Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What insights are shared about the situation in Venezuela?
Brian Stewart, our director of news at Seeking Alpha, our first Wall Street Roundup of 2026. Welcome back.
Yeah, great to be here.
It's great to have you. It's great to be talking again. What have you got for us? The world is on stage performing for us all in comedy and drama and horror. What do you got for us?
Well, if we're gonna talk about the world stage, I think we have to start with Venezuela. Over the weekend going into this week, US captured Maduro. The stock market, generally positive response. Several sectors saw gains, you saw gains in. Oil sector, oil services, the only exception there really, a glaring exception was the Canadian oil stocks.
The Canadian oil sands competes with Venezuela for the heavy crude. So if there's going to be more Venezuelan oil on the market, that's bad for the oil sands, lower prices there.
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Chapter 2: How are memory and storage stocks performing in the market?
I mean, at a certain point, that kind of drilling becomes uneconomical if oil prices get too low. So there were some concerns in that little pocket. But otherwise, oil stocks, the prospects of more production in Venezuela move those higher. Defense stocks higher, both on the idea.
of broader geopolitical tensions driving those stocks, but also the idea that companies like Halliburton are going to get contracts to build out the infrastructure in Venezuela. Obviously, we'll have to see how that goes. We're sort of still at stage one of that process, which is going to be a multi-year process.
But I think the interesting impact, stock market-wise, was that the idea of a military action in Venezuela, kind of a ratcheting up of international tensions, a lot of American allies pushing back against the idea that we would jump into Venezuela. The stock market basically shrugged those off.
So the idea that there'd be that we're moving into, say, a more dangerous world or that things are going to get more troublesome as we kind of move forward, even with the kind of tough talk coming from the Trump administration about other countries, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, even that didn't really faze the stock market that much.
Have you ever seen a time like this where it seems everything is priced in except for normalcy, quote unquote?
Yeah, that's really interesting. I like the idea of everything priced in but normalcy.
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Chapter 3: What does the recent jobs data indicate about the economy?
I think there's sort of a... We had for a while the taco trade, the Trump always chickens out trade. That's obviously kind of a negative way to frame that, but you could frame it in the sense that the Trump administration has proven itself to be extremely pragmatic. So even when it takes an aggressive step...
The administration kind of looks around, sees what the reaction is, and will adjust in real time to that. So I think that is the main thing that's priced in, is the idea that I just don't think people take seriously that the worst case scenario, which is often the thing that Trump says, I'm going to do this terrible thing, this thing that is terrible for the economy or whatever. And I think...
people just sort of assume that that's rhetoric and that'll be sort of figured out over the course of the the process but there are things that that don't seem to be completely priced in so for instance um if we could just get back to the stocks you know um memory and storage stocks without much of a catalyst jumped over the past week um so you saw sandisk up 36% in the past week.
It's up 10% today as we started taping, up 71% in the past month. Meanwhile, Micron, which was one of the best performing stocks, major, larger cap stocks of 2025 is up 6% in the past week, up 36% in the past month, past year, just looking at the 2025 performance up 230%. So I think this signifies just sort of
The AI trade kind of moving around, like you think about like a game board, like it's just sort of, you know, moving to where the opportunity is. And right now there's just this feeling that there's going to be a dearth of the memory and storage chips. And so these products are going to be in high demand. And so you're seeing these stocks respond in kind.
Any other stocks you would add to that conversation or tech-wise or sector-wise that you're seeing move?
the ai trade kind of moving around to different sectors we saw oklo is up today it got a deal after meta signed three major nuclear power agreements um basically the the companies are building out these huge data centers need power you know these are huge power um using facilities and the current current grid you can't just plug in your data center into the normal grid and just start
you know, you blow it out. So these companies are looking for alternative power solutions. And Oklo is an example of one.
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Chapter 4: Why is Roblox experiencing a long-term decline?
Vistra is another one. The ticker on that is VST. You're seeing that, you know, as people kind of reason out, like what's going to be necessary to do what these AI, these huge hyperscalers are promising. You sort of look into, we talked about last year, we were talking about a lot about Caterpillar. Caterpillar is up again this week, getting a boost from the idea that they're going to have to,
buy equipment to build these data centers and now you're gonna have to have power to build these data centers to power these data centers um so i think you're still kind of in the shovel and pickaxe part of the trade but i i feel like people like it's dawning on people sort of in real time like oh we're gonna need power for this and so you see these stocks respond when that happens
Yeah, I've been talking to people that are in the job market and people that are kind of getting recruited by those data storage centers. It's a bonanza. It's a bonanza. I can tell you some companies do have money and some companies don't. And I can tell you in that sector, there's a lot of money as we all see being moved around there. So definitely interesting to see how that will play out.
And then speaking of like the labor situation, what would you say about the jobs data we saw this week?
I recently went to the doctor for the first time in a while and they took my blood pressure and I asked, so how does it look? And the nurse was like, oh, it's fine. And, you know, I feel like that's the jobs data reaction. That's my reaction to it is, oh, it's fine. So certainly not as egregious as it could be. I mean, last month's jobs data, we saw the unemployment rate spike to 4.6%.
This time we saw it pull back to 4.4%, so you kind of see a reversal of that.
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Chapter 5: What predictions are made for the market in 2026?
Some of that is the labor participation rate went down, so you see people coming out of the workforce. So this could be people who have been looking for jobs for a while, have now kind of just given up, gone back to school, have kind of settled into being housewives or househusbands or whatever. You know, whatever is happening there, maybe just decided that, OK, I guess I'm retired now.
