 The following is a presentation of TFNN. The Morning Markets Kickoff with your host, Tommy O'Brien. This is Jacob Schup filling in for Tommy O'Brien. Let's see what we've got going on this morning. We have the ES Mini of about 0.18%. Pre-market with the Russell up 0.87%. NQ's down minorly 0.07%, really flat. The YM up about 0.29%. Gold contract trading at $19.88 and $0.40. Silver at $23.95. A great run up this week in Silver, the lower dollar. Copper contract trading at $3.71. The LightSuite crude contract trading at $73.85. Take a look here, Tesla still trading down. Silver at $232.63. Steel dynamics at $109.88. Now we have the dollar breaking down a lot lower. We're getting back to that $103 level. Currently trading at $104.07. If we get lower movement today, right? We have this massive leg down. We're kind of bouncing at that $104 level. If we do get a breakdown further in the dollar, that is obviously going to be positive for the market as a whole. And so we're eagerly awaiting to see what it will do today. I know Basil is going to go over a lot of the currency pairings today as well during his show. So make sure you tune in for that. That will be right after this segment. Excuse me, this show. The QQQ trading at $385.74. We have Google trading at $137.65. Meta at $332.54. Disney, again, love to see it. We're up at $94.73. Bob Iger had made some revamps regarding prices for accessing his parks. So we've gotten some good moves with that. Apple at $189.87 in the spy at $450.89. Take a look today. I want to look at Amazon this morning. See if I can find it. There we go. So not a massive move on the news, but we have some of the kind of like car dealership stocks. They're going down pretty significantly. Essentially what Amazon is going to do is they're having online car sales. And that's going to start with Hyundai, which is pretty massive. Starting next year you'll be able to buy a car on Amazon for the first time. The company announced to deal with Hyundai that will allow dealerships to sell cars through the site. Previously customers could browse car showrooms to compare prices on Amazon, but not actually buy the car. And this will change next year when several Hyundai dealerships start to list models for sale on the site. Customers can browse cars on the site and make a purchase using the preferred payment methods. This is great. They can then choose to pick the car up at a nearby dealership. And I wonder if this will get kind of looked at by some legislators. You know, Amazon has such a wide kind of breadth of services that they're looking into, right? And if it starts suppressing local car dealerships in any kind of way, and they really start dominating the market, I could see maybe some pursuit and antitrust. And you know, we at least see in Europe and the UK that that happens a lot with Amazon. And I could see that kind of transferring into the United States as well. So we'll see how that turns out. Obviously we're still about like a year away from that. Excuse me, we're still about a few months away from that starting next year. So we'll kind of see how that turns out. Amazon is also starting to trial basically pharmaceutical deliveries with drones, which would be interesting as well. I think that would be a game changer for a lot of people who are kind of locked in their home, given their kind of medical conditions. And this would make it a lot easier. And you think about it this way as well. You know, people will have to take medications for like mental health. A lot of the times what happens is they start feeling better. You know, it kind of gets on this kind of wave and then they stop taking the medication. They stop going to pick it up. They still can't really plan things in their life. I have a friend that are just like an associate, I guess, who basically needs medication like that and he takes it, he feels better and then he just stops going, right? And he stops going to the doctors. He stops going to the pharmacy. And then obviously things spiral out of control with that. So, something like Amazon delivering medications via drone where it kind of like cuts out the efforts on the sick person's part will be massive, I think, just for society in general. But I also think that will be good for Amazon's bottom line as well. As part of the deal, Amazon's Alexa voice assistants, they're going to start integrating this with Hyundai vehicles at least, which is interesting. I'm not sure how much that actually contributes to the value of Amazon stock, but it is interesting to see it kind of spread out like that. So, 48 states have laws that limit or ban manufacturers from selling vehicles directly to consumers. That's obviously started to shift a little bit with Tesla, I believe. They have no independent dealerships, of course. They just sell straight to consumer. I know they obviously have showrooms, but that's not really the dealership. So, it'll be interesting to see how Amazon can kind of essentially sidestep that legislation. We'll see what moves on from there. I'm going to take a look at Starbucks today. They have a strike going on. This company always gets strikes for some reason. It has a very active employee base. Starbucks workers have filed more complaints with New York City, alleging the coffee chain violated the Fair Work Week law. This obviously is on the back of a lot of different companies having to pay off for