Stock Martket Nerd – Market Headlines – July 06, 2024
Visa and Mastercard agreed to extend interchange fee caps for another 5 years in Europe. These caps have been in place since 2019, so this won’t have any incremental impact on the businesses. In other card network regulatory news, if you recall, Visa and Mastercard recently agreed on interchange caps with merchants in the United States. This past week, a District Judge struck down the $30 billion settlement and hinted at wanting these networks to pay a lot more than the estimated $6 billion in annual savings over a 5 year period.
Boeing will repurchase Spirit AeroSystems to try to bolster safety via vertical integration and more hands-on maintenance.
Oppenheimer lowered earnings estimates for Starbucks in 2024 and 2025 amid a consumer backdrop that has not improved since its last report. It thinks traffic challenges are ongoing, which is likely reflected in the stock that is now nearly 50% off of previous highs and at multi-year lows for profit multiples.
Disney’s Inside Out 2 needed just 3 weeks to become the first film of 2024 to cross $1 billion in box office sales.
Amazon’s AWS landed a $2 billion deal with the Australian Spy Agency. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos also sold $5 billion in stock out of his roughly $166 billion stake. Launching rockets into space and really big boats are expensive. AWS boss Matt Garman spoke on Amazon’s Bedrock (foundational model) saving Pfizer $1 billion in drug discovery costs to date. These are the kind of anecdotes that make me highly confident in the monetization of the app and software layer of GenAI being inevitable.
Uber is launching Uber Yacht in Ibiza this summer.
Susquehanna’s analyst upgraded PayPal this week due to optimism surrounding its drive for profitable growth.
Snowflake caught a bullish upgrade from Goldman Sachs during the week.
Piper Sandler downgraded CrowdStrike due to valuation concerns.
