The Rundown - Waymo Expands to Miami, Ulta Beauty & Lululemon Shares Soar

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Stock market update for December 6, 2024.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in five minutes. My name is Zadadmani, and today is Friday, December 6th. In today's episode, we dive into the latest jobs report and tell you which industries are seeing the biggest growth. Then we discuss Waymo's expansion plans and tell you why Palantir stock is making all-time highs today. Then stick around to the end of the show for an earnings recap from Alta and Lulu Lemon and find out why AMC shares are tanking. All right, let's go.

Well, the stock market took back some gains yesterday, snapping a multi-day win streak. Both the S&P and NASDAQ dropped more than 0.2%. So not a huge sell-off. Same can't be said for Bitcoin, though, because we barely had enough time to enjoy the $100,000 milestone. Bitcoin actually got up to $103,000 yesterday and then tanked to under $97,000.

In fact, there was. was a mini flash crash last night where the price tanked to like $92,000 for a couple minutes before recovering back to above $97,000. So hopefully one of you guys bought that $92,000 dip. Now, if you've been in the crypto game for a while, you're probably not phased by this at all. In fact, I kind of missed some of this volatility, you know? I feel like Bitcoin hasn't had any dramatic price movements in a while. I'm talking like a 10% move in a five minute period. So we got a little bit of that last night. But things seem to be stabilizing around the $97,000 range. And who knows, maybe we'll get back to above $100,000 by the weekend. Now let's talk about

the jobs report. We've been hyping up this report all week, and it finally dropped this morning, and the numbers were pretty good. According to the November jobs report, 227,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in November, beating the 214,000 estimates. The unemployment rate, though, did tick higher to 4.2%, but that was expected. A couple of things that stood out to me from this report was that U.S. wage growth was up 4% compared to last year. which is nice to see. It's higher than inflation. And the two biggest sectors of job growth were healthcare and hospitality. The health care not super surprising. Hospitality, though, was a little surprising to me. Overall, though, the job market seems to be in a good spot, and hopefully the

markets will use this report to end the week on a high note. Let's run through some headlines. Robotaxies are coming to Miami soon, and no, it's not Tesla. It's Waymo. Google's Waymo continues to expand throughout the country. They're going to start testing autonomous vehicles on Miami streets in 2025 and become available to passengers in 26. I know that Tesla gets all the buzz when it comes to robotaxies and autonomous vehicles, but Waymo is the secret leader in the space. They currently operate in L.A., San Francisco, and Phoenix, and they're expanding to Austin and Atlanta in 2025. I'm just waiting for the day they expand to Houston because I really want to try them out. Now, Uber and Liv shares tanked on this news, even though Uber has a partnership with Waymo.

I think investors are seriously worried that self-driving taxis like Waymo's will hurt Uber and Lyft's business. It might not happen in the short term, but if there's Waymo's everywhere and they're cheaper than Uber, that's going to make it tough for Uber to compete. Plus, with Waymos, you don't have to have that awkward conversation with the driver, you know? Shares of Uber and Lyft were down around 10% on Thursday on this news. So investors are very nervous right now. Sticking with the autonomous theme, Palantir is making news this morning because they just signed an agreement with the defense contractor Shield AI.

to essentially develop an AI-powered autonomous aircraft for the U.S. military. These two defense contractors will share their proprietary technology under a partnership called Warp Speed, which aims to bring a pilotless aircraft to the battlefield and use AI solutions to protect military members and civilians. I mean, tech companies right now are racing to provide military with modern warfare capabilities. Even the maker of ChatGPT, OpenAI, is getting involved. They signed the deal with the defense contractor Endurl to develop technologies to defend against drone attacks. And then last month, META said they would allow the U.S. government to use its AI models for military purposes. So you're going to see more and more AI companies get involved with the military.

And Palantir seems to be in a good spot for that. In fact, they've had a monster year so far. Their stock is up nearly 320% since the start of the year. And it's currently making all-time highs today. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Let's start with Lulu Lemon. They're having a great morning after the company reported solid, growth in Q3. The revenues were up 9% thanks to a big jump in international sales. In fact,

they're still struggling in the U.S. same store sales in the U.S. were down 2%, but up 33% internationally, which is pretty impressive. I guess Lulu Lemon can't convince any more people in the U.S. to buy overpriced yoga pants anymore. So now they're trying their marketing overseas. And it seems to be working. Investors are encouraged by the growth. Lulu Lemon stock is up more than 8% this morning in pre-market trading. Seriously, though, Lulu fans, is Lulu Gear that much better than, say, yoga pants from Target? I've never tried it, so let me know in the Spotify comments. Maybe I'm missing out. Sticking with the beauty theme, Ulta stock is looking good this morning after the company pulled off the earnings trifecta. The makeup retailer reported a 1.7% increase in revenue for

Q3 and $242 million of net profit. Both those numbers beat Wall Street estimates. And then on top of that, the company's executives are feeling pretty good about the business, and they raise the company's Q4 guidance. Now, don't get me wrong, it's still not a pretty picture for Ulta right now. The company's expecting their same store sales to be flat for this year, but I guess that's better than projecting a sales decline like they were expecting before. The problem for Alta is that the beauty category has gotten very competitive. Big retailers like Walmart, Target, and Amazon are starting to lean more into makeup and skincare. Now, I wish I could offer more insight here, but I'm not super plugged into the makeup wars between these companies. But overall, investors are feeling pretty optimistic about

Alta right now. Shares are up more than 10% this morning in reaction to these earnings. Speaking of trying to turn things around, AMC is making news this morning. Their shares are falling because the meme stock slash theater chain is planning to issue and sell more than 50 million shares. Now, I don't think the timing is a coincidence here. See, AMC and GameStop both saw their stock price jump more than 5% yesterday after a legendary meme trader Roaring Kitty tweeted. He didn't actually mention AMC in his tweet, but I feel like anytime he tweets anything, meme stocks start moving.

So both AMC and GameStop saw a nice pump yesterday, and I think AMC's management is taking advantage of this price pump, and they're issuing 50 million shares and selling them to raise cash. And whenever companies issue new shares, that dilutes existing shareholders, which tends to push down the price of the stock, and that's why AMC's shares are down more than 8% this morning, pretty much wiping out all the gains from yesterday.

Let's wrap the show with the fun. fact. Taylor Swift's era's tour broke records over the past couple years, and now her book about the tour is doing the same thing. Her era's tour book sold 814,000 copies in its first week. This book was sold exclusively at Target and was priced at $39.99, which means the book did more than $32 million worth of sales in just the first week. So that makes this book the highest first week print sales for 2024. In fact, it's the second highest selling adult nonfiction release in history, only trailing Barack Obama's A Promise Land, which beat out Taylor Swift's book by just a couple thousand copies when it was published back in 2020. Just goes to show you that

Taylor Swift is an absolute juggernaut. She can sell anything. We might need to do a deep dive episode on Taylor Swift's business. I think my daughter might even listen to that episode. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. I foolishly said on Monday that we might have a slow week, man, was I wrong? We had so much stuff happened this week. We had CEOs getting fired. We had a CEO getting murdered. There was a ton of earnings this week. We had the jobs report. Bitcoin hit $100,000. Stock market hit all-time highs. We even had a mini-meme stock rally. So so much happened this week that I'm still kind of processing everything. Now, we are going to have a deep dive episode coming out tomorrow. So if you guys want some

bonus rundown content, keep an eye on your podcast feed Saturday morning for a deep dive episode. And thank you to everyone that's been commenting on our Spotify episodes this week. 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.

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