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Plus, Tesla shares, well, they continue to have a very rocky ride this year. In fact, they are the worst performing stocks so far on the S&P for 2024. Another firm cuts their price target on that stock. And former Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin telling CNBC just last hour that he is putting together an investor group to try to buy TikTok, or the U.S. business. Let's begin with the market reaction to PPI and retail sales as well, which did sort of recover last month's decline. A little bit like control group, a goose egg that's going to be interesting for GDP. For sure. And, you know, as you mentioned, the market trying to look past it, struggling to do so maybe. CPI this week, it had these big Treasury auctions that maybe we thought it would knock the market potentially off course. Now, there was a hiccup lower in the indexes. And bonds definitely are registering, you know, this, hotter than expected inflation number, 10-year up to 4.22, two-year yield up to 4.65. At this point, if this were an acutely fed dependent stock market, it might matter more on a day-to-day basis, two equities. It's not been the case. If you dial back to December, when we first got that Fed Pivot and everybody got excited about how soon the Fed might cut, because inflation was going to be friendlier and all the rest. To me, the argument was, at the time, good news on the economy can now be good news. It kind of doesn't matter when the Fed cuts, if they kind of are looking for an excuse to do so and the next move is lower. And then you had the criticism that this is way concentrated market that only six stocks were driving. And none of those things have actually been true. Well, good news is good news on the economy. But in terms of we need the Fed and we need only those six or seven stocks, that's been disproven because the economy has done better. So you had 5% nominal GDP growth give or take, and that's insulated this market. Although, we have this kind of soft upside bias this year in the index, this week in the indexes, but it's been dependent day-to-day on what NVIDIA decides to do and what the excitable public call option flow is directed toward on a given day. And today, NVIDIA is going to back off a little bit. I still think everyone can look at these numbers and say, it's kind of an overbought market, it's kind of an expensive market, it's kind of looking frothy in areas. But on the other hand, these strong uptrends to start the year, like I said, 2013, 2017, a market that basically looks through the challenges, you can't really declare that this is the moment when it's going to matter. And I think that's where you are. I'm very mindful. Peter Lynch, what do you say, more money is lost, anticipating corrections than in corrections themselves. Not sure that's the case right now, but I look at really elevated sentiment numbers and stuff like that. It kind of doesn't matter because broadly speaking, the economy is hanging together, earnings moving the right way, credit markets couldn't be more flush. It's NVIDIA's market and when it's living in it. Although, we're going to be down today and the indexes are hanging in there. So on a given day, even when NVIDIA takes a break so far, the last week or so, you've managed to kind of marshal the other troops and say, we're going to hang in there. So, I don't know how long you can continue. Maybe we'll talk about Robin Hood's numbers and how they're seeing massive volumes and it seems like there's just an excitement around certain things, whether it's crypto and obviously AI. And on the other hand, commodities are starting to roll. Yeah. Well, your general point then is that the market doesn't need the Fed as much. That's right. When earnings expectations are inflecting, earlier in the week, BFA went to $250 for the year on S&P EPS. Today, Savita has another note looking at what they call regime recoveries, which is essentially in their view, a period in which the equal weight S&P outperforms the cap weight 78% of the time. It should do so. It's doing so this month. I mean, it's obviously barely, not even halfway through the month. I mean, obviously, if it became a trend of progressively higher inflation readings, where the Fed has to really rethink the easing posture, sure, we might have a gut check. If the 10-year yield blasts out of this range above 430 toward 4 and 1/2, maybe then you have to have a rethink of the whole thing. But for now, I think there's an ability also to pick and choose what we pay attention to in the inflation numbers. I know insurance was a big upside contributor to the PPI. That's been a big one for CPI as well. You know, you were talking about transportation services and being like, yes. Well, that's car insurance, largely. Right. And to a degree, airfare. And so it's not as if it doesn't matter. It's just if you want to make the bet that that's not going to continue. So we'll see. I mean, markets in a forgiving mood for now. I guess the other piece I would just more or less bring up is, you do have earnings revisions higher. So you mentioned Savita doing that. But even on a company by company basis, it's managing to kind of alleviate a little bit of the immediate concerns about, hey, this is a really expensive market. Meantime, we're watching the biggest loser year to date on the S&P, which is Tesla. Gets another note to the downside today. UBS cuts from 225 to 165. It's the