Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports on the day’s trending tickers.
Video Transcript
BRIAN SOZZI: Let’s get some other hot tickers with Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre. Jared, we have to start with the chip shortage. Focus remains on really, some more negative headlines on that front.
JARED BLIKRE: Yeah. It just keeps coming in waves here. And the latest group is from Malaysia. Now, Malaysia is a key supplier. They’re not a huge one. But they can be a bottleneck. And so they are investing in chip testing and packaging technology. And a lot of auto dealers, including Ford, have had to delay their production because of shortages in the industry.
And we know this has been going on. But now it’s coming from a different source. Also, I want to note here– and let me just go to our EV and our car space heatmap so we can take a look at some of the market action today.
Now, here we have all of our parts suppliers. We have Ford now climbing into the green. I believe it started the day in the red. Let’s check this out here. And we can see indeed, it has climbed back into the green here. General Motors still mired in the red.
And also on that recall last week, RBC is saying about the battery recall that it had done as a result of having some of the batteries that it had bought from other suppliers have to be recalled. This is a key source here of a problem that RBC says could affect other auto manufacturers. They don’t have that production of batteries in house, like Tesla. They may have to rely on other parts suppliers. And they don’t control their own destinies, here to say.
JULIA LA ROCHE: How about, Jared– I know you’re also looking at the small caps, the biotechs and the small caps. What are you paying attention to specifically?
JARED BLIKRE: Well, everybody is focusing on the Pfizer news today, that they finally got their full vaccination license. But I’ll tell you what I’m looking at. I think there’s a deeper story here. Trillium Securities, the stock is up 190% today. Let’s get a year to date on it. They have a cancer / Pfizer just bought them out or announced they were for about $2.3 billion. And this is giving a bid to the entire pharma space, especially the small biotechs.
If you look at the Russell 2000 Biotech Index, that is up by leaps and bounds today because of this deal. So while the headlines focus on Pfizer and the vaccine, this is, I think, what’s really going on in the background.
BRIAN SOZZI: And Jared, I know you continue to watch Bitcoin. I mentioned this morning to you, you essentially called the bottom. So you’re the Bitcoin expert, as far as I’m concerned.
JARED BLIKRE: [CHUCKLES] One good call makes me an expert? I like that, Brian.
Let’s take a look at what’s going on in Bitcoin here. I’ve been happy to say it’s right around 50,000 just about the entire day. Now, we did punch above 50,000, if ever so briefly. Coming back down here.
But it’s been a slow, steady march here from that 29,500 bottom that we saw just a few weeks ago. So you take that point right there and this one right here, lower left to the upper right.
But there’s also another development in crypto. We all know that stablecoins such as Tether or US Dollar Coin, USDC coin, those are supposed to be backed by cash and treasuries. Now, we learned Tether and some other coins had been backed, in fact, by commercial paper. But now Coinbase, leading a consortium of other exchanges, has come out today saying that, in fact, in these two stablecoins, at least in USDC, everything is backed by cash and treasuries now, correcting an earlier situation where they had claimed that it was in fact backed by cash and treasuries but at the time had not been.
So just kind of closing the loop on that. Maybe Powell won’t have to give any negative testimony regarding Dogecoin and other stablecoins this Friday. But we will be bringing that to you live, of course, with Brian Sozzi. I’m sorry, Brian Cheung. Sending it back to you guys.