violating some of these laws. They should have totally paid 20 million to workers to settle Fair Work Week violations. They paid 1 million to the city of New York. There are some deals with Stellantis and the Auto Workers Union that was just passed. We'll talk a little bit about that. Looking to Starbucks, what's going on here. New York's Fair Work Week law said that employees have to give their workers regular schedules from week to week. 14 days notice of their scheduled hours and extra pay for shift changes among other requirements. Starbucks baristas have repeatedly accused the company of running a foul on the law. They have filed nearly 90 complaints with the city related to the law since February. The allegations come of Starbucks baristas at more than 200 locations nationwide. Strike Thursday on the company's busy Red Cup promotion day. Of course, it's a good day to kind of leverage what you want there. To celebrate the holiday season, Starbucks every year gives away reusable red cups. Of course, Starbucks Workers United said the strike is protesting understaffing the company's locations, particularly on promotion day. Workers are also demanding that Starbucks turn off mobile ordering on future promotion days. Convenient mobile ordering has become important to Starbucks business customers. Essentially, yeah. This is what's interesting too. I wonder how the balance of employment is in the country because you see a lot of service places are kind of understaffed. People are working pretty long hours and overtime and I see that in similar locations, at least here and in Tampa as well. But they were also in an environment where the Fed would lower employment as well. It would be interesting to see, I think there probably is just a wrong distribution or an unequal distribution throughout the economy itself. We're seeing a lot of the tech companies just shave jobs entirely. Obviously, I don't think they'll be moving into the service. Probably some of them, but not things like Starbucks. It's kind of interesting to see this happening in New York as well, especially with a higher unemployment rate. And Starbucks is usually good at this. So I think this will probably resolve pretty quickly, but it didn't look like it really hit the company that much whatsoever. You had a really high volume day gapping up. Let's see. I mean, from about 90 all the way to above 100, I think the highest on that day was 10212. If you're looking for potential trading setups in the stock market, then Rocket Equities & Options Report is a newsletter you should try. Tommy O'Brien delivers options and equity trades when the markets present them using a combination of fundamentals and technicals. Sign up for Rocket Equities & Options Report today with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you have nothing to risk. For all the details and to start your subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN Educating Investors. After all, he's got 45 years' experience as a day trader. Larry will also provide daily charts, videos, and data on the key markets that he's tracking. Expect notifications from Larry on market movement you need to act on at any time. First-time subscribers also get a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're not satisfied, let us know and you'll get a full refund within 30 days of signing up. Subscribe to the Fibonacci 24-7 newsletter today. TFNN.com Educating Investors. Steve Rhodes started his trading career as a student almost 20 years ago and the student has now become the master. Steve won the prestigious Timer of the Year award in 2018 and barely missed that mark again in 2019, finishing it number two for the year, an amazing accomplishment. Steve Rhodes is committed to sharing his techniques and knowledge with anyone who wants to learn and he shares his vast amount of trading knowledge every day in his Mastering Probability newsletter. Steve's award-winning newsletter, Mastering Probability, is delivered every trading day with updates throughout the afternoon. Sign up for Steve's market newsletter, Mastering Probability, and you'll receive access to seven of Steve's educational webinars absolutely free. At TFNN, all our newsletters come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Visit TFNN.com and try Mastering Probability 30 days risk-free today. TFNN Educating Investors. Sign up today and become a part of this educational community of traders. Just visit the front page of TFNN.com. There's nothing to strike going on. Let's talk a little bit about Baba, okay? So, that is Alibaba, of course. So, we have a massive volume down here. We're trading down 2.89% right now, down 76.82% from its highest tick up this past week, about 87.75%. This is tangible evidence that the chip ban is actually having its desired effect in China, the U.S. chip ban for China. What has happened is, well, you have two things going on right now, right? Jack Ma has sold a lot of his shares, trying to kind of like, I guess, like hedge himself against what's going on between the U.S. and China. But more so, they've scrapped their cloud business concept, which is a huge driver for Alibaba's price here. They scrapped plans to spin off its cloud business, citing uncertainties created by U.S. export curbs on chips, using artificial intelligence applications. Obviously, that ban happened last month, and that was to ban export to China of