third price target cut we've seen in about a week after Deutsche and, of course, Wells yesterday, which went to 125, one of the lowest on the street. Market cap David now below a JPM, and it's a worse performer on the S&P year to date than Boeing, than Warner Brothers, than Paramount, than Charter, than Humana. Man, that's a bad company. Yeah. We've talked about it obviously often, as you might expect. And there it is. Yeah, JP Morgan's worth about 551 billion. Tesla's not sort of about 10 billion or so below that, at least as we begin trading this morning. And again, it was down yesterday on that downgrade from Wells Fargo that we discussed in terms of their belief that the price cuts are going to significantly impact profitability, as you might expect. And they really do question sort of the ability of the company to significantly grow. And there you can see Boeing obviously also along with Tesla in terms of its very poor performance. You know, Mike, people are going to start to say, "Oh, how much is he levered on?" And things like that. I kind of hear that on Musk. It's not part of this issue at this point. I don't believe and they'll look at X, the old Twitter and wonder, well, but he sold all the stock to pay for that. Obviously, the debt of related to X is not related to his ownership. That's Morgan Stanley and a lot of other banks issue in terms of what they're doing and where they've got that marked. But it's got to hurt. Obviously his worth has-- Oh, his stake in Tesla is now worth around 65 billion. Okay. I mean, he's got everything else. He's got SpaceX, you know. Which we're on watch for another launch today. And so it's not as if that's somehow cutting close to the bone 65 billion, but it's way down. I could work with him. I could find a way to work with him. Exactly, exactly, yeah. You know, if you're careful on the spending. I do think that what you're really seeing is just this massive premium bleed out of Tesla. Everyone's acknowledged that it was obviously valued as a lot more than an auto company. And now just the willingness to kind of give the company credit for being that much more just because of the potential, whether it's full self-driving, whether it's AI and robotics or whatever. Yeah, although part of the UBS call is not just China risk and unit growth risk, but the notion that what if he does take robotics and AI and develop that outside Tesla. Sure. Or take away some of that, some of the parts valuation. And there's no doubt in my mind that the investor base that otherwise was excited about all those things is the reason that Nvidia is at two trillion dollars. I mean, for years they kind of moved in tandem. And then Tesla has given way and Nvidia blasts up. It's obviously not in the same product areas, but in terms of the place in the investor constellation, that's where it is. And so if there's less of a reason, there's no price momentum, there's not a lot of kind of next hot thing that's about to come out. It's really about getting a more affordable car. So it's a tougher business. That you can compete on. Full self-driving still seems to be around the corner. So to speak, and that conceivably, if and when they ever get there, that will be a major moment for them. I think UBS even said that they made the cut price on full self-driving in the package, just to stoke a little more demand. And so it is. Is there any pullback that this is reminiscent of though? Because there do seem to have been times when there's been a bit of a loss of faith. Only to watch the month go right back in. And this thing surged back to a trillion dollar market. Oh, definitely. It was just straight down into late 2022. Right. Now you had this crazy run through the pandemic. And then 2021 in December, it was 2020, it was put into the S&P. Yeah, 2021, the highest 2014. We're down 60% as a drawdown since then. Right. And anyway, it's still underwater, by the way, for the S&P 500 index funds, or now underwater. And so for anybody thinking that that's a reason long term, why the stock has to go up, it's not the case. And now it's out of the top 10 of the S&P. Then we had the incredible run after our interview on May 16th last year, when the stock started to move substantially higher. Of course that is, we've just been saying, has reversed significantly since then. All right, let's move on to TikTok this morning. A story we've been following over these last few days. Only a brief time ago, former Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, telling CNBC that he's putting together an investor group to try and acquire that social media app here in the US. This comes one day after the House passed legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States. If its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell the actual operations here in the US. The bill now awaits the Senate vote. Biden has said he would sign it if it does come out of the Senate. And here is what Mnuchin had to say last hour on Squawkbox. When I was Treasury Secretary, I chaired Siphias. And Siphias approved and I had President Trump sign an order that TikTok had to be sold. And I continue to believe that. So I think the legislation should pass. And I think it should be sold. I understand the technology. It's a great business. And I'm going to put together a group to buy TikTok. You're trying to buy TikTok? I am, because this should be owned by US businesses. There's no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China. As