On Thursday’s episode of Asking for a Trend, Yahoo Finance host Julie Hyman breaks down the afternoon trends that will move stocks tomorrow, exploring AI’s impact on the grid, Palantir’s technology, and more.
Yahoo Finance’s Josh Schafer joins the show to break down the trading day’s biggest stories, including GameStop’s rally on Roaring Kitty’s upcoming livestream. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance’s Josh Lipton, Palantir CEO Alex Karp explains how the company’s AI technology is offering value to customers and investors. Canaccord Genuity Managing Director George Gianarikas then talks energy bottlenecks as they relates to AI deployment.
This article was written by Gabriel Roy
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome to asking for a trend.
I’m Julie Hyman in for Josh Lipton today and for the next half hour, we’re breaking down the trends of today that will move stocks tomorrow.
There’s a lot to keep track of.
So we’re focusing on what you need to know to get ahead of the curve.
Here’s some of the trends we’ll be diving into artificial intelligence has taken the tech industry and beyond by storm.
But reality is starting to set in regulators reportedly antitrust investigations into names like NVIDIA and Microsoft as the power grid braces for a rapid surge from data centers.
Plus the return of the meme rally, Gamestop stock surging after worrying kitty scheduled a live stream for noon tomorrow.
Keith Gill.
The man behind the account is tied to recent posts on Reddit that set off a rally earlier in the week and sparked reports that E trade was considering kicking him off that platform.
Plus we Bush’s Dan Ives may hail the company as the messy of A I.
But pun slowing us commercial growth sparked skepticism that the company could, could fail to live up to the A I hype Josh Lipton sat down with P CEO Alex Carp to discuss the company’s outlook, defense spending and much more.
Well, electrical grids across the country are feeling the pressure from the A I boom.
Our next guest says something’s got to give for more.
Bring in George Generica managing director at Kord genuity.
Thanks so much for being here, George.
Um This is something we’ve been talking about a lot, right?
This huge demand for A I, the huge demand for power that comes along with it.
But of course, there’s also a lot of talk about grid security, sort of around the country and resiliency and whether it’s going to be able to keep up with this.
So where are the sort of the pain points in your view?
Well, thanks for having me on.
So we wrote a note last week that was inspired by a report from CT, which is the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
It’s the organization that operates their electric grid down there.
Uh And like your other guests, probably we’ve written a lot about the potential for a ID centers to tax the energy grid.
But we, what we appreciate about the study from Ercot is it’s one of the few that we’ve actually seen that in a granular way, tries to quantify what the impact could look like.
Now, the study was inspired by a bill in the Texas legislature that demanded Ercot analyze the impact of things like data centers on grid reliability as a winter storm in 2021 significantly impacted the grid and resulted in deaths and what the study found that was starting in 2028 2029 2030 in both the winter and summer.
The curve margins which is this buffer that they try to create to make sure that they can handle peak loads would turn negative.
And that is clearly not something that they want to do.
So, either they have to add significant energy ener energy generating assets to the grid or the demand for all this A I related hardware that people are buying has to down.
And like we say in our notes, something’s got to give there.
Well, it doesn’t seem like the latter thing is gonna happen necessarily, right?
At least not in the short term.
Are there any plans though in the works?
I mean, you know, I feel like for years now we’ve been talking about R CT, we’ve been talking about the grid problems in Texas specifically because of heat waves because of other winter storms as well, winter weather.
So is anything, is anything giving on that side?
So there are plans to add significant energy generating assets, whether it’s solar, whether it’s stuff and with battery technology and even longer term.
And we’re very bullish on the potential for nuclear technology, particularly small modular reactors that help create baseload clean energy across the country.
And we cover a company called new scale ticker symbol smr that hopefully over the next, you know, several years we start to win uh some uh some contracts to build out the energy infrastructure in the United States for data centers.
And, and it seems like regional, this is really a regional issue.
We talked to another um analyst yesterday who covers the utility industry and she kind of said, well, it depends on where you’re talking about.
Maybe in a place like Texas, you would have an issue but there is sort of ample capacity in other places.
I guess the question is whether data center operators are gonna try to locate in those places that do have more capacity.
Yeah, that, that’s a very fair point.
I mean, in Texas that there’s a lot of cheap green energy.
So companies are putting their data centers there, you know, traditional parts in the Mid Atlantic, you know, we know some places in Ohio.
So yes, it’s, it’s kind of geography specific.
But ultimately, you know, if you, the more data centers, you add, the more EVs you add to the grid, it will begin to tax it.
And I thought this particular study was alarming just because you get to these, this potential negative reserve margin scenario that’s very, very dangerous for, for their grid and for the country.