chips using artificial intelligence, and it's created major uncertainties for the country's big tech companies. Ten cent holdings set on Wednesday, and it saw the curbs impacting its cloud services. And this really does hamper Chinese society as a whole if they can't kind of keep up with this stuff. Thursday's announcements came alongside inline second quarter revenue from the Chinese e-commerce group, which in March had unveiled plans to carve out the cloud business as part of the biggest restructuring in its 24-year history. The company also put a hold on plans for initial public offering of its fresh chip-o groceries business, but said it would prepare external fundraising for international digital commerce group arms. Yeah, all of this kind of got hit. Let me see here. I don't know if I have the story on Mike Ma. Essentially, his family just sold off a bunch of shares in it as well, which is kind of compounding this. The company appointed obviously the new Eddie Wu, who's pushing all this kind of stuff, and then obviously the chip bans occurred, and this hit even harder. He says Alibaba will not pursue a full spin-off of cloud intelligence group in light of uncertainties created by recent U.S. export restrictions on advanced computing chips, and said the group had focused on growing the cloud business and providing investments for its AI drivers. He said the cloud unit will continue to maintain its independent operation. Regulatory filings also revealed on Thursday that Ma's family trust plans to sell 10 million American depository shares of Alibaba group holdings for about $871 million. And that's kind of like the ticker with all of this. I mean, I guess regarding what China's going to do with this, obviously there's talks between our president and Xi Jinping. Apparently, those were decent and productive to some certain extent. Now, I still think it is a major security risk, not just for America, but for the West as a whole for China to get a hold of the... I mean, you know, I say it like that, but the point is it's just like, you know, these are really big... these give us like a competitive edge, you know, not only in commerce, but also physical security. And so it's just... it's important to understand where these chips are going and who gets the chips, and that's kind of just the nature of how the game is played, I suppose. China has made some developments regarding producing chips on their own, but they're nowhere near what the West can do, at least with ASML and IBM, too. So we'll see kind of how that develops. If China can put in enough money and create a competitive... which this would be the time to do that, obviously. You know, we could see honestly a divergence in the economies, or at least an uncoupling regarding that, right? And China could be a bit stronger. China could be a bit more innovative as much. That's kind of like their... you know, how do I say? That's how you can kind of characterize the country. There's not a lot of innovation with that, but they can really like produce a lot and kind of finish things. For instance, they're now going to have their first full EV, and they're going to mass produce this. This is with Lee Otto. This is coming in February, right? And that's what I think is so interesting about China, right? Like in the West, it takes us a long time. Obviously, we have Tesla producing these things. All the traditional car companies are starting to produce their own EVs. But what China can do, and maybe it's not the top of the line, and maybe it's not the best, and there might be like some glaring issues with some of the products, but they can take it and then really see it through to the end. And I find that unique about that culture and the economy as well. At least regarding Lee Otto. On Friday, it will start mass production, the delivery of its first fully electric car in February. As the up and coming Chinese automaker, that's on fast charging technology to solve a range, anxiety for EV users. So they're calling this the multi-purpose vehicle. It's great. It has an 800 volt charging architecture, and they are using Chinese batteries. So this will be interesting to see. It's a little bit more expensive than what is going on in China, but people want to buy more Chinese products in China. Yes, they have the same kind of concept we do in America. We want to buy American. They also want to buy Chinese. And the government does a good job at fostering that kind of appetite among its people. So it'll be cool to see how that evolves. Of course, it's not always as refined as it is in the West, as I'm saying, but you can see it really occur on a wide scale and kind of extrapolate that to possibilities in the U.S., which I think is pretty cool. On that same note, since there are security issues with China and the U.S. has obviously had that import band, Microsoft, you know, I mean, this is a really great upward movement, right? Azure is doing phenomenally. Obviously, that's their cloud. They've acquired Blizzard. You know, in theory, you could get to a point where Microsoft is how you call like, you know, you have really Hulu and Netflix. It could be that for video games essentially, right? One of the really cool things I find, especially with Azure, is you have these, you know, I mean, you have cloud servers basically, right? And you can just spin these off, and it doesn't necessarily matter what you have