Semiconductor sector, McDonald’s sales dip: Asking for a Trend
semiconductor

Semiconductor sector, McDonald’s sales dip: Asking for a Trend

Thursday saw the worst trading day for the semiconductor sector in seven weeks. Earnings revisions for some of the top tech stocks like Nvidia, (NVDA) Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META) , and Alphabet (GOOG,GOOGL) are currently over 35% higher than that of the entire S&P 500 (^GSPC).

McDonald’s (MCD) is experiencing a slowdown in growth, with its same-store sales lagging behind competitors like Burger King. This shift in market dynamics comes as fast-food chains increasingly pivot towards value-focused meal options to attract budget-conscious consumers.

Headline venture partner Kamran Ansari joined the show give insight into the state of the venture capital landscape as the AI craze continues to ripple across markets, touching on what makes a great founder.

Check out how Amazon Web Services (AMZN) wants to use artificial intelligence to improve healthcare in the latest edition of Lead This Way.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to asking for a trend.

I’m Josh Lipton for the next half hour.

Gonna be breaking down the trends of today that will move stocks tomorrow.

Here’s some of the trends.

We’re gonna be diving into the S and P 500 pulled back today after briefly passing 5500 for the first time ever, blame sliding tech stocks for lost traction though the broader index still on track here for gains in this holiday shortened week of trading plus his tech names scramble to cash in on the A I craze where do start ups fit into the hype.

We’re going to speak with one early stage investor about trends within venture capital and health care is one of the sectors getting a piece of that A I funding pie.

Thanks to new initiatives from Amazon web services.

We’re gonna be taking a closer look at the problem A I is setting out to fix on our latest edition of lead this way.

Now, if recent earnings are any indication, all it takes to drive investor enthusiasm is A I but for smaller start ups, it’s a competitive landscape out there, especially in technology.

So where are the venture investors looking for with me?

Now is headline venture partner, Cameron.

I’m sorry, Cameron.

Great to see you as always my friend.

Good to see you.

Thank you.

I thought we were talking Cameron off camera.

I thought we’d start with, uh, you kind of jo listen, you’re, you’re meeting a lot of interesting smart founders and entrepreneurs and I, I wanna start with just what you interests you right now in terms of just broad topics and trends.

Is it, is it just A I 24 7 right now, Cameron, is that it?

I, I mean, you know, just I was joking with somebody if you had dot A I to the end of your URL, then you increase your evaluation of two X.

So, you know, there’s a lot of obviously theater right now with everyone saying that they’re leveraging A I, I have A I, uh you know, what’s your A I strategy?

But to me A I is a foundational layer.

It’s kind of like saying I’m a mobile app or III I use the internet, it’s like html or, or one of these foundational.

So how do you, that?

It’s a really interesting point you made then Cameron, how do you sort of as an investor?

How do you kind of distinguish with gay?

This is real versus I’m hearing marketing for.

So I think that there are legitimate use cases for A I where it’s, it’s additive.

I’ve spent a lot of time in fintech within FINTECH.

For example, there are three or four broad use cases that people have identified.

And I think makes sense to me where A I can really be a differentiator.

For example, customer service, Arna uh recently announced uh Clar the giant, you know, um buy now pay later product in Europe and in the USA little bit as well, they replaced something like 900 customer service agents with an A I solution that actually got a higher uh score in terms of satisfaction from customers.

So customer service is one area, another is underwriting, for example, lending and insurance.

Um Another is with uh you know, thinking about how A I can be leveraged for um things like the back office and improving your internal operations.

Uh these things all make sense.

There are other things that, you know, you can say you have A I within your banking app or whatever where it’s like, OK, that’s nice and all.

But is that really necessary or is that gonna improve the customer experience?

And then you have to differentiate between where it can actually add value and where it’s just a bit of uh kind of extra dressing.

I’m also interested a as you sort of decide, OK, who’s you’re gonna write a check to you meet a lot of smart people.

What are the variables that decide that it, it ultimately comes down to the founder honestly, no matter you know, people would say that the matter matters, their background, the, the experience, the background, the personality, right?

The, the, the stick to itiveness.

I think the thing you’re trying to suss out is, is this person, in my opinion, what I call a figure outer, the best founders are figure Outers are the kind of people that are gonna hit stumbling blocks because those are inevitable, right?