And so, you know, and like I said, you know, there are we, we followed up that note that we wrote with the uh basically uh calling out some posts yesterday or two days ago from Elon Musk and someone else who went back and forth on X that basically said these companies are buying so much of this A I related hardware.
They don’t know where to put it, you know, and that’s sort of creating an issue there too.
So it’s not just having to put the energy generating assets in the ground.
It’s also finding a, where, where to put all this A I related hardware that, that they’re buying.
And so there seems like there’s this potential for an air pocket as all these ambitious plans to create, you know A I data centers meet the realities on the ground of building data centers, buying energy generating assets, getting permits, finding labor.
This is all the real world stuff that might slow down the uh the A I related stuff, right?
And not to mention, maybe have an effect on our electricity bills as well, potentially even though it is regulated industry, you know, we’ve already seen that kind of an increase.
So George, as you mentioned, you kind of look at it as well through the prism of who could benefit from all of this, not just like where is it gonna create bottlenecks?
As you were just discussing, you talked about one idea, one company that might be poised to benefit, are there other sort of, you know, grid resiliency operators or alternative power operators that you’re looking to here?
Certainly, you know, we cover a company called a Maresco uh that basically a clean tech integrator that should benefit, you know, uh although they’re not quite seeing demand from data centers yet that we’re seeing some early signs from that same thing for a company we cover called fluence that hasn’t really seen yet that, that data center demand, but they’re starting to see the inklings of it.
And also if you want to buy a generator for your home to make sure that it’s uh it’s safe for any issues with the grid.
You buy Genack Gnrc.
Uh They make the generators that basically serve as backup power for residences and for, you know, for some uh commercial industrial applications as well.
George, good to catch up with you.
I look forward to something’s gotta give part three maybe.
Uh The next note, next update on this.
This is definitely a topic that’s not going away.
So we’ll keep talking about it.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
The S and P 500 dips below the flat line on the heels of a record, close investors setting their eyes on fresh labor market data.
And Yahoo Finance’s Josh Schaffer joins us now with more on the trading day takeaways.
Hey, Josh.
Hey Julie.
Yeah, not a lot to say about today really, because stocks didn’t do much.
Quite simply.
We’re ahead of the jobs report tomorrow.
The S and P 500 closed one point under an all time.
High.
So really not a lot happening.
And I want to take a look at why that is and essentially look at what could happen tomorrow.
So we have a chart here with us.
This is taking a look at the relationship between cities economic Surprise Index and the S and P 500.
Essentially the way to think about this chart is as our line comes down, that means that bad economic news or when economic data comes in lower than expected, softer than expected, that has been good for stocks.
This has been the trend basically over the last month here, you can see we’ve had fits and starts with this quite a bit through the rate hiking cycle.
But I think this is just to say that over the last week, we’ve really seen a little bit of softer data in the labor market, not crazy soft, but the market has liked soft data.
So we’re looking for 100 85,000 non farm payroll ads tomorrow.
Maybe if we come in soft, maybe that’s what the market wants or maybe it wants a strong labor market.
I don’t know.
But this has been the trend.
It wants everything, it wants a strong labor market but low inflation and it wants rate cuts lower rates.
Yeah.
So how are, you know, we that increase, which is interesting to see it has been interesting to watch.
So this is the probability of a fed rate cut in September from the CME fed watch tool.
Currently pricing in a 70 per or roughly 70% chance last week.
It was just 51.
It’s a pretty big move.
We know these odds move a lot.
But it was interesting to me to see this big of a move in a week really off some jolts data.
Not a lot of data.
It’s not like we had, I guess we had an inflation print last Friday now, but there wasn’t ton of data and of course, no fed speak over the week.
So it’s been interesting to see this move.
And also again, what is the jobs report due to that tomorrow?
And what does the fed meeting actually do to this expectation?
I mean, you know, when we’re gonna know if there’s gonna be a rate cut in September when J Pal tells us, there’s gonna, I mean, he, he usually signals right.
In other words, it’s not gonna, we don’t have to wait till the day of usually, usually there’s signaling either the meeting before and, or through fed speak.
But we don’t, I mean, for September still don’t know.
And the question too is, does it matter that much if it’s September or if it’s no, you know, like I think that question is, yeah, we’ve talked to a lot of investors who said it doesn’t matter that much in terms of the trajectory for stocks as long as they’re not cutting because of a dramatic slowing in the economy.
That’s sort of the caveat for all of this.
Well, all of this boring macro stuff is going on.
We still got a guy with a bandana who’s gonna talk to us tomorrow.
Apparently I called this Gamestop won’t give up because I was talking to our colleague, Josh Lipton on Monday when gamestop rallied and then it kind of cooled off and I was like, maybe it’s over, we kind of left the segment with, you know, maybe like this is just it, right?
