HAPPY SATURDAY TO THE STREET
And welcome back to Street Tweets from The Street Sheet!
Most research firms are content to analyze the drug pipeline. Citrini Research decided to join it.
The firm, most famous for predicting the AI apocalypse and sending the market tanking earlier this year, teamed up with Anthropic. Its goal? To see whether an unreleased version of Claude could design a scorpion antivenom from scratch.
The project produced some promising leads, but nothing close to an actual drug.
When critics piled on, Citrini shot back: “Not to beat a dead horse, but we are an investment research firm.”
Fair enough. But someone should tell them the fable of the Scorpion and the Toad.
The moral, for those who skipped first grade English class: stay in your lane.
— Brooks & The Street Sheet Team
MARKET REVIEW & PREVIEW
Tech kept sliding last week. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 both posted weekly losses, while the Dow eked out a gain despite a Friday sell-off. Strong earnings did little to offset gloomy housing data, as higher mortgage rates pushed September starts to a 1.22M annualized pace, down about 7% from a year ago.
All eyes turn to the Fed next week. Policymakers wrap their two-day meeting Wednesday, and markets widely expect rates to hold steady. Then Thursday brings September’s PCE inflation reading. Another print at or above August’s 0.3% pace would firm up bets on a rate hike in December.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t?
Investors want their capex like Goldilocks wants her porridge.
Fight it, pay it, or plan around it?
Three California billionaires, three plans for Prop 40 before California voters weigh in on the proposed billionaire tax on Nov 3.
Google’s (GOOGL) Sergey Brin (est. $13B bill): spent $100M+ fighting it.
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang (est. $8B bill): calls paying it “a privilege.”
Mark Zuckerberg (est. $10B bill): had Meta create a whole new class of stock to help cover it.
Only Zuck could turn a tax bill into a recapitalization.
Binge-watching, meet doomscrolling.
Netflix (NFLX) says its audience is nearing 1B people. Yet first-half viewing grew just 2%.
The fix? Starting in 2027, it will publish its viewing report once a year instead of twice.
Hard to spot a slowdown when you stop releasing the data.
Housing starts? More like housing stalls.
Starts are now running at roughly half their 2006 peak.
Owners won’t sell. Builders won’t build. Buyers couldn’t afford it, even if they would.