Every start up every company, whether it’s seed stage, whether it’s series D or E or a public company runs into problems.

You’re gonna have problems with uh people with funding, with uh strategy, with competitors.

And the best founders are the ones that figure out a way forward.

They don’t get discouraged.

They’re always trying to uh move ahead and can pivot and move quickly.

And that ultimately is kind of a DNA thing, right?

I think you either have it or you don’t.

And that’s the thing you really try to suss out as you’re meeting a founder and getting to know them and figuring founder, founder, founder.

I think so that makes so much difference in the world.

You have the best product in the world, the best, you know, company.

But if the founder, because the founder ultimately is the person that they hire, they recruit, they fundraise, they market, they have to get out and talk about the company.

And if they can’t do those things well, then the business is ultimately not gonna succeed.

There’s a lot of people listening right now, they, they may not be invested in private companies, but they’re investing in publicly traded companies, right?

And so I was interested to get your take on the broader IP O landscape.

Are you surprised that maybe that we haven’t seen more uh companies taking the public market plunge in, in the sense of the stock market is working, the economy is decent.

Inflation is moderating.

What do you think?

Uh it could be a matter of time?

But this at the same, uh you know, in the same breath, I’m looking at the performance of the companies that have gone public since September.

And you have it, it’s been mixed frankly when you look at the actual, exactly.

It’s like other than in fact, the two best performing stocks that I saw one was uh Arm, which was obviously a Blockbuster IP O the other is Kava, the, the, the food business, the, the Mediterranean chain.

So the other ones, Instacart Clavia, um Rubric, I bought a, they’re in many cases flat or down from the IP O price.

So none of the other tech names that have gone public other than arm have really done tremendously well.

In the public market.

Reddit’s up like 15 20% which is, you know, one of the exceptions, but the other ones are essentially flat or down.

So that doesn’t really give encouragement to the other tech names that are gonna be waiting to come out that aren’t an A I story like arm was uh to how well they’re gonna do.

So that’s something that gives me a little bit of pause as I think about the pipeline of names that have been, you know, discussed as coming on in the coming months.

One other big theme, obviously, we talk a lot on the show.

I wanna get your take on it, the fed, you know, higher for longer.

That’s the mantra.

Is that a big topic in your world, Cameron that you think a lot about, does it impact you as a venture investor?

Uh Yes and no, I mean, it, it trickles down for sure.

It impacts the broader market impacts the stock market and the stock market in effect is the downstream.

You know, we’re upstream, how you want to define it for the venture market.

And so to the extent that investors are wary about making big bets and equities because they feel like the there’s better opportunities maybe on yield to do things in, in the bond space.

Of course, that’s gonna impact the venture space as well.

It’s not something we discussed day in and day out.

You know, I don’t meet with founders when they’re talking about interest rates unless it’s a lending business, obviously, with which within fintech is a meaningful part of the, of the space.

Cameron.

It was so great.

I had so many more questions, but we’ll leave it there.

Thanks for coming in.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Moving on you.

Finance is Jared Blicker is joining us here now with more on the trading day takeaways, Jared bad day for semis.

In fact, I’m calling it the chip pocalypse and I say that a little bit tongue in cheek because it was not a disaster, but we’re not used to seeing this much red on our heat maps uh screen and there you can see it right there.

Just wanna quickly plot the price action in NVIDIA.

And I’m gonna show you a two month chart with candlestick.

So you can see this big red candle right here.

And I, I’m gonna show you another one on a year to date chart.

You can see we have one right here.

So sometimes these are the beginning of a consolidation or minor correction period.

And Josh, that’s what we could be seeing here right now.

How about a MD?

Wasn’t that another name on your radar?

You know what?

Look at a MD, look at all this right on the screen.

There’s a MD.

My guess is this is the reaction in some kind of Paris trade.

You can see it’s up today 4.62% up 10% year to date.

But that is a far cry from NVIDIA.

By the way, I gotta mention too, tomorrow is a huge options, expiration and also a rebalance for a lot of S and P in indices.

So NVIDIA has been um there’s kind of this virtuous cycle.

This is a year to day chart where people are buying call options in NVIDIA and the dealers, the market makers who sell those call options, they have to cover them and they buy the underlying stock.

