Zaid Admani

Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes.

My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Thursday, October 16th.

In today's episode, we'll tell you about the AI brain drain happening at Apple and some new product announcements from them.

We also dive into earnings from TSMC and tell you why Salesforce stock is seeing a pop this morning.

Then stick around to the end of the show to find out about the biggest finance fat finger mistake in history that just happened yesterday and why it's making some people nervous about stable coins.

We got a great show for you today.

Let's go.

Well, Wednesday was another choppy day in the markets, but this time with a happy ending.

Stocks started off hot, then dipped in the red by midday, but ultimately closed higher with the S&P 500 adding 0.4% and the NASDAQ was up 0.7%.

The big overhang continues to be the US-China trade tensions, which has everyone on edge a bit.

It also doesn't help that the government shutdown is now in day 16 and likely headed into the third week of gridlock.

And since the government has been shut down, we haven't gotten any government data, including the CPI inflation report, which was supposed to come out this week.

And that makes it tough for both investors and the Federal Reserve to get a clear read on the economy right now.

So for now, the only thing that investors have to go off of is earnings.

And look, so far, earnings have been pretty solid.

I know we're still really early, but according to FactSet, analysts expect the overall S&P 500 earnings to grow around 8% for Q3.

That would mark the ninth straight quarter of earnings growth for the index.

So we might be in for another strong earnings season.

We'll have to see if that's enough for investors to overlook the China trade tensions and the government shutdown.

We're going to be keeping a close eye on all the major earnings coming up.

Like next week, we're going to hear from Netflix, Tesla, and Intel, just to name a few.

So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop.

In fact, you can even email us a video of yourself asking a question to the rundown at public.com.

And we'll try to answer as many questions as we can.

And yes, the merch is still coming.

Let's run through some headlines.

Starting with Apple.

Apple just lost another key player from their AI team thanks to Meta.

leading a team at Apple called Answers, Knowledge, and Information, and they were working on making Siri more like ChatGPT.

You know, Yang was a pretty big deal.

He reported directly to Apple's head of AI, John Gianandrea, but now he's gonna be reporting to someone at Meta.

You know, Meta continues to poach AI talent from every major tech company with massive offers.

According to Bloomberg, roughly a dozen senior AI researchers have already left Apple in the past few months, including the head of its foundation model group,

He also ended up going to Meta, and it looks like more departures could be coming.

Apple still hasn't figured out their AI strategy, and it's not a good look for them.

For one, they refuse to write blank checks to AI talent like Meta is, even though they desperately need the talent to make improvements to their AI offerings.

But then again, Meta hasn't really blown anyone away with their AI stuff.

I mean, the only thing they've released is an AI video slop app called Vibes, which was not great.

So maybe all the billions that Zuck is spending isn't really going to pay off either.

But for Apple, they've been talking about a revamped Siri for years now, and it's expected to launch in March of 2026.

Now on top of this new Siri, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who's a friend of the show, Apple will also be launching some new home hub devices around the same time, which is Apple's answer to the Amazon Echo.

So in order for that home hub to be good, Siri has to be good.

Speaking of hardware, Apple also did a low-key launch yesterday of their M5 chip.

This new chip will be going into the MacBook Pros, the iPad Pros, and the Vision Pro.

Apparently they still sell that.

And this new M5 chip is 3.5 times faster in AI performance

compared to the M4.

But then again, no one's really using AI on these Apple devices in the first place.

But yeah, I think ultimately Apple is gonna have to find an AI company to acquire.

Software just really isn't their thing.

They continue to lose talent.

So I think it's time for Tim Cook to open up the checkbook and make a big acquisition.

They should have bought Anthropic when they had the chance.

It's too late now.

Now sticking with the AI theme, let's talk about chips.

The biggest chip manufacturer in the world, TSMC just reported earnings this morning and they had a monster quarter.

TSMC reported a 39% jump in profits to $14.8 billion last quarter, blowing past estimates and hitting another record high.

