Tesla's Cybercab Is About to Get Its Biggest Test Yet

Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zayd Admani and today is Tuesday, August 18th. In today's episode, we'll break down why bond yields are surging to their highest level in nearly 20 years and what that could mean for the stock market. We'll also recap earnings from Home Depot and give you the latest on Tesla's Cybercap. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Google is buying Spirit Airlines' data for $10 million. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks kicked off the week in the red on Monday. The S&P 500 fell 0.5% while the NASDAQ dropped 0.3%. And this happened despite memory stocks and chip stocks ripping on Monday. The semiconductor index was up 1.6%. The chip index has now rallied more than 20% from its July lows, officially putting it back in a bull market. But again, despite the rally in chip stocks, the broader market struggled yesterday, and it was likely due to rising oil prices and surging bond yields. So we covered this earlier in the summer. Bond yields are surging and that hasn't stopped. The 30-year treasury yield closed at 5.31% on Monday. That's the highest level since 2007, while the 10-year treasury yield climbed to above 4.72%. And those yields are moving even higher this morning. Now, part of the reason is the Iran war and higher oil prices and hopes of a peace deal fading. Investors are worried that higher energy prices for an extended period of time could keep inflation elevated for longer. But there's also a much bigger structural issue happening here, which is that there is so much debt right now being issued at the same time. The U.S. government is running an annual deficit of nearly $2 trillion, so they have to borrow a ton of money. And then you also have these big tech companies borrowing a record amounts of money to fund their AI infrastructure build out. So you have governments and corporations competing for basically the same pool of investor money. So investors are demanding higher yields to lend to them. And I think this is probably one of the biggest risks of the stock market right now. If long-term yields keep climbing and borrowing gets more expensive across the economy, even without the Fed raising rates, that could make it much harder for stocks to keep ripping higher in the second half of the year. So far, the stock market has ignored the bond market. Stocks are near all time highs while bond yields are surging, but we'll have to see how much longer that lasts. So we'll continue to keep an eye on the bond market along with everything else happening. So definitely get subscribed to the podcast and tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with Home Depot. Home Depot reported earnings this morning and the numbers were actually pretty solid, despite management literally saying the housing market is frozen. Revenues came in at $47.9 billion. That was up 5.6% from a year ago and beating Wall Street estimates. Adjusted earnings came in at $4.92 per share, also beating estimates and comparable sales, which is sales at stores that have been open at least a year, increased 1.7%, which was nearly double what Wall Street expected. In fact, that was Home Depot's strongest comparable sales growth since late 2022. The Home Depot is getting a boost from two things. Their professional contractor business keeps growing. Tradesmen like plumbers, electricians keep buying supplies, despite what the macro economy is doing. The other big boost from Home Depot is that existing homeowners are doing small projects. So I'm talking things like repainting rooms and buying plants and grills and patio furniture and power tools. But people are still hesitant to take on big projects like a major kitchen renovation or remodeling an entire house. And the reason is mortgage rates remain high. Home prices are expensive and people just aren't moving these days. And that matters for Home Depot, because these major renovations usually happen when people buy a house. But there are a lot of people stuck in their existing house, locked into a 3% mortgage. So they're choosing to do small DIY work to make improvements. An interesting comment from the CFO. He said that customers actually have the money to spend. They're just hesitant spending on big projects because they're worried about inflation, fuel costs, and the overall economy. All things considered though, I think this was a solid quarter for Home Depot. I mean, the stock is up around 2% this morning. The bull case here is that Home Depot is surviving one of the worst possible environments for its business. The housing market is frozen right now. It has been for a while. Borrowing costs are high and getting higher. And yet same store sales are growing at their fastest pace in almost four years. So when mortgage rates eventually come down or if they eventually come down and the housing market picks back up, there could be a lot of pent up renovation demand waiting on the sidelines. Let's shift gears and talk about Tesla. According to a report from the information, Tesla is reportedly getting ready to launch its cyber cab to the public in Austin, Texas, as soon as this month. Now remember the cyber cab is Tesla's two seater car that has no steering wheel or brake pedals. It was specifically designed to be a self-driving car. And the company seems to be