Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Public.com presents The Rundown, your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zaid Admani, and today is Friday, January 9th. In today's episode, we'll break down the December jobs report and what it signals about the economy. We'll also tell you about Meta's nuclear deal to power its AI data centers.
Then stick around to the end of the show to find out how many people are using chat GPT as their doctors. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks are coming off a mixed day of trading. The S&P 500 was pretty much flat all of Thursday, ending the session up 0.01%. The Nasdaq was actually in the red, dropping 0.4%. Small cap stocks were the big winners yesterday.
The Russell 2000 jumped more than 1% and closed at record highs.
Chapter 2: What does the December jobs report reveal about the US economy?
One of the predictions I made on our predictions episode last weekend was that the MAG7 stocks would underperform the broader market in 2026. And so far, that prediction has been right. I know we're very early here, but the overall MAG7 is down 0.1% this year. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 is up around 1% and the Russell 2000 is up nearly 5%.
We are continuing to see a rotation out of mega cap tech stocks and into other parts of the market. This started happening late last year and it's continuing this year. And it could be a sign that investors are feeling more optimistic about the overall economy. Small caps tend to benefit more from an increase in economic growth.
Now, speaking of the economy, we just got the December jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning. And according to the report, the US economy added 50,000 jobs in December, which was well below the 73,000 jobs that was expected.
On top of that, the BLS revised down the data from October and November, now saying that 76,000 less jobs were added than previously reported in those two months. But it wasn't all bad news though. According to this jobs report, the unemployment rate did tick lower to 4.4% and wage growth held steady.
To me, this jobs report is showing what we already know, that we are currently in a low hire, low fire environment. Companies aren't rushing to hire people, but they aren't laying off a bunch of people just yet, either. Now we'll have to see how the Federal Reserve reacts to this data. Remember, their job is to keep employment high and inflation low.
I wonder if the Fed is going to keep cutting interest rates given that the unemployment rate is at 4.4%. The next big data to watch is going to be the inflation numbers. We are getting a CPI report next week on January 13. So we'll definitely break that down. And remember, next week is also the start of earnings season. So we are about to enter into a busy period in the market.
So if you're new here, it's a great time to get subscribed to the podcast to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Meta. Meta just signed multiple nuclear energy deals to power its next generation AI data centers, including its massive Prometheus AI super cluster being built in Ohio.
Meta announced a deal with three nuclear energy companies, including Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower. Now, Vistra and Oklo are both publicly traded companies, and both of their stocks are up more than 10% this morning at the time of this recording. For these AI hyperscalers like Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, getting access to power has become just as important as getting access to GPUs.
Training and running large AI models requires an insane amount of electricity, so these tech companies are all turning to nuclear power. Meta said this deal will help fund Vistra's nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania, extending the lifespan of those facilities and also increasing their energy production. The other two companies' nuclear projects are still being developed.
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