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00:00And right now, we are two minutes away from the end of the trading day.
00:03Romain Bostic here with Katie Greifel, taking you through to that closing bell.
00:07It's a global simulcast.
00:08Carol Masser and Tim Stenevich join us right now.
00:11Welcome to our audiences across all of our Bloomberg platforms.
00:13She's back!
00:14Television, radio, our partnership with you two.
00:16Yes, I'm back.
00:16Thank you, Carol Masser.
00:17I appreciate you loving me.
00:18Back from you.
00:18Oh, oh, you mean Katie Greifel.
00:20Oh, okay.
00:21Okay.
00:21Thrilled to be here.
00:22No, it feels like I missed a lot.
00:24You did.
00:24There's always a lot going on.
00:25I'm sorry, Romain.
00:26Did I interrupt you?
00:28No.
00:28Just talk about these markets, you know?
00:30They're so kooky.
00:31Listen, even when you look at something like the VIX that has been up a bunch, down a bunch,
00:36I mean, the volatility that we see, we just swing from headline to headline, it seems like.
00:40Looking at the choppy day oil had and maybe the buying that we saw in the equity market
00:44had to do with the decline in oil prices late in the day after the, I don't know,
00:50what ended up happening with Russian oil and the U.S. easing sanctions there and allowing that to be sold.
00:57It's unsanctioned now.
00:57Yeah, there you go.
00:59This is what I missed, these $20 swings in the price of Brent.
01:03We were just talking about this with Dan Suzuki, though.
01:05I am fascinated by what's going on with gold because even as you saw these intraday reversals
01:11in stocks and bonds and oil, you didn't see it in gold.
01:16Gold's still down more than 3% on the day, nearly 4%.
01:19Yeah, absolutely.
01:20And maybe that's the inflation question here.
01:22And we talk about yesterday, too.
01:23We talk about the AI story.
01:25We broke this on air yesterday with Micron earnings.
01:27That's a phenomenal quarter.
01:28But those shares have been under pressure all day long.
01:31It's, I guess, a lot of people just saying, like, have we kind of reached maybe the peak,
01:34at least for some of those names?
01:36We get the closing bells here in New York.
01:38We opened lower.
01:39And at one point on the day, all of the major indices were down basically about a percent
01:43or more.
01:44But as you can see on your screen, there has been a big turnaround.
01:46Some comments from President Trump, some comments from the Treasury Secretary, some comments
01:50from Benjamin Netanyahu seeming to provide some optimism here that maybe potentially the
01:56U.S. and Israel can get things under control in the Strait of Hormuz.
02:00The Dow Jones Industrial Average lower by 200 points or four-tenths of a percent.
02:03The S&P closing lower by 18 points or a quarter of a percent.
02:07The NASDAQ down about three-tenths of a percent, Carol.
02:09And the Russell 2000 higher by six-tenths of a percent.
02:13All right, forgive me.
02:13I jumped the gun there.
02:14Hey, S&P 500, let's go to it.
02:17Kind of an even split, but you did have a little bit more of a negative tone here.
02:22291 names in the S&P 500, Katie, lower on the day.
02:25212 to the upside.
02:27Let's take a look at the circle, what these sectors did on this day.
02:32You can see that information technology is green, but really that is exactly unchanged.
02:37So a bit of a misrepresentation there.
02:40In terms of what did perform today, energy higher by one and a half percent, even though
02:45you saw Brent really reverse its gains.
02:49Financials also pretty much unchanged on the day, but the color is green.
02:53Then you take a look at the other side of the list.
02:55Materials leading losses today down about 1.6 percent.
02:59Consumer discretionary and consumer staples both off as well, Carol.
03:03All right, guys, let's get to some of the individual gainers.
03:06I'm just going to go right to the energy patch, because we definitely did see them dominating
03:10in the S&P 500, understandably so, with the moves that we've seen in energy markets.
03:15Still a lot of concerns.
03:16But what's interesting to play was a lot more of the oil field services and equipment companies.
03:21These are the companies that I think it's safe to say, I never saw like kind of a clear headline
03:26on any of this, but this idea that you think about what's going to be needed to be rebuilt
03:30perhaps in the Middle East, what might be being built out here in the United States as we think
03:35about energy security.
03:38So you had Baker Hughes, an oil field services and equipment company.
03:42That one was up about 5.6 percent in today's session, top in the S&P.
03:46Apache, an E&P company, up almost 4 percent in today's session.
03:51And then SLB, formerly Schlumberger, also an oil field services and equipment company.
03:56That, too, a gain of about 5.5 percent.
03:58So we did see some outperformance there.
04:01Keep in mind, Baker Hughes is up something like 30 percent year-to-date.
04:04Apache, we've seen analysts on the street raising targets on that company.
04:09That stock's up about 56 percent year-to-date.
04:12And then for something completely different, let's go to Signet.
04:15S-I-G, of course, the jewelry retailer.
04:19This one outperforming, too, up about almost 14 percent in today's session.
04:23Company's fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share beat consensus.
04:26And its full-year forecast was viewed as good enough by Citigroup.
04:30And so you definitely saw some outperformance in today's trade.
04:33And what was a down market?
04:35All right, that was the outperformance.
04:36What about the underperformance?
04:37Let's start with Micron, ticker MU.
04:41Shares of Micron fell today.
04:42The company did warn that it's going to need to spend quite a bit of money when it comes to
04:47production to meet demand.
04:48$25 billion for CapEx this year.
04:52Analysts wanted to see about $22.4 billion.
04:55That does, though, reflect the high cost of keeping up with demand for those memory chips,
05:00especially high-bandwidth components used in AI computing.
05:03Once again, Micron shares falling today by 3.8 percent.