You know, those kind of things happen. Meanwhile, jobs, you saw an increase of 50,000 jobs in December. It's a little down from November. We saw 56,000. It's around expectations, expectations for 55,000 going to this. But yeah. 5,000 either way isn't really a meaningful amount. I think it'll be interesting to see the revisions for this.
November's was revised down from just over 60,000 to the 56,000 it was. That's been a trend for the jobs data is you'll get a number, then you'll see it revised lower. So this is right around just sort of stagnant job market. I think it was kind of interesting the anecdote you were talking about where people in the mining sector and things like that are finding jobs.
Meanwhile, we see a lot of the tech companies laying off people. You know, there was like the story for 20 years was if you want to get a good job learning to code, now it's going to be, you know, all the people who learned how to code are going to have to become construction workers to build the data centers that put them out of business. So I don't know.
It's a very interesting time for the economy. Inflation is still kind of high.
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Chapter 6: How is the AI trade shifting across different sectors?
We got the CPI coming out next week. And we're really we've been wait and see for a while. Just looking at kind of like the market response to the latest jobs data, we see there's now a 95 percent chance that rates will hold steady at the next Fed meeting, which is coming at the end of June. This month, it was 83% last week.
So you basically see people kind of locking into the consensus that rates are going to kind of hold steady. The jobs data kind of played into the idea that, okay, the labor market's not great, but it's also doesn't seem to be collapsing. So maybe that gives the Fed a little bit more runway to hold rates steady. They don't have to slash them aggressively to generate hiring.
So like I said, it's been wait and see, and it looks like it's going to stick to the wait and see for a while.
To your point about the coders, you know, perhaps now having to become construction workers and then building a certain kind of world and now they're having to build a concrete tangible, perhaps they'll be involved with that. I remember reading an article like more than a decade ago or perhaps just about a decade ago in the New Yorker about AI and they were saying how
At the end, humans will have robots putting bags over their head and we're going to be laughing and saying, isn't this ironic? And I think a lot of people are right now wondering if they are the architects of their own demise as AI comes chugging along and probably replacing a lot of what we see. But also there's still so much yet that we don't know.
There's a lot of fear, of course, because of that uncertainty. But also I think... The call is for patience as we see how the world evolves. And one stock I wanted to mention as we watch the world evolve, and we were talking about stocks that have been on the rise, but a stock that has been on the decline has been Roblox. And that was a stock that was on fire in recent years.
Anything to say about that and how that may speak to the trends that we're seeing play out?
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Chapter 7: What factors are influencing the current labor market?
Yeah, I actually think that's kind of tangentially related to the kind of fear that robots will put bags over our heads kind of situation. So Roblox is down about 10% in the past week. This is part of a longer term decline. It's been falling since its last earnings report in late October. It's down about 45% since then. The latest catalyst is it's now going to require age verification for chat.
The fear is just this is going to kind of slow down. You know, it makes it more difficult for people to sort of participate in. And Roblox is a sort of online video game platform. The reason they're doing this, though, is there's been a lot of pushback against the company for a while. It's had the reputation as kind of a wild west.
It's a it's a series of video games that appeal to kids like my my daughter used to play Roblox all the time. When she was a kid, but it's also gotten kind of a reputation as a place where groomers and other despicable people can kind of slip into the chats of the kids who are on the platform. So there's been lawsuits filed by different states. There's been a lot of pushback publicly for it.
And so they're putting in these age verification for the chat just to sort of eliminate or at least tamp down.
this problem that they've been having i think it points to just the the sort of you know every time we kind of roll into a new technological era there's just there's there's kind of a utopian view of what it'll look like but then the the worst parts of humanity i mean you can kind of see this online in like a place like twitter or whatever you know like it kind of surfaces not only the good but also the bad and so you need moderators you need you know maybe down the line regulation
And I think when you're looking at AI, I think that kind of points to the idea that all these sort of technological advancements are going to require some sort of social response, you know, and whether that's more self-regulation, which is what Roblox is trying to put into play here, or whether it's going to come from government regulation, which is what, you know, being sued by the states is sort of the...
The corollary there. So I don't know, like as, as we move forward, I think that as AI builds, like you said, like a new world, like a world that, you know, is going to be functioning differently than what we, and the assumptions that we had about what was a good job and what was the right course of education, like those are all going to be sort of challenged.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of geopolitical tensions on market pricing?
And how we respond is going to, you know, whether the companies are going to take steps to kind of mitigate the worst aspects of it or whether eventually there's going to be kind of a public response. We'll have to see as we move forward.
Change is the only constant. Remember that.
Exactly right.
What do you got for us next week?
So next week, as I said, we got the CPI coming out early in the week. That'll again, the mostly kind of looking to the Fed, whether or not they, you know, can stand on that knife's edge between the economy looking a little shaky, but inflation still being higher than we'd hope. So that'll just be sort of a data point in that direction.
Meanwhile, the earnings season is going to start to move forward. The financials are going to be the theme next week. So we have Citi, we have Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs all reporting. Elsewhere, Delta Airlines, the first airline of this kind of cycle, earnings cycle, is coming out.
So that's always kind of a good indication of the economy just because, you know, people are traveling, people are spending money on vacations and things like that. It kind of indicates, you know, strong consumer spending. Meanwhile, just another kind of economic indicator type earnings report. We have J.B. Hunt reporting next week as well. It's a trucking firm.
So again, it just kind of points to just overall economic activity if you're looking for more signs of what the economy is doing.
And then I guess just because we're the first episode of the new year, anything to say about the market in general this coming year? Anything that you're particularly focused on or thinking about or anything to give to investors for this coming year?
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