I've been discussing in recent days, of course, there is no expectation nor on the part of Mr. Mnuchin that that would include in buying TikTok in the US the source code and the algorithm. Those would stay with ByteDance. So you'd get a user base. You'd get the data as it currently exists on the servers here in the US. And then you've got to build the underlying infrastructure. No easy task. And of course then, what do you pay for this business without the source code and the algorithm, the algorithm having been the key really to its success in terms of how it drives people to spend so much time on the app itself? That is a key question. What does anything look like? Do ByteDance investors include the likes of General Atlantic or CO2? Do they try to restructure their investments and roll in in some way? And frankly, it's still far from clear that the app is going to be banned by legislation here in the US anyway. The Senate vote is certainly much tougher guys than things went in the house yesterday. So a lot of different questions here, including by the way, whether the Chinese would simply say, no, ByteDance, you just shut it down. They're going to do this. You just shut it down. And we know the Chinese have some say over what their companies in that country are able to do and not do. And some demonstrated willingness to essentially, if not shut things down and just suppress one of their own companies. Without a doubt. I mean, I guess this is a- Make it irrelevant. The simple point is there are plenty of hurdles here in terms of seeing this come to fruition in some way. And it's highly complex word to actually get there. That said, Mnuchin perhaps maybe rightly so sees himself as positioned at least as someone who having understood the previous battles three and a half years ago when he ran Siphius, as he just said, sort of can intermediate in some way between the US government and China to try to meet both of their needs here. Meanwhile, taking control of what is without a doubt an incredibly valuable property with 170 million users spending a lot of time on the platform. And many businesses that rely on it as well. And so, you know, we'll see TikTok's CEO also starting to try to get involved here, putting out a statement Carl talking about the legislation and what it would mean if it was signed into law. Yeah, well, those numbers you just mentioned were a big part of his, not just statement, but his response on TikTok as he would you put out last night. Take a listen. This legislation, if signed into law, will lead to a ban of TikTok in the United States. Even the bill sponsors admit that that's their goal. This bill gives more power to a handful of other social media companies. It will also take billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses. It will put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk and it will take away your TikTok. We know how important TikTok is to all of you. Meantime, you mentioned Schumer relatively non-committal on the Senate side. Not to mention the fact that he's got some other things going on regarding Israel and Senator Menendez and Politico points out today that Schumer still uses a flip phone. So who knows what the radar looks like on that side of the hill? Yeah, I mean, even if the legislation does not pass, there is still a hope, I think, on the part of Mnuchin and other potential investors that over time, given the focus on TikTok and its national security risks, that there is some sort of negotiated solution here, which would end up with it being in US hands, which they would obviously see as very beneficial. No sense on price either given it's just very much unclear what it's worth without the source code and the algorithm, but clearly worth a lot given all those users. Meantime, everything old is new again over at Under Armour. Kevin Plank, coming back as CEO of the company that he founded. We're going to talk about that after a short break. We'll get to Lanar and DKS and Dollar General and this upgrade of city over at Goldman. Take a look at futures hanging in there. Post PPI in a moment. Are you a software professional looking to make a lasting impact on people and the planet? As general motors, our vision is a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. And we need innovative people like you to join us on this journey and challenge the limits of what is possible. From autonomous cars to software defined vehicles, you'll translate breakthrough technologies like AI and to experiences that people love, all while pushing the world forward toward an all-electric future. See how you can shape the future of mobility at careers.gm.com. Now is the time to accelerate innovation. T-Mobile for Business is powering Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix operations and epic fan experiences with secure, reliable 5G connectivity. Because an event this big and this fast deserves a network that can set the pace. See what our 5G advanced network solutions can do for your business at T-Mobile.com/Now. View 5G device coverage and access details at T-Mobile.com. Under Armour's founder Kevin Plank is returning as CEO. He's going to replace Stephanie Lenart's effective April 1st, Muhammad Alarion, has been named non-executed chair. Sarah Eisen's on the phone with more on these changes, and maybe Sarah some reflections on the stock action pre-market today. Yeah, good morning Carl and David and Mike. So it's not that