on your computer, right? Because you're using cloud resources. Now, of course, you know, graphics processing and CPU do play a role in that, right? And how much, you know, how much you can make of the cloud. But what I see Microsoft doing, and I think they already do it at least on the computer, right? My friend's kid, she's like 11 years old, and I saw her sitting on the computer, and she was playing like an Xbox game on the computer, which if, you know, when I was that age, I mean, that would have been the best thing in the world, right? And it then hit me, I just, I've been out of that for so long, obviously, but then it hit me as like, this is really the future, right? It's like, not just streaming videos, I mean, it's streaming video games, and this kind of lowers the barrier to entry that, you know, Microsoft experienced with new users, given that their Xbox and all their other gaming stations are so expensive, right? Well, now you can just go ahead and subscribe to the service and just play it on your computer, right? I think this is massive. So how does this kind of affect what we're talking about with the chips? How does this affect Microsoft? Because that's some risk exposure they have. They essentially say that it's not a big deal, and they're totally fine with not focusing on China, which is interesting. So let's take a look at this a little bit. It says Microsoft is not focused on China. It's a domestic market that the company has notable Chinese customers with operations outside the world's second most populous country. It says we're mostly focused on the global market outside of China. A lot of the Chinese multinationals operating outside of China are our bigger AI customers. It's interesting. You know, there's also another tangible risk for Microsoft with this is, you know, you're putting your operating system in a country where the government is pretty bent on cracking different things, right, different bits of technology. And so, you know, that has a huge, like I say, like risk surface with it as well. It might not be as apparent with Chinese companies working, let's say like in the Balkans or in Africa. Folks, stay tuned. We'll be right back. 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For all the details and to start your 30-day Tiger Forex report subscription today, visit the front page of TFNN.com. TFNN, educating investors. Are you ready to take your trading to the next level? Introducing Tom O'Brien's award-winning newsletter Market Insights, your key to successful active trading. Tom O'Brien, renowned for his expertise in the financial markets, has designed Market Insights to be your daily guide to profitable trades. Tom publishes his daily Market Insights newsletter every market day before the market open, along with updates when warranted. Stay ahead of the game with Tom's real-time analysis and trade recommendations delivered straight to your inbox. Whether you're a seasoned trader or just starting out, Market Insights provides the edge you need to navigate the markets with confidence. Ready to join the ranks of successful traders? Head over to TFNN.com and subscribe to Market Insights today. 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Each host is an experienced trader and gives their take on the market while taking calls and questions live from around the world. From the moment the market opens until the closing bell sounds, Tiger TV has eight different shows with expert hosts to help you make the right moves with your money. Watch online at TFNN.com or on TFNN's YouTube channel and become the investor you were born to be, TFNN. Educating investors. Don't forget, you can listen to TFNN live on your mobile device 24 hours per day. Go to TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. That's TFNN.com and hit Watch Tiger TV. Welcome back, folks. Sorry, I was just reading the email. Okay, refocus again. Okay, we're at market open right now. We're at 9.30. We have the ES mini trading at 45.23. We have the Russell trading at 17.90. 90 cents. We're sideways right now essentially and everything. NQ down about 0.2% at 15,867. The YM down over up 0.15% right now. And the gold contract trading at 1,986.50. Let's take a look at what the dollar is doing. What the dollar doing? It's 104.13. We're really looking for this to break down today. And if we can get some convicted move down from this area, we'll be set to go in the markets. And this is going to kind of herald the green market for the day. We have Disney trading at 94.76. And the spy still at 450. Again, that is on an ABC up to the 462 area. If you want to know more about that, you can go to TFNN.com. Go to Newsletters. You can sign up for Market Insights as a 30-day money back guarantee if you decide that you do not like the service. Check it out. All right. What are we looking at? Talking a little bit more about Microsoft. I'm not going to go much more into it. Essentially, they're okay with not being in China and they don't think it's going to hit their bottom line that hard, which is actually pretty reassuring if you are a Microsoft bag holder. So this is how to really stellar move since October. And we'll see what comes out. Again, Azure is massive. It's getting more market share. I'll say too, I had one of my mentors. He worked for the DoD. He was doing cybersecurity and everything. Now he works for another company and they use