The Rundown - Tesla Q1 Deliveries Plummet, Crypto Company Circle Files for IPO

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

Stock market update for April 2, 2025.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Wednesday, April 2nd. In today's episode, we talk about Trump's Liberation Day and preview the upcoming tariff announcement. We also tell you about a partnership between UFC and META. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Tesla stock is falling and why Roblox is about to become a virtual billboard.

We've got a great show for you today. Let's go. Tuesday was another choppy day of trading where the markets couldn't make up its mind on what to do. But after some ups and down, stocks did squeeze out a win with the S&P 500 jumping 0.4%. And the NASDAQ snapped a four-day losing streak, adding 0.9%. The biggest shock continues to be Newsmax. I think it's become a full-on meme stock at this point because the stock jumped 170% yesterday, closing at $233 a share. Remember, they IPOed on Monday at just $10 a share, so the stock has gone up 23X in just a matter of two days.

That is not normal. We talked more about Newsmax and the cable news business on yesterday's episode, so go check that out if you missed it. By the way, Corweave, the other big IPO from late last week saw some life yesterday. Their stock jumped 40%. Now, today, all eyes turned to the White House as President Trump is expected to announce wide-ranging reciprocal tariffs and what he is branded to be Liberation Day. Trump is going to hold a press conference at the Rose Garden at 4 p.m. Eastern to give us details on the tariff plans. And the timing of this press conference is interesting because it's right at the market close.

So the markets won't be able to react in real time to the tariff announcement. We are going to be locked into the press conference this afternoon. We might even post an instant reaction to the tariff announcements on our Instagram account. So make sure you follow us there. And we'll do a full recap of all the tariff stuff on tomorrow's episode. so definitely don't want to miss that episode. Happy Liberation Day, everybody. Let's run through some headlines.

We got more companies filing to go public. This time it's the crypto company Circle. They just filed for an IPO. Circle is the issuer of the stable coin USDC, which is the second largest stable coin in the world. It's pegged to the US dollar and backed by cash and treasury securities. There's about $60 billion of USDC in market. circulation, which only trails the stable coin tether, which has about $144 billion in circulation.

But USDC continues to eat into that market share. USDC's market cap grew by 36% last year, while tetheres just grew by 5%. And stable coins overall have started to gain serious traction. Like last year, stable coins reached a transaction volume of $8.5 trillion in a single quarter. And just to put that into perspective, that's double the volume that Visa Facilion. in the same period. And now they're starting to get the attention of Congress, which recently ushered in new bills to create legal frameworks for stable coins.

So there's a lot of energy around this industry, and Circle wants to capitalize on it by filing for an IPO. Now, as far as Circle's financials, they brought in $1.7 billion in revenue at the end of 2024, with 99% of that money coming from interest they generated on the reserve assets. And Circle has been eyeing to IPO for a few years now. Back in 2021, they tried to IPO through a SPAC merger. That's what every company tried to do back then.

But it ended up not happening. Then in early 2024, they filed a draft IPO, but that process got stalled until now. And this could potentially open the floodgates for other crypto companies to go public. You know, companies like Gemini, Cracken, and Ripple, which have all been rumored to be considering an IPO. Let's shift gears and talk about a company that IPO 13 years ago. That would be meta. Meta just announced a multi-year, multi-million dollar partnership with the UFC that would make Meta the official fan technology partner.

So I think this means you're going to start seeing Meta's logo at UFC events pretty soon. Now, this is a wide-ranging deal, and we're going to get more details about it in the next three to nine months. But the companies did say that as part of this deal, there's going to be exclusive UFC content on threads, which is Meta's Twitter competitor. I guess that's one way to get more people to use threads. UFC also plans to use Meta's technology to create a new fighter ranking system. So we'll see what that looks like. You know, I wasn't really shocked when I saw this headline across my timeline because Zuck is a huge UFC fan and he does MMA himself.

On top of that, the CEO of UFC Dana White is also on Meta's board of directors. So this deal just solidifies that relationship. Now, just to be clear, this deal has nothing to do with UFC's media rights. Right now, ESPN controls the media rights, but they are expires. soon. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of Petco are rising after the company's CEO bought almost 1.6 million shares in the pet retailer. The company's stock had dropped by more than 40% in the past six months, but Petco CEO Joel Anderson is buying the dip and the value of his Petco investment is north of $4.7 million. As a result, shares of Petco are up more than 6%

today on that news. On the flip side, shares of Tesla are down this morning after the company missed on Q1 delivery and production numbers. Tesla said they delivered 336,000 vehicles in Q1, which is a 13% drop from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting Tesla to deliver 390,000 vehicles. So a pretty big miss right there. Well, as for production, the company produced 363,000 vehicles, which was also lower than the 412,000 that was expected. So not great numbers, and Tesla stock is down around 3,000. 3% today in reaction to this report.

Tough way for Tesla to start Q2, especially since their stock was down 36% in the first quarter, wiping out $460 billion in the process. But the drop in Tesla's deliveries probably shouldn't come as a surprise, especially if you're tuning into the rundown. We've been telling you guys some of the brutal sales numbers across the world over the past few months that Tesla has been experiencing. Tesla's China-made EV sales dropped 11.5% year-over-year in March.

That's a tough look, especially when you compare it to their competition like BYD, which saw a 23% jump in sales. By the way, if you want to learn more about BYD and how they stack up against Tesla, check out our deep dive episode from this past weekend. We have a clip in there from 2011 where Elon Musk laughed

when he was asked about BYD and the threat they were to Tesla. I guess he's probably not laughing so much right now. By the way, another stock having a tough morning. Hymns and hers, their stock is falling after the telehealth company added Eli Lilly's weight loss drug Zep bound to their platform. Now, you would think that that would help their story.

right? Well, the problem is, is that Zepbound is too expensive on Hymns' platform selling for $1,900 a month. Eli Lilley on their website says that patients can expect to pay around $1,100 a month for Zepbound. So Hems is offering Zepbound at a 70% markup to the standard price. As a result, shares of Hems is down nearly 6% today on this news. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Ads are coming to Roblox. The way these ads are going to work, is that players will get in-game currency and power-ups for watching a 30-second ad. Now, look, I'm not super familiar with Roblox's platform

in their game because my kids are still too young for that. So I don't know how it's going to impact the game. For all my parents out there that have kids that play Roblox, let me know in the comments on what you think about this. Can't imagine too many parents being happy about this. Roblox says they're partnering with Google to help launch this ad platform and scale it up. I guess there's also going to be digital billboards

in the virtual city, which I think is not too bad. But I'm not surprised that Roblox is doing this because every company at some point embraces ads. And like with how popular Roblox is, they have 85 million daily active users. 85 million people play the game every day. They want to monetize those eyeballs. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today.

Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Big announcement coming from the White House this afternoon, so make sure you guys are following our Instagram account for our instant reaction. and definitely turn into tomorrow's episode for a full recap and the market's reaction. 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.

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