surprising if you followed Under Armour carefully over the last few years as I had a lot of investors have that Kevin Plank is back as CEO. He's been very involved even as he stepped out of the CEO role about four years ago when Patrick Frisk came over. He was the non-executive chairman then. What is surprising about this announcement is that it's abrupt and the timing. Stephanie Lenart was just put in place as CEO about a year ago, February 2023. She's barely into what she laid out in her three-year plan. So that raises questions about why now. Company isn't saying, don't have answers as to exactly what happened here, just that it was a board decision. But you can imagine investors are asking, why wasn't she given the time to implement her changes? Did she clash with Kevin Plank, both in personality or in terms of the strategy on the growth plan? We know that Plank is aggressive, he's hungry, he's been, he's potentially impatient about the growth story and that really gets to the problem at Under Armour right now. It's been this turnaround story and the previous two CEOs have been really working on writing the ship both in profitability and inventory levels but it has not seen growth and that is the problem. The brand, the growth profile, it's a fraction of what it was back in the heyday. This stock peaked around 2015. Kevin Plank presided over a tremendous growth period for Under Armour but in the eyes of investors, it was sort of considered low quality growth ultimately as to how he left. It came at the expense of profitability and the growth hit a wall and that's why I think Wall Street has a little bit of a love-hate relationship with him. The stock initially surged on the news last night, growth days are back again and then gave up all the gains and then some on these questions of what now and what is Kevin going to do. Yeah Sarah and just to talk about the broader competitiveness of the space we had on yesterday talking about the sneaker market, Adidas with its first annual loss in three decades. I know that's a very specific story but even today, City cuts Nike to 125. It's a competitive space and I think Under Armour had a taste of brand relevance in this space several years ago but since then it's lost a lot of that and you have had new brands. You mentioned on in the apparel space where Under Armour is more dominant. Aloe yoga, fiori, these brands have come in and he can share and of course when you're dealing with competitors like a Nike specifically, it's always going to be tough and I think that is what Kevin Clank has been and is always focused on is the brand strength and how they are going to get that sort of buzz and heat back into the brand after the last few years were just hasn't been. It hasn't been as relevant and they've had a key partnership with athletes, Gordon Speed for instance. I'm at a business event on the sidelines of the players championship. He's here that's still a big athlete for them but they just hadn't had the kind of momentum. In fact, haven't really grown since before COVID in terms of the top line. In the latest quarter, North American revenues were still down double digits. Part of it is the competition and part of it is just it's finding the right mix of designers and folks to bring this brand back to life. They over send it during the prior Clank period. They were in wholesale across the board and I think that's what ultimately hurt them. They've been doing a lot of work to try to correct that in the recent years. But the growth part of it has been missing. Meantime, Sarah, congratulations on lighting up the tape this week with the Griffin and then Palantir yesterday. I look forward to having you back on set tomorrow. I will be back on set and I'll share some of the some of the greatest hit short sellers on cocaine and all. Sarah Eisen talking under armor, Sarah, thanks. When we come back in video, pulling back and sitting that record high last week, we'll talk to one analyst who has raised his price target on the stock, taking another look at the pre-market busy session ahead not to mention Adobe tonight as we continue to watch this 10 year around the 4.2 range. Don't go anywhere. Now is the time to accelerate innovation. T-Mobile for business is powering Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix operations and epic fan experiences with secure, reliable 5G connectivity. Because an event this big and this fast deserves a network that can set the pace. See what our 5G advanced network solutions can do for your business at t-mobile.com/now. View 5G device coverage and access details at t-mobile.com. Take a look at some pre-market gainers. Got some retail in there. Dollar General with a nice beat, guides above, surprise gain and comps. We'll talk about that in conjunction with what DKS said as well, a 5% pre-market. Get to hood, as Mike mentioned, up almost 12% before the bell. Don't forget, you can catch us anytime, anywhere. Just listen to and follow the Squawk on the street opening bell podcast. Keep your eye on the home builders today. Lanar was an interesting story last night. Mike, not just for the earnings, but for ASPs down 8. In a time where you're on your shelter is almost up, almost 6. Yeah, it seemed like a look to close some deals in the last quarter. They did have to ease back a little bit, so fit is such a strong stock. It's basically at the highs of 64% on a one-year basis. Still got the $5 billion buyback. It's a huge percentage