And so this creates this virtuous cycle of higher prices in the stock that’s gonna stop tomorrow.

So that on Monday, NVIDIA is gonna be able to trade more freely to the upside and the downside.

All right, a lot to watch Jared Bliley point number two, you bet this is something funny.

I came across in a Goldman note, this is the yachts versus the have yachts.

Normally we talk about the haves and the have nots.

No, this is the yachts versus the have yachts.

And here we have the earnings revisions.

This goes back to June of last year and we have the top five stocks in the US Microsoft NVIDIA Amazon Google Meta versus the rest of the P five hundreds.

And these are earnings revisions.

So we can see on those top five stocks that’s up 38% and the 495 down 5%.

That does that surprise you.

You know what surprises me is that the gap is actually this big, um that is just a huge chasm there and it makes you wonder are any other stocks participating in this rally besides those five?

The answer is yes.

So, you know, on average, maybe the average is zero, but there’s some more stocks that are participating, but just real quick, this also ties into one more phenomenon and that is the Dow versus the NASDAQ today.

Guess what?

The NASDAQ was down 1/10 of a percent.

The dow was up 1/10 of a percent.

So, all kind of ties together here.

All right.

The final Jared blier point.

Yes.

Yes, we have bullish seasonality on deck in July.

So, just thinking a week or two ahead here for the month of July, uh This compares the 1st 10 in the last 10 trading days of each month.

So we got 24 bars two for each month where you’re gonna notice is July, that’s the 1st 10 days of July.

That is the biggest bar.

So going back to 1928 that is the most bullish period to be in the market doesn’t mean that we have to go up, but that is just a huge tail wind.

Do you, do you let me ask you a seasonality?

We talk about it so often, isn’t that priced in or why isn’t it priced in?

Given the amount of times we talk about it, Jared?

Yeah.

The thing is, I don’t know that you can ever price anything in Foley.

I think it’s just kind of a tail wind.

So I’ve seen studies done, uh where it shows that about about one third of market gains can be attributed to seasonality, but that’s not even close to 50%.

So it’s just something that kind of helps you along.

If there’s big news to the contrary, guess what?

We’re not gonna go there.

I want to get out of here.

Didn’t, didn’t the Great Ryan Dietrich have some other thoughts, I believe.

Yeah.

Other thoughts that are very similar in conclusion.

Can this rally continue, be aware that July has been up at nine years in a row for the S and P 500 up 3.1%.

A similar chart to the one we just showed uh in this, this chart, November is actually bigger.

But suffice to say July beginning of the July should be a nice window for stocks, all things uh being uh considered equal.

You can always count on Dietrich to come with the boss Ryan Dietrich.

Thank you, Jared.

And coming up, it is the latest episode of lead this way, Madison Mills is getting a closer look at the next A I revolution in health care we’re asking for a trend on the other side.

So currently what I see is a beating heart and I do have a little note that’s available to me that says it is a myocardial infarction.

So this patients having a heart attack, Amazon Web services is extending its reach into health care and it’s not just about 3d virtual hearts like this one from simple voice commands to complex real time data analysis.

A W us along with other tech heavyweights is looking to solve some of the health care system’s biggest issues including costs and labor shortages.

Doctor Angela Shippe, medical doctor turned physician executive at AWS is leaving the charge for the world’s biggest cloud provider.

I have the opportunity to really bridge that gap between what’s happening day to day with health care organization and technology that can help them really transform and really find the solutions to any pain points that they have.

Big tech firms from Amazon to meta added $16 billion in A I spend this earnings season as healthcare spend hit $4.5 trillion in 2022.

Yahoo Finance got an exclusive look at how Doctor Shippy sees the future of healthcare.

This is kind of a homecoming.

Can you tell me your context with this specific hospital?

I used to see patients here early in my career and throughout Doctor Shippy spent a decade seeing patients before managing hospitals herself.

I know that you’ve said you knew you wanted to go into the medical field as early as nine years old, which fascinates me.

What would you tell that nine year old about why you work at a tech company?

Now?

What I would that nine year old wanted to go to medicine then?

Because somebody told her that she was smart and the nine year old thought that smart people became doctors.

She would not be surprised that the ability to scale to help more than the 25 people I could lay hands on every day would only occur by working for a large or uh organization like Aws.