Because Gamestop had the rally on Monday.
I’ll pull up the charter for us and at the rally on Monday and then it sort of just died down after that.
And I don’t know if I’m gonna have the chart for us.
I think I might have moved to R chart around here.
I’m gonna help you.
I’m gonna help you out because I know it’s the top training.
So the top training and there will be Gamestop.
So there’s Gamestop there.
It is on the day that, hey, you wanna do the four day here.
So it’s, here’s, here’s you on Monday saying, well, maybe, maybe it’s gonna go away and then here’s you today.
I’m sure there’s some sort of meme to describe your true factory throughout the week.
It’s us rolling forward in the chair, right?
It’s the, it’s the initial meme.
It’s, oh, we’re interested again.
Ok. All right.
And the Reddit account that’s attached to Ro and Kitty just posted after the close, that, that position that he has is now up over 500 it’s at about $580 million.
Up over $300 million from when it was opened.
So, pretty interesting.
I, I don’t know what we’re gonna hear tomorrow.
I don’t know.
We’re gonna, does he still have a fundamental case to make for gamestop?
I mean, we just talk, I, I think you, you missed it, but we just talked to Anthony Cumba of Loop Capital who covers still Gamestop as an analyst.
And boy was, he fired up and not in a good way about what’s going on with gamestop.
And he said this, you know, it’s, the business is in a much worse position than it was when this began.
Right?
Few, few years ago.
What?
Let’s do a three year chart or take it to a five year chart to show what, you know, this was the first time around and the business has only gone down in terms of the revenue in terms of number of stores, just health of the business.
And yet we see this happening again.
The final thing I’ll say, I’ll be curious if he mentions any other stocks because everything he’s done so far, people just, it’s only Gamestop moving.
Maybe that’s how we broaden out a meme stock rally to some extent he talks about something else.
That’s what I’m um, quick, quick, um, precision here, Anthony does not still cover Gamestop, but he still obviously talks about gamestop.
We all talk about gamestop.
Yeah, it’s the, it’s the fun stuff right now.
Yeah.
All right, thanks, Josh.
Appreciate it.
Well, coming up, we’ve got a conversation with Punier technology, Ceo Alex Carp about the company’s A I platform that’s next on asking for a trend pent technologies, customer conference A I A IP con giving customers the stage to showcase how they use the company’s software.
In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Finance Punier Technology, Ceo Alex Carp details the functions of the company’s A I platform.
And what it means for investors.
I think what everybody watching this is familiar with is you have a massive he cycle around large language models.
And then when you try to use them in your enterprise, you find out that it’s more like self flagellation and it’s expensive with no output and what we learned in the context of war fighting primarily, but also across the uh 20 years of building uh software infrastructure.
Where how do you manage an emergent natural resource called large language model models in a way where you actually get value, meaning you can transform your enterprise, you can change the margins, you can turn non technical people into technical people on the battlefield.
You can do things that would have otherwise cost billions of dollars for millions of dollars, meaning being very precise in how you allocate troops, being precise in how you target people.
There’s a fundamental fallacy around large language models.
People could conflate actual data of an enterprise which is structured and can be taken apart and understood with a large language model which is much more like an emergent property.
Something that is can be modeled used, but you need precision and all the value in the market is going to go to chips.
And what we call ontology, we have this anology and the ontology allow you to take a large language model and use it, refine it and then impose it on your enterprise in the logic of your enterprise, in the security model of your enterprise.
And what does that mean for the 7070 people are here presenting talking about why they’re using it and how they’re using it.
You got to remember we started selling this product just over a year ago.
We started with the claim that we knew a lot about the precursors of large language models and large language models.
And the general approach of just buying models is going to be essentially self pleasuring for an enterprise at the cost of the enterprise and no one believed us.
And now you see 70 people saying, hey, we’re using this for construction, we’re using it for hospitals, the people who are not speaking, but we’re using it on the battlefield.
We’re using it to compress margins, we’re using it to build enterprises that we’re only able to build in Asia and America, we’re making engineers uh better engineers, we’re making people are not engineers into engineers using or anology and a large language model.
And this works very, very quickly and it is substantially changing the health and vitality of every business here.
And as opposed to the alternative, which is that you buy some large language model, you, you party with it basically.
And the next day you have a hangover and, and then, and so like and again, for, for people just looking at this, what does it mean for palant here?
It means we are sitting on the only thing that actually creates a quantifiable transformational value in an enterprise.
Yes, it is not understood well because everybody understands the problem incorrectly.
Yes, it is going to transform America and our clients are leaving the way.
And by the way, it’s like to actually show things that are not understood, you have to actually show them the whole purpose of this conference is I can tell you how an ontology works.
It’s actually quite simple.