05:07Also, let's look at Fannie and Freddie today.
05:10Shares of Fannie and Freddie have plunged to their lowest levels.
05:13Oh, no.
05:15What?
05:16You know what?
05:17Sometimes this happens.
05:18What can I tell you?
05:19Fannie ended up finishing the day higher by 5.4 percent and Freddie higher by 8.6.
05:24They were down a lot.
05:25Oh, yeah.
05:26I mean, look, the big picture is investors are casting doubt on the Trump administration's efforts to sell more stock
05:32in the mortgage finance giants to the public.
05:35Shares have been on a steep decline since mid-September, shortly after optimism peaked that a public offering for the
05:40agencies could come in 2025.
05:43To be fair, I mean—
05:44Let's see how Boston Scientific ended the day.
05:46They were down 22 percent.
05:47They were.
05:48Like, Fannie, you pulled a carol, Tim.
05:50I'm changing the subject here, guys.
05:51Let's go to Boston Scientific.
05:53All right.
05:55That's a really weird one.
05:56I'm going to have to get to the bottom of that in a few minutes.
05:58Anyway, shares of Boston Scientific, they fell as much as 3.1 percent earlier in the session.
06:01They closed down about 2 percent.
06:03This after the New York Times reported that the FDA found issues with the firm's pacemaker battery.
06:08This was last spring.
06:09Inspectors from the FDA found that a pacemaker battery made more recently had also failed.
06:14That's according to a report that has not previously been made public, according to the New York Times.
06:18Let's check in on yields here because we had another wild day in that space as well.
06:23We started the day with the sell-off or resumption of that sell-off in Treasuries.
06:27At some point, that turned into buying.
06:29But the net effect of it all, your two-year yield is going to end the day higher on the
06:32day by three basis points.
06:34Creeping back up to 3.8 is that basically everyone, everyone is pricing out any chance of a Fed rate
06:39cut this year.
06:40Although, on the longer end of the curve, a different bit of the story there where you saw yields fall
06:44on the 30-year down about four basis points.
06:47All right, guys.
06:47When we're not talking about the war, when we're not talking about the AI spend, we're talking a lot about
06:52prediction markets.
06:53And an interesting story on the Bloomberg, it talks about 0.72, Beliozny Asset Management banning employees from trading on
07:00prediction markets in their personal accounts.
07:02That's according to people familiar with the matter.
07:04It's driven by compliance limitations.
07:06So this is according to one of the people familiar with the situation, because these prediction markets are regulated by
07:11the CFTC, activity can be treated as derivatives trading.
07:14It triggers tracking and reporting obligations.
07:17But the exchanges generally lack the infrastructure to provide reliable electronic records that the financial firms need, which makes monitoring
07:24difficult and raises noncompliance risk.
07:25So it raises the question that if these firms could then provide that sort of infrastructure or paper trail, would
07:32these firms, would the asset managers then allow their employees to participate?
07:36Well, it kind of reminds me of what we saw with crypto a couple of years ago.
07:39You know, when you have a new emerging asset class or whatever you want to call it, you see these
07:44sort of headlines as firms try to catch up.
07:47And it's not just banks either, you know, I'm sure it's news companies as well.
07:51When you see something like prediction markets emerge, which you can bet on and win or lose a lot of
07:56money, that these disclosures, they tend to come on a little bit of a delay.
08:01All right.
08:02We are getting some earnings here.
08:03FedEx crossing the wire right now.
08:04The big freight shipper reporting earnings for its fiscal third quarter.
08:07Adjusted EPS does look like a beat.
08:09$5.25 a share.
08:11The street was looking for $4.17.
08:13So that's a huge beat.
08:14Revenue grew 8.1% in the quarter to $24 billion.
08:18That's roughly in line with what the street was looking for overall.
08:21The FedEx Express unit, once again, the star of the show, up about 10%.
08:24The freight business, though, was down about 4.7% and slightly missed estimates at $1.99 billion.
08:32But here's your forecast.
08:33The company says that for the full year, and we are in the final quarter of that fiscal year for
08:37them, 1930 to 2010 a share.
08:39That's well above what the street was looking for.
08:41The previous range had been 17.80 to 19, and the street, on average, was looking for 18.71.
08:48Looking for some color in the commentary from Raj Submarani and the FedEx president and CEO.
08:56Nothing that is really surprising to many people.
08:58Talking about how he delivered another quarter of strong financial results, excellent service for customers.
09:02He calls the company the industrial network that powers the global economy.
09:06The strategy strengthens our operations but also drives robust free cash flow, positioning FedEx to deliver a durable, long-term
09:12value for stockholders.
09:13I guess what I'm most interested in is this being sort of a barometer for the U.S. and global
09:17economy and what the company is seeing when it comes to demand for its products and services.
09:21Yeah, kind of interesting.
09:22I mean, as we said, the company raising its guidance, but I just did a quick search in the press
09:27release for the word war, and I didn't see anything.
09:29I mean, this, you know, is one of the shippers, Katie, you know, that's shipping all around the world.
09:34So it is a great barometer on the war.
09:36So we'll see if we get any commentary, certainly, on the call with analysts.
09:40Absolutely.
09:40I have to imagine that's top of mind.
09:41I will say for the fiscal third quarter, that ran through February 28th, so the day before the war broke
09:49out.
09:49So when it comes to a lot of these figures, when it comes to the guidance, have to imagine that
09:54what the war means for fuel costs, for demand, hot topics coming up later today.
10:00All right.
10:00Looking forward to that.
10:01That stock up about 2 percent here in the aftermarket, and that's after having a pretty good run so far
10:06already in 2026.
10:07I think it's up more than 20 percent here year to date.
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