Now, Shippy interfaces with 700 health care leaders across the US in an effort to expand their use of Aws Backed technology, including two way communication systems like the echo dot A potential replacement for traditional call buttons.

So right now, we’re in an inpatient room, the patient can ask for the lights to be turned on or off the temperature to be controlled.

So it’s one of the ways that it frees up the clinical resources so that nurses can work at the top of their license by really helping with the true clinical task, medications, diagnostic testing, looking at the lab results, interacting with the rest of the clinical team and it allows the patient to take care of those nice little creature comforts that are theirs.

What is the importance of cost effectiveness too, not just for things like burnout but just for the hospital in general.

So when you have the opportunity to visit across the country, like I do with hospital leaders, what I see them talking about most is their margin variability.

What’s happening with their workforce and what does the consumer or patients and their families demand?

So what I see them doing is looking to migrate to the cloud because that allows them to decrease the cost of their it infrastructure.

We know that those organizations that go to the cloud.

It’s 60% less that they spend in compute storage and networking cloud tools like these are digital transforming health care and the market is getting bigger with research projecting it to reach over $115 billion by 2030.

Microsoft has a strong foothold in the provider space with Azure its open A I service that’s being used by Epic, the largest electronic health record provider covering medical records for over 300 million patients.

How bad of a heart attack is the one that this heart is having.

I would say just based on how looking um there’s definitely damage to the wall to the myocardial.

The tech could train providers on procedures and patients on their illnesses for a patient who has cardiovascular disease to be able to show them.

This is what your heart looks like.

This is what happens when your blood pressure isn’t controlled or you get to the point that you don’t have enough blood flow.

I could see where it might help a patient be even more compliant with their medical regimen.

Hi, good morning, ma’am.

My name is Ashley.

I’m a virtual nurse here at Houston Methodist outside of the tech hub.

Aws integrates two way audio visual tech with cloud service in the virtual intensive care unit.

This allows nurses to monitor more patients in less time.

The virtual nurse will ring the bell and let the patient know that they’re coming in and then they’ll show up on camera so the patient can fully see them and then they’ll converse.

It usually takes 45 to 60 minutes to admit or discharge a patient.

And many times they would get interrupted because of other patients they’re taken care of or other questions they had to answer from other members of the care team.

This way, the patients getting dedicated time with a nurse at a time that’s very critical in either their admission or when they’re being discharged home to continue their care.

Doctor Shippy implemented this alongside her former colleague Roberta Schwartz.

The two worked together during the height of the pandemic before Schwartz became CEO of the hospital.

In addition to medical accuracy, Schwartz said that Aws Cloud technologies have lowered costs of care sitting behind us is, you know, the virtual IC U. Um And when we were, when we built it, we used to have four nocturnal intensivist on site.

Here, we now have two.

That means that two people are sleeping through the night in a much better way.

They burned out.

We were able to have adequate and appropriately staffing during the daytime, reducing our co blues by 20% reducing our length of stay uh improving many other aspects of the quality of care.

When Dr Shippy isn’t at the Texas Medical Center or hospitals around the country.

She can be found in Houston here at the Aws office.

Yahoo Finance got a closer look at how she transitioned from practicing doctor to innovative leader, Amazon web services.

One thing I’m so interested in is how you made the decision to go over to the tech space when you had interface with patients for so long.

Can you talk to me about what that decision making process was like for you?

Truly, in my career, I’ve been an end user of technology the entire time.

So along the way, I’ve been a champion to pilot devices.

I’ve been a champion for documentation electronically.

And so it’s just been part of my world.

I saw the power of technology and how it would be used to transform health care.

And that’s really what made coming to a role like this at Aws possible for me because I saw what that transformation could really lead to.

I’m curious what that’s like for you kind of this idea that you speak two languages fluently, I mean several but like the health care executive but also the practitioner.

So one of the reasons why I do what I do every day is in my role as a clinician.

I certainly saw opportunities for us to do things differently and to do them better.

And I also once had somebody tell me from a software company, the product is working as designed well.

It was working as designed, but it wasn’t working for me, my health care colleagues who were actually taking care of patients.

So I wanted to be able to sit in the seat where I could help new technology, new innovations make sense for those who would be using them for the end user.