of the market cap. But there is a little bit of margin hesitation, I think, because of that pricing in terms of the guidance. The market continues to wait and see if the shelter releases are going to treat them to the natural data. Let's get the opening bell here and to see if these deals kind of change. The big board celebrating a recent listing. The iREAT market vector quality read index ETF, and at the NASDAQ, it's a jam-f providing security for Apple devices, as we once again, Mike, in this range of 51/70-ish after a narrow spread in the last couple of days. It has been. And each day, we're switching off between narrow mega-cap lead and more broad. Today, some software in the lead, like Oracle ServiceNow, Microsoft. And this has been a little bit of the pattern of when, okay, yields are higher. Maybe there's a little bit of concern building about just the perfection of the macro backdrop. And you go to stuff that doesn't seem too dependent on it. That has been, this pattern I mentioned, all these elevated sentiment readings and things like that. It's just one of those atmospheric conditions that says, we're not really set up for an adverse surprise. And yet the market keeps absorbing these potential downside blips without too much trouble at this point. Yeah, I would say, you know, we're kind of sideways on the average stock for the past week, but that's after a great run. All right. Well, keep our eye on financials today. This Goldman upgrade of city has gotten some attention. Yeah. Essentially looking at top line growth, simplifying the business model, freeing up some cash on the non-core international business. Yesterday, it was B of A submire who said technically some of the support levels here are pretty strong. Yeah, they've acted better city as well. I mean, the Goldman call is kind of the plan seems like it'll probably work. You know, the strategy as laid out, essentially freeing up some capital by getting out of some businesses internationally, just simplifying the structure. It's been such a long haul. I know there's a general sense out there. If we get some easing of the the Basel Endgame requirements that these bigger banks will be a little bit ahead of the game. So yeah, we'll see. I mean, up and a half, still super cheap, of course, on book value. But so not really as much of a macro call as it is that, you know, basically some fundamental company-specific improvement that we can look toward. David, are you going to touch on Jerry Levin? You know, we will. I think towards the end of the show, Carl, Jerry Levin, of course, the CEO of Time Warner passing away. We're going to spend a little time on that. What I've been spending time on this morning, as you guys know, of course, is TikTok trying to understand and figure out exactly as I listened to Mnuchin this morning, discuss their his plans, potentially, or to try to put together an investor group to buy the app in the US. As we said earlier, a lot of things come along with that that make it highly complex, plenty of hurdles, but certainly interesting. And then keeping an eye on shares of US steel guys, this stock reversed dramatically yesterday when an FT story came out, essentially indicating that the Biden administration seemingly in part to stay on the right side of unions in Pennsylvania, a swing state would not look favorably on an acquisition of the company as is currently under contract to be purchased by a Japan snip on steel for $55 a share in cash. You can do some simple math there and say, 3890 is a long way from 55, isn't it? That's what we call the spread. That is a reflection of the risk and that risk has gone up dramatically. Reports today have the president making a campaign stop in the Midwest in which the AP is reporting that he will say things that indicate that he's not in favor of said transaction. I don't have the quotes in front of me right now, but to paraphrase again, he sort of thinks that it should remain a domestic company. This is odd to say the least in many ways. There is virtually nobody who would argue that Japan represents a national security risk. In fact, the technology transfer in this case is going from Japan to the U.S., where there would be significant potential upgrades of it. But here's the quote obtained by the Associated Press that Biden is expected to share later today. U.S. Steel has been an iconic American steel company for more than a century, vital to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated. That is sent shivers through many investors here who thought that this deal would close. Now, that said, it's still not clear. It won't. And in part, this does seem to really rely largely on getting the unions on board. They're not. That's a big mistake it would seem that Nippon made in terms of negotiating the deal, having not already received the ascent of the unions very different from Cleveland Cliffs, the arch rival that has been working nonstop to try to dislodge this deal. But it doesn't mean they can't get them on board at some point in the near future. And maybe they will do that. If not, there's a lot of different rumors going around, Cleveland Cliffs. Would they be able to buy the things that Nippon Steel doesn't want? Would you still see a $55 deal and then Nippon could turn around and potentially sell some of those assets? Seems very difficult, not to mention the taxes related to a potential sale of that type. We rarely see that kind of a deal where one company buys and