The Rundown - Uber Acquisition Hits Roadblock, GameStop Tries for 5-Day Win Streak

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Stock market update for December 26, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadmani, and today is Thursday, December 26th. In today's episode, we talk about the great start to the Santa Claus rally. Stocks are getting close to all-time highs again. We also tell you why Uber's acquisition in Taiwan is being blocked, a strike ending at Starbucks, and a recall for Costco eggs. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why GameStop is.

up today and how much stuff is expected to be returned. It's a lot higher than you think. All right, let's go. Well, guys, the stock market has been on a roll this week. On Tuesday, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ were both up more than 1% despite the market's closing three hours early for Christmas Eve. So the Santa Claus rally is off to a great start. Now Tuesday was a pretty low volume day. Only 7.4 billion shares exchanged hands compared to the 11.5 billion on a 10th. typical day and we're probably going to have low volumes for the rest of the week, maybe until the new year. But if this rally continues, we might see all-time highs again before the end of the year because both the S&P and NASDAQ are within 1% of a record close. So keep an eye out for that.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said about Bitcoin. You know, earlier in the week, Bitcoin was back to rallying, almost hitting $100,000 on Christmas Day. But then early this morning, the price dropped to $95,000 again. So not really sure what caused the price to drop so dramatically. But hey, it's crypto, you know. Let's run through some headlines. Uber's acquisition for Delivery Hero's food panda business in Taiwan is being rejected by Taiwan's anti-trust regulator. Back in May of this year, Uber agreed to buy Food Panda, which is a food delivery service in

Taiwan for $950 million from Delivery Hero. Uber planned to roll Food Panda's brand underneath Uber Eats, and they also agreed to purchase $300 million of Delivery Hero's stock as part of that acquisition. But Taiwan's FTC is blocking this deal because Uber and Food Panda combined have a 90% share of the market. And regulators believe that this deal would remove any competitive pressure for Uber and allow them to raise prices for consumers. And also charge higher commissions for restaurants. So now Uber has two options. Either they can appeal the decision or they can walk away. So we'll see what they plan to do. But yeah, this is kind of a big deal because this was the largest deal in Taiwan outside of the same.

semi-conductor space. Uber stock is down around 1% this morning. So not a huge reaction by the markets. Let's shift gears and talk about Starbucks. Thousands of Starbucks workers were on strike over the holidays in hopes to get a bigger boost to their minimum hourly wage. The striking baristas were looking for a 64% increase to their wages and north of 77% increase over three years. Now, there were two unions that were involved in the strike. The service employees international union and the Starbucks workers united. The strike, spread to over 45 states, closing 300 stores. The strike lasted a total of five days and concluded on Tuesday of this week. Union officials said they are ready to return to the bargaining table

for a serious proposal from the company. Now, this strike only included three percent of Starbucks's total store footprint in America, so we'll have to see if the strike was effective enough to get the Starbucks corporation to crack. Speaking of cracking, let's talk about Costco eggs. There is currently a class one recall for Costco Kirkland eggs over salmonella concerns. The eggs that are affected have been sold in Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee. The batch has an expiration date of January 5th and they were sold in a set of 24. I mean, I buy Costco eggs all the time. So this definitely caught my attention. Thankfully, Texas does not seem to be on the list of states that are impacted. Because a class one recall

means that eating these eggs could cause illness or even death. So if you live in these states that I just mentioned and you bought eggs from Costco, you might want to check those eggs to make sure that they're not part of this recall. I mean, tough timing, too, especially around the holidays. Hope nobody had any eggnog yesterday. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of Honda and Nissan are up this morning after merger talks between these two companies officially kicked off this week. These two companies are hoping to close the merger by June of 2025. But we'll have to see regulators allow this merger to go through. Investors seem to be pretty optimistic, though. U.S. listed shares of Honda are up more than 4% this morning and up almost

20% this past week. But still, not a great year for Honda. If you zoom out, their shares are down around 8% for the year. Similar story for Nissan, their shares are up around 20% this past week, but down around 10% for the year. Another winner this morning is GameStop. Shares are up 3% because OG meme trader Roaring Kitty tweeted an image of a gift box yesterday. And that was enough to make the stock go up 3%. Honestly, I think Roaring Kitty might be losing his fastball a bit because a 3% pump is nothing compared to what this dude used to do back in the day. Still, GameStop has been on a mini rally. Shares have gone up for four days in a row,

and today they might extend that streak to five. GameStop's sneaky having a great year. Shares are up more than 90% for the year. Now, on the flip-size, shares not doing so good this morning. Coinbase. This one kind of makes sense. Shares of Coinbase are down because Bitcoin had a big drop this morning, and the stock price of Coinbase tends to follow what Bitcoin does,

and as a result, Coinbase stock is down around 3%. Bitcoin is currently down 10% from its all-time highs of 106,000 that is set back in mid-December. So I wonder if we get back there before the end of the year. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact. 17% of all merchandise sales is expected to be returned this year. This is according to the National Retail Federation. That's about $890 billion in returns. And returns become really prevalent right after the holiday shopping season.

In fact, January is now referred to as return. And processing these returns is pretty expensive for retailers, costing an average of 30% of the item's original price, according to Optoro. So I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we see retailers get strict with returns moving forward. I mean, I think it's already starting to happen. A bonus fun fact, it was a strong holiday shopping season in general. U.S. retail sales were up 3.8% between November 1st and December 24th this year compared to last year. So I'm looking forward to hearing where retailers have to say when earning season. and rolls around in a few weeks.

Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Hope everybody had a fantastic holiday. I had a great time hanging out with family. Didn't have as great of a time watching the Houston Texans get demolished by the Baltimore Ravens in 4K on Netflix. That wasn't very fun. But hey, at least the Beyonce halftime performance was pretty good.

Now we entered that weird period between Christmas and New Year's where no one's doing any actual real work, but the markets are open. So hopefully we'll have some interesting stuff to talk about. We are going to have a show tomorrow and we're going to post. host a weekend deep dive episode on Saturday. So stay tuned for that. 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. You should not take any mention of a publicly traded security as recommendation to buy, sell or hold that security. Rounddown guests are not financial advisors and are not affiliated with public holdings or its subsidiaries. You should make your own financial and investment decisions or consult.

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