You have the logic of the business, including the security logic of the business.
And you have something that approximates new knowledge in a new form called a large language model.
And it allows you to take the value of the new form, the raw resource of a large language model, largely powered by chips and put it into a precise organization in the logic of the business.
I can tell you that or I can show you 70 businesses saying my business is stronger, healthier and much better than any other business in my sector.
And so what is bottom line for investors listing Alex, how would you characterize what is commercial demand like right now for a IP the way I would explain it to my most important investors which are individual investors.
There’s two parts of the market that are creating value.
People will pay for chips and ontology.
And you understand the chip side now and now you’re going to understand ontology and what does that mean for your business.
It means you can actually use this raw resource and process it into something that actually works.
And if you want to see exactly how watch the people presenting, you’re going to see people in construction, using it to build buildings quicker, cheaper, more accurately, you’re going to see people in the hospital industry saying, how could I possibly ever distribute my patients ethically fairly and commercially relevantly?
How could I distribute resources across?
How can I manage my my company as not abstract units, but as a portfolio, these are these things are happening within days.
What I’m interested in the Alex is because you, you can talk a lot of CEO S will say and they’ll sit on yours, they’re interested in A I but actually they’re not willing to pull the trigger yet because they have these questions about privacy security vs but, but you’re saying we’re crushing it.
We’re closing.
What I would tell any of them is how are you doing it?
Well, there’s a technical answer which I gave you the precursor of.
But again, do you wanna know how we’re doing it or do you wanna enjoy it being done?
Both?
Great.
Well, first, you, but no, actually, first you wanna see it works like the, the, the, the central issue I think, I mean, we have hundreds and hundreds of CEO S. And by the way, the thing about the 70 people here presenting is, you know, they’re presenting to other people.
I’m not paying them to present.
The reason they’re presenting is they’re like, wow, I didn’t really believe this could work and now it’s working really well.
So the most important thing, by the way for a normal user, someone who’s gonna pay is does it work?
Then the second question is how does it work?
Does it scale?
What is the commercial model you really have to establish?
It works?
I would stand by the thing that it, in this case is people think of large language models as the value in of itself.
What they’re gonna find is the large language model is much more like a chemistry experiment.
The outgrowth of which is a something that is useful when refined and the refinement of that for your enterprise happens in what we call our ontology, which is where we impose the logic of your business on the large language model in the security and intellectual logic of your business.
And this is transformative and what it means for investors and others is there is value in this market.
People, you can identify where the value is very easily.
Are people paying for it?
Will they pay for it?
And what will there’s a prey to optimality to a lot of this stuff?
And that prey to optimality happens when people say, oh, I am actually getting value and that’s why people are here.
Let me ask you, you suggest I want to broaden the conversation because you kind of suggested this.
Just give your take on the moment we’re in because there’s some Alex you’ve heard who say, listen, this is a historic moment.
Internet Mobile and now A I Nvidia’s Jensen Wong said the next industrial revolution has begun.
Do you agree with that?
Do you agree with Jensen?
Um I think you’re gonna have very divergent for some people.
This is the next generation and for others who think they’re doing very similar things, it’s gonna fail.
Who defines the winners?
Who will be the winners?
Well, come talk to our 70 customers, they think they’re winning.
And it’s like, you know, you look, it’s a lot of this goes back to basic ideas of how you build things.
Why you gotta talk to people who are getting value and ask them, how are you getting value?
Why are you getting value?
Are you paying more or less for that value than you think you should.
And that’s exactly what you’re gonna see today.
You’re gonna see people saying I’m getting a lot of value.
It went much quicker than I thought.
I’m, I’m outstripping what I thought I could do.
I’m better, much better than the people.
It happened efficiently and I’m probably, I don’t think they’ll say this, but I’m paying less than I think I should.
And that’s why I’m very happy about it.
To get to the full interview with Pent your technology, Ceo Alex Scarp, head over to our Yahoo finance website.
More asking for a trend when we return.
Let’s take a look at what’s trending after hours.
Now, first shares of docu sign, we’re watching those go down about 6% after the company delivered.
First quarter results earnings did beat Wall Street estimates but second quarter billings guidance missed the street’s expectations.
Do you sign also boosting its stock repurchase program by up to a billion of outstanding common stock?
And we’re also watching shares avail resorts ticker, MTN for Mountain, the shares down almost 6% after earnings missed analysts expectations.
And the ski resort operator cut its full year IDA outlook that guidance missed estimates as well.
The CEO saying the lower guides was the result of lift ticket visitation not rebounding for the spring season.
Well, that’s a wrap on today’s asking for a trend.
Be sure to come back tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. Eastern for all of the latest market moving stories affecting your wallet.
Have a great night.
