The Rundown - Tesla Reports Drop in Annual Deliveries, Squid Game 2 Sets a Netflix Record

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

Stock market update for January 2, 2025. Follow our new Instagram account ⁠@TheRundownDaily

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Thursday, January 2nd. In today's episode, we highlight some of the big winners from 2024 and look forward to 2025. We also tell you about Apple's plans to win back market share in China and why Netflix was a big winner during the holiday season. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out the latest stock that Roaring Kitty might be targeting and new delivery numbers from Tesla. that's making investors kind of nervous. All right, let's go.

2024 is officially in the books, and the stock market closed out the year on a bit of a down note. Both the S&P and NASDAQ were in the red for the last three trading days of 2024. But overall, very strong year for the stock market. The S&P was up 23% in 2024 and closed at record highs 50 times in the process.

The NASDAQ was up 29% thanks for the continued rally in big tech stock. and the hype around AI. In Video was the big winner in 2024, adding $2 trillion in market cap, making them the biggest gainer of the year. And Apple was second, adding $790 billion in market cap.

Apple had a sneaky good year. And for all my Dow Jones haters out there, the Dow was up just 13% in 2024. That's why we shouldn't care about the Dow. But yeah, overall, the stock market has been on an incredible two-year run going up more than 20% in back-to-back years. So let's see if the markets can three-peat in 2020.

On a side note for all my football fans out there, do you guys think the Kansas City Chiefs winning the Super Bowl might have something to do with this market rally? Because remember, the Kansas City Chiefs have won back-to-back Super Bowls. They're also trying to three-peat this year. So if the Chiefs somehow don't win the Super Bowl this year, I might get a little worried about my portfolio. I'm not going to lie. Let's run through some headlines.

Starting with Apple. Apple is preparing to offer big discounts for iPhones in China. This is kind of a big deal because Apple is not. really known to be offering discounts ever for their iPhones. I don't think they've ever really done it in the U.S. Like, you can get student discounts in the U.S. for iPads and Macs. Never the iPhone. The iPhone never goes on sale here. But starting on Saturday, Apple is going to do a four-day promotional period where they're going to trim prices of their iPhones by nearly $70 in China. And this includes the flagship iPhone 16 model as well as older models and other devices. See, Apple's

facing a lot of competition in China, especially from popular domestic brands like Huawei. So they're hoping by offering discounts, they can win back some of that market share. You know, and regain momentum in China, which is the world's largest smartphone market. The pretty important market for Apple. They got a lot of work to do and a lot of competition because Huawei, which I mentioned earlier, saw sales in China grow by 42% in Q3 of 2024. Compare that to Apple, which saw a 0.3% sales drop in China. I've seen some reviews of Huawei phones on YouTube.

They're pretty nice. And some of them are pretty expensive, too. but Huawei phones got banned in the U.S. in 2022 because of national security concerns. So yeah, we'll have us see if these discounts in China will help Apple win back some market share from competition over there. Apple has actually offered these strategic discounts a couple times over the last year or so in China. And to be fair, the iPhone is still one of the top five bestselling phones in China. But Apple wants to get higher on that list. Let's shift gears and talk about Netflix.

Netflix ended 2024 with a bang. They just had their biggest TV series debut of all time with the release of Squid Games season two. The sequel debuted with 68 million views in its first four days, beating the record for the show Wednesday, which had about 50 million views in 2022. So they crushed that record. I guess you shouldn't be that surprised because how successful Squid Game season one was. It's the most popular non-English language TV series of all time with more than 265 million views.

It was like a cultural phenomenon, honestly. So Squid Game Season 2, despite not getting the best reviews, it's crushing it. I mean, there's no denying it. Netflix has a ton of momentum entering 2025. There's new data showing that Netflix's two NFL Christmas Day games averaged over 30 million viewers globally. Now, we already knew that it was a record-breaking performance by Netflix with 65 million U.S. viewers tuning into those games. But I think these new numbers show the global scale that Netflix can bring to the NFL and potentially other live sporting events. And I think this gives Netflix to be a big.

of an upper hand when it comes to negotiating with these sports leagues to acquire sports rights. Because Netflix can offer money, but they can also offer a global reach. So maybe leagues like the NFL and NBA might be more willing to work with Netflix because they know they can potentially acquire new fans all over the world to help grow the game. So yeah, I'm pretty bullish on Netflix going forward. We actually talk more about live sports and how it's become the new battleground for streaming companies in last week's deep dive episode. So go get that a listen if you haven't already.

Let's talk about some stuff. Fox making moves today. Unity shares are soaring after Roaring Kitty, aka Keith Gill, was back on Twitter to kick off the new year. He tweeted a meme of Dave Chappelle wearing a ring branded with the word unity. And the comments on Twitter have been going off speculating whether this meme hints at Roaring Kitty taking a position in Unity. Unity provides software to help develop video games, which I guess fits the Roaring Kitty narrative. because, you know, he was big on GameStop before. Unity stock was down more than 40% last year,

but it's starting 2025, up more than 10% this morning. You know what? I wouldn't want to start the year any other way. Boyd Kitty, baby. Now, another big winner this morning is a company called Synaptics. Their shares are rising after the semiconductor company announced a partnership with Google that will connect the tech giant's Internet of Things machine learning software

to Synaptics Astra chips. A lot of that was a bit over my head, but the software is open source, and I guess it'll make it easier for developers to push out AI-powered Internet of Things products. I didn't know the Internet of Things was back in the zeitgeist of things, but maybe something to watch out for in 2025. Shares of synaptics are up more than 4% this morning on this news.

Now, on the flip side, shares of Tesla are down after the EV giant missed on Q4 delivery estimates for the quarter. We've been teasing these delivery numbers all week. We got them this morning, and they were disappointing. Tesla delivered 495,000 cars in Q4, which was below the expectation of 500,000. 7,000 cars. So a pretty big miss. These delivery numbers also mean that company reported a annual decline in deliveries for 2024 compared to 2023. Tesla delivered 1.79 million cars last year, which is 1% less than the 1.8 million cars they delivered in 2020. Tesla stock is down

more than 5% this morning on this news. Not a great start for Tesla in 2025. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Last year was a big year for gold prices, and that's causing the price of Rolex watches to spike. Rolex is hiking watch prices by as much as 8% and they're saying that the increased price of gold is the key driver for that. In 2024, gold prices were up 27%, which is its biggest annual jump in 14 years.

In fact, gold outpaced the S&P 500. So Rolex is having to adjust their prices as a result. Now, luxury watchmakers adjust prices to start a new year to account for market fluctuations for raw materials and currencies. Last year, Rolex raised their prices by about 4% in the UK to start 2024. So seeing a larger increase this year. By the way, Rolex makes more than 1 million watches a year and brings in about $11 billion in revenue. I don't really know much about luxury watches, so I'm a little surprised to hear that Rolex makes more than a million

watches every year. I thought it was a bit more exclusive than that. They do account for about 30% of the global high-end Swiss watch market. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope everybody had a fantastic new year. I spent majority of new year's day sweating on my couch, watching my alma model, the University of Texas football team, almost choked in the college football playoff game against Arizona State. College football fans out there know what I'm talking about. It was a sweat, but we squeezed out the game, so it's been a great start to the year,

and hopefully the market's treat as well. By the way, if you guys have 12 extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, on Spotify. Vote in today's Spotify poll. Leave us a comment on Spotify. And follow our Instagram account if you guys want to see clips of this podcast. We'll put a link in the description. 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

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