Revenues were also up 30% year over year to $33 billion.

You know, TSMC is a critical player in the AI boom because they're the only ones that physically make the advanced AI chips for Nvidia, AMD, Apple, essentially everyone.

The sports analogy I like to use is that Nvidia is the star quarterback of the AI boom.

They get all the hype, they get all the press, but TSMC is the offensive line.

They might not be flashy, but without TSMC, Nvidia and the entire AI industry probably wouldn't exist.

You know, TSMC has a monopoly when it comes to manufacturing because they're the only chip manufacturer that has the expertise to make these super complex AI chips.

Samsung and Intel are trying to catch up, but as of right now, they aren't close to TSMC.

And according to the CEO of TSMC, the demand for these advanced chips from Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and others just keeps accelerating, which is a tailwind for TSMC moving forward.

The company said they were raising their 2025 revenue growth forecast again to a mid 30% growth.

I mean, investors have been paying attention to TSMC for a while now.

The stock is up more than 50% in 2025, and it's up another 2% this morning following the earnings.

I guess the key question for TSMC moving forward is will Intel or Samsung ever catch up to their capabilities?

Because as of right now, from everything that I've read, it doesn't seem like anyone is even close.

Let's talk about some stocks making moves today.

Salesforce shares are jumping this morning after the company said they expect their revenues to reach $60 billion by 2030.

Now, just for some context here, Salesforce's revenues in fiscal 2024 was around 35 billion.

So that 60 billion target would mean that Salesforce would be back to growing more than 10% a year, which they haven't done in over a year.

Salesforce continues to believe that AI will be a growth driver for their business.

They have a product called AgentForce, which is an AI powered customer service platform, which connects large language models from open AI and anthropic directly to company data and companies like Pepsi, FedEx, and more are already using it.

Salesforce also announced they were planning to buy back $7 billion worth of shares.

So all of that is pushing Salesforce stock up more than 5% this morning.

I just find it kind of funny the stock moves so much based on projections for 2030.

I mean, AI super intelligence might take over the world by that point, if you believe all the stuff coming out of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Now let's talk about United Airlines.

Their shares are trading lower this morning following their earnings report.

The airline reported better than expected profits, but slightly weaker revenue.

See, unlike the rest of the airline industry, United Airlines has been expanding its capacity.

Their Q3 capacity increased by 7%, but all that extra flying impacted prices.

Their unit passenger revenues dropped by 3.3% overall, including a 7% drop on international routes.

But still, United Airlines points to strong demand for premium and first class seating, which is what Delta also said last week in their earnings.

United said that revenues from their first class and other upgraded cabins rose by 6%.

Still, that wasn't enough to make investors happy.

Shares of United are down more than 2% in pre-market trading in reaction to the earnings.

I'm someone who usually flies United because I live in Houston and Houston is a major hub for them.

I'm just really hyped that United is starting to roll out Starlink internet services on their planes.

Let's wrap the show with a fun fact.

PayPal accidentally minted $300 trillion worth of their stable coins yesterday.

And PayPal partners with a company called Paxos to handle its crypto operations.

And someone over there apparently fat fingered the system and accidentally created $300 trillion of PayPal USD tokens, which is actually the sixth largest stable coin in the world.

Paxos said that it was just a technical error during an internal transfer and they caught it within 20 minutes and burned the extra coins.

No funds were lost.

No customers were impacted.

So ultimately it was a non-issue.

And look, fat finger mistakes happen on Wall Street.

Hundreds of millions of dollars get sent to the wrong customer.

Shout out Citibank.

But usually things get reversed pretty quickly.

But it is a reminder that even with stable coins gaining more popularity and entering the mainstream, that at the end of the day, stable coins are just powered by software running behind the scenes and transactions can be reversed.

It's not like a Bitcoin situation where the money's gone forever if you type in the wrong address.

Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today.

Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode.

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And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.