The clinician shippy believes accessibility could help change the conversation for patients who view the system is broken from long waits to short appointments.

Over 70% of Americans feel the health care system is failing them.

Much of the frustration has felt due to supply and labor shortages that remain a problem in the field, 56% of hospitals total operating revenue goes to labor and a key challenge is turnover, staffers are leaving while there’s an uptake in patient volumes.

If we can take away those tiny administrative burdensome tasks and allow them to do what they truly love, then we know we’re making it a better experience for them and we’re making it a better experience for the patient as well because they’re, they’re in control.

Doctor Shippe hopes to drive better patient outcomes by prioritizing the needs of practition, things like more flexibility and allowing them to work at the clinical level.

One of the things that’s really important when you’re talking with patients is not to make an assumption.

If you listen to patients who have heart attacks and listen to them, tell you their story about their symptoms, sometimes it’ll sound just like the textbook and sometimes it won’t.

And it’s really important to listen to the story, listen to the patient.

So the history the physical looking at all the diagnostic test and then bringing it all together to say this is the differential diagnosis and this is the ultimate diagnosis and what’s going on with this patient.

Raising the profile of women and minorities is another passion of doctor ships.

As of 2023 women hold 35% of tech jobs in the US.

The representation of women drops at senior positions and health care organizations still, Doctor Shippy remains optimistic about the potential tech has to represent greater populations.

Now, what we’re seeing is the majority of health care decision making happens by women.

Um The largest part of the workforce in medicine is nurses.

So what I see changing along the way are people being more inclusive in their thought about how do we ensure that women have a place at the table?

And women are the ones that are there making that happen?

The top of our game will not always mean that we’re at the head of the table, but it means that we’re definitely involved in the decision making.

We’re helping set the strategy.

And when you say like somebody like me at nine years old says I wanna be a doctor, I wanna help people like that never goes away.

And one of the things that becomes very, very clear is when you have good health, then you’re able to do anything that you need to do.

And so being from an underrepresented community or being in a community where maybe health care isn’t like what you’ve seen in the Texas Medical Center today.

Um, we wanna close those gaps.

Mcdonald’s is falling behind Burger King in same store sales growth in the US is coming as the fast food value meal competition heats up with mcdonald’s $5 value meal set to take effect on June 25th and Yahoo Finance’s very own.

Julie Hyman joins me now with a closer look, Julie.

Yeah, this helps, explains what’s at stake with these sort of new value meal wars, so to speak.

As the mcdonald’s for the past few years has pretty consistently been on top in terms of its same store sales, but now that has changed and we’ll see if it’s sustainably change.

But mcdonald’s us comps 2.5% last quarter.

That compares with Burger Kings at 3.8%.

Wendy still lagging here at 0.6%.

But this does help explain why we are seeing this flurry of activity around value meals being introduced.

So next Tuesday, mcdonald’s going to kick off its new marketing campaign around this new meal deal, which is a $5 meal deal.

It’s a response to some of its competitors, right?

You’re getting a Wendy’s $3 breakfast uh value meal.

Even Starbucks has now a $6 breakfast sandwich and coffee, uh meal as well.

Burger King also has been pushing out some value.

So there’s that element but there’s also sort of the social media surrounding mcdonald’s itself recently.

Of course, there was that social media post that highlighted an $18 Big Mac Meal and the company’s pushed back against that said it was an anomaly, but nonetheless, this all seems to be somewhat connected here.

We’ll see what, how consumers react to this latest meal deal.

We’ll also see how franchisees react to it because sometimes these types of value meals are not necessarily popular because it threatens the margins for some of these franchisees, Josh.

So it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out and we’ll see if it helps juice.

Uh, the sales for mcdonald’s $5 meal deal.

Viewers want to know, what do I get for that?

Here’s what you get a mcdole cheeseburger or a mcchicken sandwich, small French fries, my personal favorite, the four piece chicken nuggets and a small soft drink.

Are you in Julie Hyman?

Are you in?

Does that make sense to you?

Do you want that?

You know, I don’t, but I know you do and you will order more than enough for me.

I’m gonna have enough for both of us, Julie Hyman.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

That is a wrap on today’s asking for a trend.

Be sure to come back tomorrow.

4:30 p.m. Eastern for all of the latest market.

Moving stories affecting your wallet.

Have a great night.

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