this is just the next logical and slightly terrifying step. And let's be honest, they're not going to stop there. It's probably only a matter of time before their delivery vans are self-driving too. Because remember, Amazon has a self-driving car company called Zooks. So I'm sure they're working on that. So in the near future, we might have a robot van pulling up to our house with a humanoid robot jumping out of it with our prime box. And that's all going to be captured by a ring camera, which is also owned. by Amazon. I wonder if the ring camera footage would just mysteriously be deleted if a robot acts out. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode.

We got one more episode to go this week. It should be a good one tomorrow. We're talking Jobs Report. So make sure you guys tune in for that. And then next week, we got Apple's WWDC coming up. So that should be interesting as well. By the way, speaking of Apple, if you guys want to support the show, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple Podcast. Or if you listen on Spotify, you can give us a five-star rating there. And while you're at it, don't forget the 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.