on the verge of adding these cars to their robo-taxi service soon. Now, right now, Tesla's robo-taxi fleet is made up of Model Y's. So adding the cyber cab would be a major milestone for the company. I think at some point the company plans to sell these cyber cabs as well, but there's no timeline on that just yet. Now going back to the report, it says that Tesla has been testing cyber cabs this summer by giving employees rides on private roads and even doing training with Austin first responders on how to deal with the car in an emergency. The plan for Tesla is to start with employees riding these cyber cabs on public roads and then add the cyber cabs into Tesla's robo-taxi service a few days later. I got to say overall, not that many people are talking about Tesla's robo-taxi service or the cyber cab these days. You know, Tesla launched their robo-taxis last summer and got a ton of attention and they've been slowly expanding the footprint and bringing it to more cities. But Tesla still has a long way to go before they really scale up and catch up to Waymo. You know, Tesla said that last quarter that their robo-taxis had done 380,000 driverless miles. Waymo by comparison said they logged more than 220 million driverless miles with riders. So there's a huge gap between the two companies and I'm not really sure how making a dedicated cyber cab will help Tesla scale the robo-taxi business. So overall, it's been a pretty tough year for Tesla. The stock is down around 17% so far this year. I think everyone is expecting Tesla to eventually merge with SpaceX and create one big super Elon company. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Duolingo stock is popping this morning after DA Davidson upgraded the stock to a buy and raised their price target from $130 a share up to $160. The firm says that the worst may finally be priced in for Duolingo when it comes to slower user growth and monetization concerns. And you know, this upgrade really stands out because Wall Street has been overwhelmingly bearish on the stock out of the 25 analysts covering Duolingo, 21 have a hold or sell rating. The stock has had a rough ride over the past year. It's down about 26% so far this year and down more than 60% from its 2024 highs because of slower user growth and concerns that AI might make language apps obsolete. But DA Davidson thinks that Duolingo may finally be approaching a turning point and shares are up more than 4% this morning at the time of this recording. Now on the flip side, the Chinese tech giant Baidu is getting hammered this morning after reporting another ugly quarter. Revenues last quarter fell 4% to $4.6 billion, making that the company's fifth straight quarter of declining revenues and to make matters worse, the company's net income fell by 68% to $344 million. Baidu is like the Google of China and they have a big problem right now. The resisting search advertising business is shrinking with ad revenues falling 19% last quarter as users spend more time on social media apps and also getting answers from AI chat bots. At the same time, Baidu is tripling its capital expenditure on AI data centers and chips and AI development to compete with rivals like Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot. And to be fair, their AI business is growing. The AI cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 50%, but so far those revenues aren't growing fast enough or generating enough profit to offset the decline in their search business. And that's why Baidu stock was down 20% this year heading into this earnings report and is down another 9% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Google is buying Spirit Airlines' data for $10 million. Google won a bankruptcy auction with a $10 million bid to buy a massive collection of Spirit's internal business data. I'm talking 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, plus information about aircraft operation and pricing and revenue and employee productivity and marketing and HR. I mean, they are getting all of it. The data set even includes pricing information from 7.2 billion competitor flights and transaction data going all the way back to 2008. Now, before you panic, no, your personal information is not included. Passenger profiles and loyalty records are being scrubbed by a third party, so Google won't know that I took way too many red-eye flights to Vegas between 2016 and 2019. Now, the reason that Google is buying this data is to train their AI models and improve their products. And I think this really shows how valuable proprietary data is becoming in the AI race. All these big tech companies have already trained their models on all the publicly available information from the Internet. So now they're looking for data that's not on the Internet, like corporate internal emails and transactions and operations and pricing and all that real world business stuff. So honestly, I feel like $10 million is a bargain for all that info from Spirit Airlines. Remember, Google already pays Reddit around $60 million a year just to get access to their data. With Spirit, Google is getting decades of real world operational data that it actually owns. So yeah, now that Google is buying all this data from Spirit, maybe that means that Google flights will become even better to use in the near future. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.