Azure. And he said it's amazing. He's like, one, I don't know why they have me here. He's a pretty, they pay highly for his position. But for Azure, you just kind of, you just set kind of settings essentially for security. And a lot of it is done in the back end. We were talking yesterday how a lot of people want a one-stop shop for IT and security. And Microsoft is at least doing that in their cloud. So that's pretty neat. And I like that for the company. Some quote unquote breaking news for the day. UAW members finally ratified new contract with Chrysler owner Stellantis. Stellantis was actually about to buy people out of their retirements earlier to see if they could try to get some more money or on the longer term essentially. Obviously this strike has done pretty significant things to the company as well. Let's take a look here. United Auto Workers members at Chrysler owner Stellantis have ratified a new labor contract following historically contentious round of bargaining between the union and company according to the preliminary results posted Friday by the union. And what's interesting too is I think you saw Subaru as well as some other companies watching all this going on. They now are making more deals with their employees to can prevent something like this from occurring. And that just must be a pretty pit in the stomach feeling for Stellantis. They're the ones you're getting so heavily targeted. And these other companies are honestly making not as extreme concessions in order to try to get the eye of Sauron off them I suppose. The deal is the second this week for the Detroit automakers. A deal with GM received 54.7% support from UAW GM who voted according to preliminary results published by the union. UAW members with Ford Motor are on pace to also ratify their agreement but are continuing to vote Friday. A majority of Stellantis facilities overwhelmingly approved the deal which like GM and Ford includes at least 25% wage increases. Which is pretty significant. It also includes the reopening of an Illinois plant that had been indefinitely idled. However, the deal has received notable objection at the automakers Jeep plants in Toledo. According to the UAW's vote tracker, the deal was supported by 68.4%. Okay, that's good. See how hopefully we can see... I don't know what's GM trading at. Yeah, not any big moves on the news at least for GM's deal that they made. But yeah, we've been following that a little bit. So I thought it might be smart to kind of open up and see what's going on with that. Volvo is down today. Down about 14%, record low. Chinese Holdings Group sold off a lot of them. Yeah, 100 million shares they got hit. They're also going to have some supply issues going forward. Volvo of course is a pretty solid vehicle anyways. But they are having supply issues. Let's see what else. Yeah, but that's just why they're going down. If you're holding it, take a look. This is really big news for Eli Lilly. Obviously we've seen it with Novo Nordisk as well. This is trading at $5.88, $0.55. So retail investors crowd into Eli Lilly after weight loss drug approval. This is massive. Retail flows into Eli Lilly spiked more than a two-year high in November. Small investors rushed to buy the stock after the U.S. pharma major received highly anticipated approval for its weight loss drug, Zepin. Daily net purchasers, excuse me, purchases surged $14.4 million on November 8th when Zepin was clear to the U.S. and U.K. and then of course Novo Nordisk has will go. We look at this too. What is the implication on a cultural level? Obviously this is huge in a financial sense. Obesity treatment has surged in recent years. I think it's something like 128% I think I read the other day cost into treating obesity in the U.S. You have other countries that are modernizing and they are suffering with vast amounts of obesity. This is the case in Mexico, namely, but you'll see it in other countries probably in South America starting. So it's good that this happens, right? So people are obese and they need to take these drugs to kind of lower it. But I think we run into some issues first with Zepin and will go. You actually can start to see muscular wasting with these kind of drugs, right? I worry too. Now there are people who are obese that there are definitely some biological markers going on there or like activity going on there. Maybe the metabolism is slower during the daytime due to whatever reason. But I worry that with the advent of something like this it won't be focused enough on in society of like healthier practices for people, right? So you might not be obese but do you still suffer some of the same consequences and I say this like mentally, right? I have periods when, you know, I train a lot in MMA but there are periods where I'll stop and I'll still be eating a lot and gain some extra weight and I definitely feel sluggish. My brain is more clouded and my overall quality of life is just a lot lower, right? Like if I take this drug okay, yeah, I might look better but am I still going to feel this way? So that's something to consider, right? I think lifestyle changes are also very necessary in first world countries. At least in America, Europeans have done a better job at this. You know, I look like Iceland and some of the Nordic countries and certainly Germany that are like focused on activity and hasn't been historically the case although it's