then there's a bunch of asset sales that take place. So Mike, we'll have to wait and see on this one whether Nippon is successful. They're starting to fight back. There's a joint statement from them and U.S. Steel saying the partnership between Nippon and U.S. reflects a close alliance between Japan and the U.S. and they're confident the partnership will create shared success for American jobs, supply chains, and competitiveness of the U.S. economy. As I said, there's not much of an argument to be made here. So this does seem to be pure politics and an unfortunate case of it. For sure. I guess that messaging-wise, if you were able to say, we're going to keep the production that is now domestic, domestic. In other words, there's not any anticipation of doing anything with this stuff. We're not picking up a steel plant moving it to pansy other way. In fact, Japan's steel making in certain areas is ahead of our own. The plan is to invest here and increase the technological capacity of the steel plants here. And Japan is a national security risk? Well, no, certainly not. I mean, on that basis, it's hard to make the case. On market concentration, it's probably hard to make the case in any way. It is for Nippon, Cleveland Cliff Steel, in contrast, raised significant antitrust questions, particularly in terms of domestic production for steel for the automobile industry. By the way, there's also a question of UAW unions opposing that potential deal, where that to somehow come back. So we'll continue to monitor this. I know we don't have a lot of hard and fast things to tell you at this point. But there are those who are going to wander in here at 39 and say, "I'm going to take a shot at getting 55 because Nippon's going to get the unions on board and then Biden's going to change his mind." Right. Yeah, President is still trying to lock down the Teamster's endorsement. The Prime Minister in Japan is coming in for a state visit. That's going to be a little bit awkward. Depending on how firm this wording comes, Presidents and Saginaw today, as David said, making his way through the Midwest. One big buyer of steel is Boeing, and this fascinating letter from the NTSB to a couple of senators saying, "We still don't know who did the work on this door panel, and Boeing's now telling us they can't find the records. Story continues to get a lot more interesting." The other wrinkle on that one was this Reuters piece that the European aerospace regulator says it would pull Boeing's approval, if needed, down the road. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly unclear if this is just Boeing's procedure to not necessarily have very specific records of who did what in the maintenance. But it's been under such a cloud about whether they're just going to now be so constrained in terms of everybody watching every move and how every effort to increase production, which they absolutely have to do to meet any financial targets. I don't know. There's been times over the last four or five years when it seemed like Boeing was sort of washed out and lost all sponsorship. I would say on the sell side, it's not the case. There's still sort of a loyalty to the long-term story here on the services and the free cash on everything else. So we'll see if that changes, but stock is better than flat today. Real quick, guys, just a quick mention. I think Courtney Reagan in the next hour will have more, but we've been focusing part on this potential deal to try to acquire Macy's. Macy's has given them the stiff arm, but not now. Allowing Arc House and its partner is well brigade to do due diligence. That's the latest in the proxy there. March 13th, they provided a due diligence request list to the company that's Arc House and brigade through their advisors. They want customary diligence items that will need to provide to help them either confirm or potentially even increase the current $24 share all cash offer they have for the company. And there are negotiations with respect to a confidentiality agreement. So that is at least potentially on a bit of a different tack here than previously in which Macy said, "We're not going to engage with you." There's also a proxy fight. The Arc House side is pursuing potentially as part of it, not brigade. I know it gets a bit complicated. Brigade doesn't want a part of that, but Arc House does. They have different advisors on the law front, for example, on the M&A law front. But again, may be moving forward. Speaking of retail, DKS, the chart kind of looks like Williamsonoma yesterday. The comps beat, gross margin beats, 10% div hike, great stats on the tape looking at the operating margin since 2019, meaning just before COVID has gone from 3-8 to 9-7, and sales overall are up 48 versus US retail sales up 37. And their guidance implies they're going to actually be able to maintain that, which is why the excitement, yeah. Like William Sonoma, kind of leader in a secularly strong part of retail, I guess you'd say in terms of specialty where there's still room, you don't have saturation. Obviously, they've kept the majority of pricing that flowed through during the pandemic. And look, I mean, I guess we're not backing away from outdoor leisure, everybody wears sneakers every day, kind of life. And it's still not all that expensive. You see some growth retailers, this isn't Chipotle here, it's still 17 times earnings, it's cheaper than the market. So it does show you there's a little bit of room for