Moderna Soars on Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough

Your Daily Market Update in 10 Minutes. My name is Zayd Admani and today is Wednesday, August 19th. In today's episode, we'll break down Trump's latest tariff fight with Canada. We'll also recap Target's earnings and how they've turned things around and tell you why Moderna's stock is exploding today. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why one in four Gen Z investors are treating sports betting like an actual retirement strategy. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks sold off again on Tuesday. The S&P 500 dropped 0.7% and the Nasdaq fell by 1.3%. Chip stocks were some of the biggest losers yesterday with the SOX Semiconductor Index dropping 5%. The bigger story continues to be the bond market. The 30-year U.S. Treasury yield hit 5.3% yesterday, its highest level since 2007, and the 10-year is sitting around 4.7% which is its highest yield since early 2025. By the way, this isn't just happening in the U.S. Borrowing costs are surging around the world. French 30-year yields are at their highest level since 2008, German yields are at 15-year highs, and long-term yields in Japan and the U.K. are also hitting multi-decade highs. We talked a bit about this yesterday. There are a few reasons driving this sell-off in the bond market. One reason is the supply of debt hitting the markets. Governments are issuing enormous amounts of debt, and they're now competing with big tech companies that are also trying to borrow billions of dollars to fund their AI build-out. With more bonds hitting the markets, that means investors can demand higher yields to buy them. And the other thing that could be happening here is that maybe a 5% yield on a 30-year treasury is just normal now. Before the financial crisis in 2008, long-term interest rates regularly traded around these levels, so maybe we're getting back to that reality. And I wonder what that's going to do to the stock market long-term. Higher interest rates increase borrowing costs for companies across the economy, and it also makes stocks a less attractive investment. So far, those strong corporate earnings have allowed the stock market to mostly ignore what's happening with bonds. The S&P is hovering near all-time highs. But this earnings season is almost over, so now we're going to find out whether the stock market can keep ignoring the bond market moving forward. So we'll continue to pay close attention to stocks, bonds, and everything else happening, so make sure you guys are subscribed to the podcast and tuning in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines, starting with a tariff update. President Trump just hit pause on a new round of tariffs on Canadian imports less than two hours before they were supposed to go into effect at midnight. A quick refresher on the situation, last month, President Trump announced plans to slap a 50% tariff on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian products using Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. The reason I bring this up is because this is a Great Depression-era law that has basically never been used to apply tariffs. These tariffs would have impacted Canadian imports like hockey equipment, electronics, plastics, building materials, beer, milk, and plywood. Overall, it was only going to affect 5% of Canadian exports to the U.S., but obviously a 50% tariff is massive and would essentially price most of these products out of the U.S. market. And the reason all of this is happening now is basically a retaliation on top of a retaliation. Trump is upset about Canadian restrictions on American products like dairy, autos, and alcohol. Not to mention Canadian provinces like Ontario and Quebec have been boycotting U.S. alcohol in response to American tariffs from last year. Bloomberg says that exports of U.S. spirits to Canada have dropped about 70% since those boycotts began. So yeah, Trump was going to slap these 50% tariffs on Canadian products, but now that's being delayed for three days. Trump said in a Truth Social post last night that the U.S. and Canada have reached a deal. Now what's funny is that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was a little bit more cautious. He said the two sides made substantial progress, but there's still more work to do. So yeah, we're doing this tariff dance again, and at this point, the market really doesn't care. Tariff headlines like this used to cause huge swings in the markets, but now we've seen this play out before and no one's getting too worked up about it. Let's shift gears and talk about Target. Target reported earnings this morning, and on paper, the numbers were solid. Revenues in Q2 were up 5.3% to $26.5 billion. That beat estimates, and if you look at comparable sales, which are sales at the stores that have been open for at least a year, that was up 3.8%, well above the 2.4% that Wall Street was expecting. And importantly, that growth in sales is being driven by more traffic to the stores. That's a big deal because Target has been struggling for the last few years to get people to come back to the stores, and the company has been refreshing their products and lowering prices and improving the store layout, and it looks like some of that is working. In fact, sales were up across all six of Target's major categories, and their digital comparable sales were up 8.7%. Not to mention, their same-day delivery grew more than 25%. And because of that momentum, Target raised its full-year sales outlook for the year for the second time this year, now projecting a 5% growth. Now, I have to point out, there is an asterisk on these earnings. Target reported earnings of $4.11 per share, which is nearly double last year. But Target did receive roughly $752 million in tariff refunds during the second quarter, which added $1.65 per share to their earnings. So the headline profit number looks way better because of that one-time tariff refund. And that's why Target stock is down around 2% this morning, despite the overall solid quarter. But if you zoom out, Target stock was already up more than 50% this year, so it's been a good year for the retailer. And I think Target might be in a good spot, especially if shoppers are actually coming back into the stores and using same-day delivery more often. This has got to be a great feeling for new CEO Michael Fidelke, who took over the company back on February 1st. I mean, what a way to start your tenure. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Moderna shares are absolutely skyrocketing this morning after announcing a breakthrough in cancer treatment. Moderna, alongside Merck, announced that their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine successfully met its main goal in late-stage phase 3 trials of over 1,100 patients. This treatment combines Moderna's mRNA-based cancer vaccine with Merck's blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda. And this combination successfully extended the amount of time patients stayed cancer-free compared with Keytruda alone. It also reduced the risk of cancer spreading to other parts of the body. So this is a pretty big breakthrough, and the companies are also testing the same approach for lung, bladder, kidney, stomach, and pancreatic cancers. So if this works, the market opportunity could be absolutely huge. As a result, Moderna's stock is up over 80% this morning at the time of this recording, and Merck's stock is up more than 6%. Now on the flip side, Lowe's is trading lower this morning after the home improvement retailer reported mixed earnings and gave investors a pretty cautious outlook. Revenues for the quarter came in just under $26 billion missing estimates, and the company updated its full-year guidance to the bottom end of the previous forecast. Comparable sales are also now expected to be flat for the year. The main issue here is the housing market still remains frozen. High home prices and elevated mortgage rates have kept people from moving, and that means fewer big renovation projects. We talked about this on yesterday's show with Home Depot earnings. But unlike Home Depot, Lowe's isn't seeing a boost from small DIY shoppers. As a result, shares are down around 3% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. There is a growing number of young people who are starting to treat sports betting like an investment strategy. According to a new survey from Betterment, 26% of Gen Z investors say they consider sports betting a deliberate part of their long-term financial strategy. For comparison, that number drops to 14% for Millennials, 6% for Gen X, and 1% for Boomers. But here's the stat that really stood out to me. More than half of the Gen Z investors surveyed said that over the past year, they've taken money that was originally meant for their investment account and put it into sports betting instead. And you know, all this sounds crazy on the surface, but I can kind of understand how we got here. When I was growing up, if you wanted to bet on sports, you pretty much had to go to Vegas Today we have sports books sitting right on our phones with billions of dollars spent on marketing them. Legal sports betting in the U.S. has now grown into an almost $17 billion dollar industry and I think this is all connected to a bigger trend of the cost of living going up and housing becoming less and less affordable. A lot of young people feel like the traditional path to building wealth is getting farther so you see more and more people looking towards sports betting and crypto and other high-risk bets as a shortcut. You know, so instead of putting $100 a month into the stock market and waiting decades for that money to compound, a lot of people are just putting that money into a high-risk parlay to try to 10X their money overnight. So yeah, kind of a heavy topic for the show, but let me know in the comments on how you guys feel about all of this. Well alright guys, that's the rundown for today. I 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.