changing. The quality of life and then therefore really the output of the citizens is so much improved by this kind of physical activity, right? And again, I fear that with these kind of drugs coming out there's not going to be the impetus for the average person to try to pursue this kind of lifestyle because the, you know, apparent effects of you know, not having a lifestyle to be present if that makes sense, right? Trying to like say everything straightforward but yeah, regardless I think that this is going to be huge for these companies and more weight loss drugs will probably come in the coming years and that'll be just a huge huge market. Folks, stay tuned, we'll be right back. With live programming hosted by a variety of professional traders during market hours and now they are expanding their reach with the Tigers Den, available to all Tigers and Tigresses for just $1 for the year. There's no cash or added costs when you join our community of traders. 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Low from the day prior was about 1347-1446. Gaps shares soar on old Navy brand renewal and then controlled inventory. They're 20% pre-market. We're now trading up 4% from that basis-wise. So basically like last year Walmart and Target gap discounted heavily to clear excess stocks due to weaker demand for non-essential products and aggravated by out-of-style clothing at the company's brands. Reporting quarter results were driven by improvement in old Navy and leaner inventory. That's massive. That's another thing too that I think is pretty impressive. We have this culture in America of fast fashion. Really, this concept is like you have this trend in today and you have it out next week when you're these large kind of retailers you have to try to either choose something that's kind of like vanilla middle of the road or you hyper-specialize and only choose a little bit of it. The accounting management that goes into some of these companies to try to like this article says slim down the amount of inventory it has and be more controlled than what it's putting out is pretty extraordinary honestly and if you're someone who does that you know I'm here Monday filling in for Tommy give me a call and we can talk about that because I think that's really interesting. Anyways reported quarter results were driven by an improvement obviously at old Navy and leaner inventory and encouragingly November to date sales trends have improved modestly from the third quarter. Comparable sales at old Navy rose 1% in the third quarter the first increase in 10 quarters which is pretty solid. Old Navy gained market share and encouraging quality proof point that worked to improve both product assortment and brand messaging. Gap struggles with outdated inventory at his namesake brand and old Navy had pushed customers to look for newer and fresher styles although you know I think what could be and this is so interesting to me what is the champion is the brand right and back in the day like especially when I was a kid champion was just like the the weird off brand kind of sportswear yeah same with Fila right and then in recent times they've just had this complete like rebranding right I mean it's it's still the same thing it still looks the same but just a few influencers started taking to it and now they're they're massive companies right or they're massive product lines at least you know gap is definitely what would be considered uncool and so was old Navy as well but what is so interesting this day and age is all you need is like I said a few influence influencers to wear your stuff to really push it and say hey look how good this is blah blah blah and it can really take off so that would be interesting to see if you know there can be kind of like a comeback with fashion ability regarding these brands I don't know I'm just kind of musing on that I think it's a little bit interesting the apparel makers executives also looted to longer recovery time for Banana Republic yeah they've lost a lot and their quality has gone down and Athleta I'm not super familiar with that line anyway which has seen product misfires in weak retail execution so yeah gap doing quite alright this morning up 26 point five percent it's probably a nice morning to wake up and see that if you're a long-term gap holder looking at like three years yeah I mean just kind of like a dead stock for a while interesting our moving on we were talking about the digital currencies yesterday and how some of the central banks want to start adopting it there were some talks in Singapore regarding that and so Singapore came out and said that they're actually going to try to do a pilot run the wholesale use of central bank digital currencies that's going to start in 2024 let's see how it's going I'm going to give you something here yeah so it's essentially just a pilot one the wholesale CBDC is a digital currency issued by a central bank that's used exclusively by the central banks commercial banks or other financial institutions to settle large value interbank transactions it's unlike retail CBDCs which cater to individuals and businesses facilitating everyday transactions since 2016 the MAS has conducted many experiments with other central banks financial industry to explore the use of wholesale CBDCs on distributed ledgers to facilitate real time cross border payments and settlements and again that's what I've