it to go, kind of mid-cap range. And we mentioned Dollar General earlier with the surprise jump and comp, not by much 7/10, but Street was looking for down one. And they do guide above on full-year comps, a bit below on full-year EPS. But I don't know, is it striking that we're spending more time talking about this stuff than Nvidia? Well, for today, for this morning, I think so, yeah. And it does show you that, you know, we are at this moment where you're getting somewhat mixed signals from the companies themselves about the consumer. Not a lot of panic about it or alarm, but, you know, McDonald's saying things seem soft and people are perceiving. But the other dollar stores yesterday was a different story. Dollar Tree, along with Family Dollar, which they own, was a very different story yesterday. It was. And closing as many as a thousand stores, most of them family dollars. It's an enormous number of dollar stores in this country. I know. It's kind of amazing, but you want to share to Walmart. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in the retail sales, the official retail sales number today, kind of soft, although I think we were somewhat braced for it. So, a little mixed. But, you know, overall market hanging there, we speak about Nvidia down at 1% today. Tesla also down. And it is the more, you know, kind of software, you know, still slow and steady stuff that is working. But again, on a day when yields are up, you do see the Russell 2000 backing off underperforming the S&P by more than half a percent, kind of the pattern here. Of course, Mike, I don't know if there's any reason in particular, I would note amongst the mega cap tech names. Microsoft, by far, the outperformer of 2%. Yeah. Is it this Oracle deal? It could be that. Well, the Oracle deal plus, it's been, it's been kind of a sleep for a little while. I mean, at a ties, but it's kind of gone sideways and is not really participated. It has a little more of that, that defensive type character as well. So, meantime, you had this Q&A with Renee Haas in Behrens, calling it outside of Nvidia, the best growth story in tech. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's the whole thing. At its size, the fact that it still has that status and you have this huge kicker with the, you know, with the opening eye of relationship. Yeah, Mike, Microsoft, obviously, far ahead in terms of a $3.1 trillion market value. Well ahead of Apple, which helped that crown for quite some time. Let's take a break here, watch bonds as well. As we said, now above four and a quarter on the 10 year, as we're not quite done with the data for the week, we'll get empire tomorrow, industrial production, and you, Mish, should be interesting. But for the now, or for the time being, Dow's up 60. Don't go away. As Karl mentioned earlier, Jared Levin, the longtime CEO of Time Warner passed away 84 years of age. Of course, some of our viewers who've been watching for some period of time may remember Levin from the 1990s when he ran Time Warner, culminating to a certain extent with what was the faded decision to merge with AOL. It didn't go well, as we know, as we documented, in our first documentary here at CNBC, some 23 years ago, the failure of that deal, I think. Levin did not participate with me at that point in that documentary. As you take a look at Steve Case and Jerry Levin shaking hands on that fateful day when they decided the biggest deal of all time, by the way, and one of the great failures, Time Warner for its part under Levin, though, HBO, Time Warner Cable, so many different assets along the way. Studio, take a look at Dick Parsons, and everybody Ted Turner, man, takes you back. Levin, I had interviewed many times during the course of his stewardship of Time Warner, didn't participate then, but then we were able to sit down a number of years later when he was living out west at something called the Moonlight Sanctuary Healing Center that was run by his wife, and we did talk about the deal. Take a listen. I'm upset that I couldn't have foreseen then what I see now, both in myself and in the internet. Now I would also criticize myself for believing strongly in the power of an idea, that a transforming transaction, which is what we viewed AOL Time Warner as, would in fact change the landscape not only of our own company, but across an industry. Courtney remember Levin also helped create HBO, along with Charles Dolan, course of cable vision at the time, and then ran HBO when it was owned by Time, not Warner, but Time. Some people don't realize that HBO was actually a Time Inc property. I have fond memories of Mr. Levin and our many sit downs through the years. Jerry Levin, 84 years of age. My chairs of Nvidia are pulling back in early trading, you can see some three and a half percent. Still though, up 11% just this month, our next guest sees even more upside for the stock. He boosted his price target from $950 to $1100, joining us now, be a securities analyst. Vivec, just give me the reason why the higher price target and why you continue to be positive on the stock, obviously, that has already had a historic run. So we are kind of affectionately calling next week the Woodstock for AI, support all the semiconductor and computer science nerds out there and finance people of course. And the reason is that we expect Nvidia to put a very strong event at their GPU technology conference for GTC, focusing on three things. Number one, how rapidly the