Bulls Rule in November, Black Friday Is Here, FTC vs. Microsoft 11/29/24

Carl Quintanilla (0:00)

Market moving insight and analysis. Join Jim Cramer, David Faber and me, Carl Quintanilla on the opening bell hour of CNBC Squawk on the Street. Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber, Sara Eisen at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer has the morning off. The futures are fairly steady on this final trading day of November. Shortened session, stocks close at one Eastern, bonds close an hour later. And speaking of bonds, 10 year 420 is about a one month low. Our roadmap begins, as we said, with the last trading day of the month. S&P on pace for the best month since February. Consumer discretionary, the top performing sector.

Sara Eisen (0:36)

Plus, speaking of the consumer, closer look at retailers' Black Friday strategies as shoppers across the country hit the stores.

David Faber (0:43)

And the FTC opens an investigation of Microsoft. It's an antitrust probe. But the big question, will it continue in the next administration?

Carl Quintanilla (0:53)

Let's begin with the markets in this obviously strong November for stocks, guys. We mentioned some of the month to date, but you look at year to date, consumer discretionary up 25 for the year so far, staples not that far behind with like 18

Sara Eisen (1:07)

It's been pretty broad based actually. And I'm looking at some of the month to date winners, Palantir, no surprise. Tesla's right up there. I think one of the more interesting stories this morning, you just mentioned treasuries, the round trip that we've seen for bond yields since the election, the 10-year yield is now at a level that is lower than where we were before the election. We're going back to end of October levels on the 10-year yield. What does that tell us about how the market is processing the economic outlook, the Trump policies? I will just say, potentially, you have this rally in bonds today and a sell-off in the dollar on alleviated trade tensions, right?

That has become front and center now that President-elect Trump put out on Truth Social that he had a very productive call with the Mexican leader, Shinebaum, President Shinebaum, and maybe different accounts, but both were very encouraging and sounded productive that, according to him, she's going to do something about the border.

Ed Yardeni (2:02)

Yes.

Sara Eisen (2:02)

And according to her, they've already been doing it.

Ed Yardeni (2:03)

Exactly.

Carl Quintanilla (2:04)

But her point is that we've already been working on that.

Sara Eisen (2:06)

But maybe it means less tariff. For the market, it's like, okay, we can maybe not expect 25 percent tariffs on Mexican imports. Yeah.

Ed Yardeni (2:14)

We'll see.

Carl Quintanilla (2:14)

There is, as far as bonds go, sort of month-end short covering. We're down 30 bips since Besson's naming, which is interesting too. Are there fears about NFP print coming up? We'll see. It's probably all in the mix.

Sara Eisen (2:28)

So that's next Friday, and it is the big jobs report before the Fed meeting. All signs point to a pretty healthy job market, at least at this point. And then if it's not, you can always blame the weather and the hurricanes, which did factor into last month's numbers as well. But after we got PCE, the Fed's preferred inflation number, exactly in line with expectations last week, maybe a little bit elevated, but in line. So Core is still tracking closer to 3 than 2 percent. They don't want to see that. But does it throw them off the path of cutting rates in December? A weaker jobs number certainly would increase the chances that they would go in December. But the market's kind of already there, around 70 percent odds that they go.

Carl Quintanilla (3:07)

We're going to talk a bit later this morning about sort of relative tech weakness. David, we mentioned this report on Wednesday from BTIG called It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Tech Mess. NVIDIA, of course, actually bouncing a little bit today. But all the big ones have some sort of headline risk today, whether that's Microsoft, which will get to Uber, which we continue to watch Google. This Australian bill banning social media for kids under 16, now officially law?

David Faber (3:34)

Yeah. It will be interesting to see how they implement that. I know there's been some coverage of exactly how they can actually execute on that law. You can take a look at NVIDIA shares, which of course we track very closely for any number of very obvious reasons. A couple of weekdays earlier in the week prior to the holiday. I brought this up many times, of course, the pre-training models, the deceleration in terms of advancement being made there. Is it an issue? Do you need the same kind of computing power for inference as you do for training on these large language models?