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 Thursday, January 8th. In today's episode, we'll break down the market's reaction to Trump's threats to institutional investors and defense companies. We'll also tell you the latest on NVIDIA's return to the Chinese market.
Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Anthropic might be a better investment than OpenAI. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Markets lost a little momentum on Wednesday. The S&P 500 slipped about 0.3%, snapping a three-day win streak. And it was a pretty broad pullback, more than three quarters of stocks in the S&P finished in the red.
The NASDAQ did manage to grind out a 0.2% gain. Google was one of the big winners yesterday with the stock adding 2% and overtaking Apple to become the second most valuable company in the world with a market cap of nearly $3.9 trillion.
Chapter 2: What market reactions occurred following Trump's threats to institutional investors?
The last time that Google overtook Apple was back in 2019. Now zooming out, let's talk about the oil market because oil prices are moving a bit lower after President Trump said that up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil could be sent to the US and that the US could potentially control Venezuelan oil production for years to come.
So that means that more oil supply could hit the markets and more supply means lower prices. Now, I still think the Venezuelan oil story will take years to fully play out, but the Trump administration is being pretty aggressive. In fact, a bunch of oil executives are meeting with Trump at the White House today. So we'll see what comes out of that.
Overall, though, it's been a pretty eventful week. And tomorrow we cap it all off with the December jobs report, which should give us a clearer picture on where the labor market stands. We'll break down those numbers on tomorrow's episode. So make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines.
starting with the housing market. President Trump shocked Wall Street yesterday after he threatened to ban large institutional investors from buying single family homes, arguing that corporate ownership has helped push housing out of reach for everyday Americans. In his post, he said that people live in homes and not corporations.
Housing affordability has become a key political issue, and his proposal would target private equity firms and large asset managers that have spent the last decade-plus buying up these single-family homes and renting them out. That includes companies like Blackstone, Invitation Homes, and Apollo Global Management, whose stocks all fell yesterday after Trump's post.
Now, to be clear, this is still very light on details. Trump said he's taking steps to implement the ban and he's going to ask Congress to codify it into law. But there's still a lot of questions on how exactly this ban would work and who exactly counts as a large investor or whether existing portfolios would be grandfathered in.
And here's the other thing, these large institutional investors only own a small slice of the housing market. Current estimates put it around two to 4% of single family homes nationwide. Now in some markets like my hometown of Houston, Texas, it's a bit higher, but I still don't think this alone is gonna be enough to solve the housing affordability crisis.
Like sure, it's a step in the right direction, but we're gonna need additional policy to truly help housing affordability. See the real problem right now is a lack of supply. So policies pushing for faster permitting when it comes to building homes could have a bigger impact when it comes to the housing market.
But first, we'll have to see if this institutional ban becomes real policy and what impacts it will have on the housing market. Let's shift gears and talk about Nvidia. According to Bloomberg, China is preparing to approve purchases of Nvidia's H200 AI chips as soon as this quarter. there will be some caveats.
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