this concept is what I've been saying is so interesting about the blockchain in general you can kind of make these unique little hubs that transcend general boundaries which I think is pretty neat maybe we can talk a little bit more about how that would kind of be realized on the show Monday and we'll see how that goes banks will issue tokenized bank liabilities in the form of claims and balance sheets currently retail customers can then use the tokenized bank liabilities in transactions with merchants who will then credit these bank liabilities with the respective banks tokenization refers to the process of issuing a digital form of an asset on a blockchain the CBDC will then be automatically transferred to the merchant as a form of payment during transaction now this is more the domestic just use of it right and they're going to pilot that as well and that's kind of how something like that would work it's kind of interesting however you have Mastercard they come out and said that they don't see this adopting as quickly there's a lot of what's really the article here so this Mastercard says wide adoption of central bank digital currencies would be difficult right now the Mastercard blockchain and digital assets leads the Asia Pacific and this is Mastercard's blockchain itself and I mean I really am impressed with this company for doing that I think they were one of the first to really hop on this concept and kind of conceptualize it and run with it right and you know novel use blockchain for the purposes it was developed for said there isn't enough justification for the widespread use of central bank digital currencies right now which makes a broad adoption of such assets difficult and this was from the Mastercard's lead on blockchain and digital assets the difficult part is adoption so if you have CBDCs in your wallet you would have the ability for you to spend at anywhere you want very similar to cash today and again this is the retail CBDC that's quite interesting and I think that's the truth and that's really obviously the central banks can trade whatever they want between each other and people can have opinions on that but it's not really going to affect them so outwardly it's kind of like a retail digital currency would and I think I was speaking yesterday a major issue in America I think a lot of people would be opposed to that I think a lot of people don't trust the government nor do they trust the Federal Reserve or whoever is really going to be issuing this kind of thing so that would be quite difficult and I think the only way you would get it to be adopted immediately would be through means that would further erode trust in the American people and again I'm not for me the purposes of now I don't really have a moralization on these things but I can just kind of see that would be the outcome of trying to force that on people although I do see moving forward that digitalization is absolutely the future I think we're going to continue to digitalize everything that we have it'll be interesting to see how that kind of shakes out folks stay tuned we'll be right back for a short segment as a precious metal gold is still king it continues to hold the most effective safe haven and hedging properties across the global major trading hubs of 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the Virginia Governor's Housing Conference in the Hampton to improve the math he said housing supply needs to increase Barkin offered up a litany of ideas for states and localities including issuing more permits for private single family homes reducing unnecessary regulation and lobbying those who don't want their towns or communities changed he also cited some examples of changes and more housing and boost supply one government body in Virginia, Wise County implemented a tax incentive for renovation rehabilitation or replacement of residential and commercial properties in West Virginia he said a newly created build WV program offers tax exemption for purchasing construction materials 10 year property value tax credit and the potential for a business occupation tax exemption it was interesting in I was reading the Tampa Bay Times excuse me we have a lot of people here and it's extremely difficult try to buy a home home prices are very high in this area and you say okay we'll just leave move somewhere else I mean that's you know that's kind of a hard thing to say as well you know how long you have to travel into the city the commute is very important cost wise obviously cars are expensive gas is starting to be a little bit more expensive I do know people who live maybe like 40 minutes south and they commute into town for work and it makes them pretty miserable overall and there's kind of no end in sight for that what I was reading the Tampa Bay Times is there's a lot of motels around here so people are kind of like cutting into their savings essentially to basically live in the hotels right so their families aren't on the street and they're waiting for assistance to come it's a pretty big mess but at least we have some people you know in key places that are understanding that this is a real issue and looking for kind of solutions folks thank you so much for joining me we have Basil on next you were saying in the den yesterday that he's going to go over currency pairings how they're really at a key level so stay tuned for that I'll be with you Monday