Drama in DRAM Memory ETF… And Trading Apple & Others At Record Highs… 10/13/26

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Melissa Lee (1:02)

Live from the Nasdaq Market site in the heart of New York City's Times Square, this is Fast Money. Here's what's on tap tonight. A memory lapse, a very particular part of the semi-sector under pressure again today. How competition from China is weighing on the group and how Elon Musk is weighing in. And the early read from the banks, money centers kicking off earning season this morning. What they told us about the state of the credit markets and how to trade the stocks right now. Plus, Apple hits a record high. J&J sinks after its Q3 report. And AT&T Games, despite a bearish call in Wall Street, has sentiment on the stock gotten too sour in the wake of SpaceX's spectrum buy. We'll debate that. I'm Melissa Lee. Come to you live from Studio B at the Nasdaq on the desk tonight. Tim Seymour, Karen Feinerman, Dan Nathan, and Steve Grossoff. We'll get to the DRAM drama in just a minute, we start off with Bank of America shares. They are down by about 2% after the company was fined more than $1.2 billion for money laundering failures. The company reports earnings tomorrow morning. Leslie Pickers got all the details of this as well as this morning's big bank reports.

Leslie Picker (2:02)

Hey, Mel. Yeah, B of A sang in a statement to CNBC that the $1.2 billion penalty will impact third quarter net income by about 17 cents per share.

The enforcement action is the third largest penalty in Treasury history and the largest in the history of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Treasury says B of A failed to timely report to FinCEN over $5 billion worth of suspicious transactions. It says over $1 billion of that implicated national security related risks. B of A sang that it's worked with regulators to reach these penalty resolutions stemming from violations cited in the previously reported 2024 OCC consent order and FinCEN investigation. The firm says it's invested billions in technology and dedicated thousands of employees to combat financial crime and notes that they are, quote, far along and committed to completing the work required to address the issues raised by regulators. Note that there is no asset cap required as part of the consent order. There are still B of A shares, as you mentioned, declining nearly 3% in after-hours trading ahead of the company's earnings report, which is expected tomorrow morning. And speaking of earnings, we heard from four other banks today. The fundamentals and the Q3 reports were pretty mixed, but questions over whether there's peak performance looming over shares today with all six universal banks closing in the red. Citigroup and Wells Fargo were the biggest laggards of that group. Now, tomorrow, we will hear, as I mentioned, from B of A and Morgan Stanley in the morning. And I'll be sitting down with the CEOs of each of those two firms during the 10 a.m. hour and 11 a.m. hour Eastern time. Mel.

Melissa Lee (3:45)

I guess there will be a lot of questions for Brian Moynihan tomorrow, Leslie, about this fine, which is pretty big. And typically when we see fines, you see an investor willingness to sort of look through a little bit.

I'm wondering what your take is. It sounds almost like the conditions that cause the fine to be imposed. It's not like a one-off episode. It's sort of a lack of controls, maybe.

Leslie Picker (4:08)

And it's something that they've been working toward and have already been investing money toward for quite some time. It's not something that they're criminally charged for. It's more of a kind of operations technology compliance issue. So that's something that for the last few years, they've hired a bunch of people to work toward remediating that, as well as spending a lot of money on and technology upgrades. And so this is something that will be kind of an ongoing thing as well in order to comply with the consent order and ensure that their operations are complying with all the anti-money laundering rules that are out there.