00:11 Speaker A

Now time for some of today’s trending tickers. We are watching Strategy, Stellantis and Reddit, and Markets and Data editor Jared Blikre is joining me now. Let’s talk about Strategy.

00:23 Jared

Let’s.

00:24 Speaker A

The stock, the stock is rebounding this morning alongside Bitcoin and the company’s reporting results last night posting a $12.4 billion loss driven by declines in Bitcoin at the end of the year. Executive chairman Michael Sailor appeared unshaken in the wake of this drawdown on the conference call. He highlighted President Trump’s support of crypto as the foundation for gains ahead. Um, that has not worked out so far, obviously.

00:54 Jared

No, I mean one of the questions I’ve been asking people on the podcast and in these studios is in 2025, we had one of the most crypto-friendly regulatory environments ever, and we made new highs in the beginning of the year, but then it petered out and I’m just wondering what the next catalyst is. I we were talking yesterday, Julian, I think it has to be another business use. But let’s get back to the main point because I’ve got some comments here from the Strategy earnings where they posted a loss of $42.93 in EPS.

01:29 Jared

But here’s benchmark with a price target of $705. That is high. Uh, Strategy posted yesterday after the market close, landed on a day when markets were in no mood to entertain nuance. Bitcoin was sliding hard, risk assets were buckling, and the company’s share price fell 17% dropping to its lowest level in roughly 18 months. And, um, here’s another one, Canter Fitzgerald.

02:00 Jared

While the Q4 print gave us another look at the company’s financials, investors are understandably more focused on Bitcoin price tonight uh dynamics and strategy’s ability to manage a crypto winter. There’s that term crypto winter, which I mean it’s hard to deny that we’re in that. Crypto winter means you got to find a bottom sometime, but that usually takes some time.

02:22 Speaker A

If you’re leveraged on the way up, Yes. you’re leveraged on the way down.

02:26 Jared

Well, that brings me to a chart here. Let’s go to the Wi-Fi Interactive. Uh, we can see right now Strategy is up $7 or 7 and a half percent up to 115. But I want to show you Strategy versus Bitcoin and this is something I’ve been showing for a while. This is a one-year look, and purple is uh the Ishares Bitcoin ETF as a proxy. Strategy is in Cyan. You can see Strategy is down 68% and where they diverged was really in the middle of last year, August, uh, September.

03:02 Jared

And you can see Strategy, they say it’s a Bitcoin proxy, but it’s also kind of like a high beta play. It went lower than Bitcoin in the April sell-off and went higher on the rebound, but they have very much diverged. Now, this year, it was looking a little encouraging because strategy was once again outperforming Bitcoin until about five days ago. and I’m just going to go to a strategy chart here. I’ll put uh there’s five days, down 25% and uh that’s that hurts. So there you go.

03:41 Speaker A

It does. We’ll see if it’ll continue to hurt as even as the stock bouncing in pre-market this morning. We’ll see how long that lasts. Let’s talk Stellantis too. Those shares are plunging after the automaker announced a $26 billion write down as it scales back its EV push. And and before we kind of get into the fundamentals of this, I just wanted to pause for a moment and just talk about we’ve talked about this before, the moment that we are in that a company like Stellantis is down 25% after earnings.

04:19 Jared

They’re big. They’re big.

04:20 Speaker A

But this is now the norm, right? That we see these enormous swings after very large companies that used to be very stayed, maybe you would get a single digit drawdown after the earnings, you know, because the options activity and the retail activity is really supercharged the, you know, these these kind of reactions in the market.

04:47 Jared

Yes. I think investors are conditioned to a much faster-paced market and you could criticize the company, well, they should have guided or whatever. But to your point, uh a lot of stocks are in fact, the entire market is kind of acting like this. And I would point out to the detriment of investors, the last few sell-offs that we’ve had, especially in April of last year, we at it was so quick to get back to record highs here in the major indices that I think investors are a little bit inured about the downside here. Oh, we’ll just get back to break even uh in a few days or weeks, but that’s not typically how the market works.

05:25 Jared

So, uh you got to remember 2022 and not necessarily the pandemic because that was another fast rebound. But and I don’t think it’s going to be long as the tech crash bubble that took years and years to play out. Uh but we definitely have a much faster market. To your point about, oh, let’s get back to some of the earnings here though. Um, UBS which has a buy rating on it said this should be the clearing event we’ve been waiting for. However, Auto, uh, which I don’t have a price target, but they do rate the stock neutral.

05:52 Jared

They have a different outlook. It’s hard to call today’s announcement a clearing event, yet given the uncertainty still surrounding the execution in the coming quarters. So clearing just means that you have a reset and investors can finally say, okay, we’re starting over here, but that’s a little bit muddied now. We got different opinions on that.

06:27 Speaker A

Yes. Interesting. That’s what makes the market. All right, let’s talk Reddit. That stock is jumping on the back of earnings, which beat analyst expectations on the top and bottom lines. The platform’s first quarter guidance also coming in strong and announced a billion dollar share buyback also, and those shares up 6 and a half percent.

06:48 Jared

Yes. So um I’ll give you a couple of analyst reports on this as well. Here’s Bloomberg Intelli- intelligence, which doesn’t really they’re not quite an analyst because they don’t rate stocks, but Reddit’s first quarter outlook indicates top line growth is likely to remain above 50% supported by steady engagement and continued advertising momentum on its platform. But there are concerns about the US growth in terms of users that are logged in. And that’s one particular metric.

07:22 Jared

So here is uh Truist Securities, the results and outlook show solid momentum across monetization and user growth and then RBC Reddit’s quarter fourth quarter featured a big beat on top and bottom lines and solid guide for Q1 offset by further deceleration. That’s what I was looking for, in US logged in DAUs. That’s daily active users. That grew 5% versus uh 7.4% last quarter, and that reinforces the LLM bear case.

07:56 Jared

So what does that mean? Well, so the growth is down a little bit. It’s still growing, but uh AI is kind of taken over everything and they’re concerns that it’s eating into uh users staying online longer. And so that’s the concern with Reddit. But as you said, it’s up in the pre-market here 6 and a half percent.

08:16 Speaker A

Thanks, Jared. Appreciate it.