market for generative AI is expanding, that if you are able to through this accelerated infrastructure really lower the cost of computing, how it can enable a lot of new applications and enable them in a very energy efficient way. So that's number one, in much larger market size anywhere between 250 to 500 billion a year in terms of infrastructure. Number two, Nvidia's competitive position that because of their pipeline, it's strong and it is getting stronger because of their ability to innovate across a silicon, across system, across software and nobody else in semis can touch that. And number three, their ability to take all that sales growth and then really drop it to the bottom line. And I think this cannot be overemphasized because the company is not just growing, it's able to translate every dollar of sales into nearly 50 cents of free cash flow. So by the end of next year their cash flow on the balance sheet could be over 100 billion and in three years it could be close to 200 billion. So that I think also provides them with a lot of optionality in growing in other ways. Is there any concern Vivek that Nvidia will not be able to persuade enough people with the stock at the current valuation that there are these multiple years of breakneck growth ahead of it? Because it seems like that's the way, in a way, you say that the multiple has come down because growth has been so good in terms of forecast. Is that at some point not the market's way of expressing doubt that this can last for for that much longer than that many cycles? No, for sure. I think that that's a very important point that maybe the multiple compression is saying that many investors are not yet convinced about the sustainability of the growth. But remember that the generative AI market is not just what Nvidia is talking about. It's what their customers are talking about. If you look at the growth plans for Microsoft or Oracle or MECA or all the new countries and regions, India, Europe, Japan, each wanting their own AI infrastructure. So it's not just Nvidia making the claim that this market is getting bigger. It's their customers who are actually driving growth in the market. But I think it's actually healthy to have this periodic check because it's the start of a new market. We have seen the same thing in other markets. But what's important to understand is that generally these trends take place over a decade. But over the first three or four years, you lay down the initial infrastructure and they are only midway through that. So we think that there is at least a minimum of two plus years before their customers continue to build out this infrastructure and you don't do generative AI half-heartedly. Just to prove it out, you need to have a certain amount of infrastructure in place. That's why we think the trend has a lot more likely. The total addressable market, how much has it increased as a result? For example, of the demand from sovereigns. We've been talking about that. Jensen has been a number of countries that seem to have ambitions to have their own generative AI. Sure. So think about it. I mean, just to participate, just the price of entry in generative AI is a GPU cluster that needs to have 10,000 of their GPUs and each product can be anywhere between 20 to 30,000 dollars. So you need tens of billions of dollars. So if you take the total number of countries in the world and say even a small fraction of them wants to have their infrastructure, that's multiple billion per country. So we think the market for a sovereign AI infrastructure could be tens of billions of dollars. More important than that, I think it's also going to be an important market for on-premise AI. There's a lot of data that financial institutions and other places have. They just don't want to send it to the cloud for regulatory or other privacy reasons. So as they start to build out that infrastructure, I think that's what gives other legs of growth in '25 and '26. Got it. Vivek, thank you for joining us. Pleasure. Thank you. Lost the opening gains here. Dows down 100 points. S&P's gone red as well as the 10-year now 427, which is going to be the high of the month in the wake of that PPI number this morning. We'll talk more about it. Let's walk in the street. Continue. So don't go anywhere. You've been listening to the opening hour of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. All opinions expressed by the Squawk on the Street participants are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of CNBC, NBC, Universal, or their parent company or affiliates, and may have been previously disseminated by them on television, radio, internet, or another medium. You should not treat any opinion expressed on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of an opinion. Such opinions are based upon information Squawk on the Street participants consider reliable, but neither CNBC nor its affiliates and/or subsidiaries warrant its completeness or accuracy and it should not be relied upon as such. To view the full Squawk on the Street disclaimer, please visit cnbc.com/squawkonthestreet disclaimer. Are you a software professional looking to make a lasting impact on people and the planet? As general motors, our vision is a world with zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion, and we need innovative people like you to join us on this journey and challenge the limits of what is possible. 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