SOTS 2nd Hour: Record Highs Roll Along, FICO CEO On The Record, & Restaurant Stock Recs 7/21/25

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Sara Eisen (0:47)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with Carl Quintanilla, David Faber as the morning off. We are live as always from Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks kicking off the week in the green after an up week.

Record territory here, up half a percent on the S&P 500 Dow is up 160 and the Nasdaq charges ahead as it has been, up 7 tenths of 1 percent. Big week of earnings coming your way. Take a look at Treasuries as we kick off the week. Get the Fed meeting later in the next week, later in the month. The 10 year yield 4.36 percent, 30 year yield just below 5 percent. So there's buying right now. Head this hour, make or break week for the market. Major earnings are coming from Alphabet, Tesla, Intel and more. We'll tell you about what we've already heard from companies and what could be coming. And shares of credit score company FICO, under serious pressure lately as FHFA Chief Bill Pulte targets the firm over fees and competition. FICO CEO will join us with his response.

Carl Quintanilla (1:44)

Pretty much one major print today on the economy. Let's get LEI with Rick Santelli. Morning, Rick.

Rick Santelli (1:50)

Good morning. And it's a negative print. Minus three-tenths of a percent is our June read on leading economic indicators. And you can see the market in a 10-year yield right now at 4.35, down a half dozen base points. That's making new low yields, new high prices on the session. Now, that would be seven consecutive negative months in a row on LEI. The last positive month was in November. So we do see that this weakness, of course, is a market-moving event, especially considering it goes against the grain of some of the recent data that we've had, which really shows the economy is pretty healthy, all things considered. Interest rates have come in this morning on the low side after last week getting very close on a 10-4.5 and toying with 5% on the 30-year bond. We do have a 20-year bond auction this Wednesday, but outside of that, supplies on the T-bill side, as interest rates continue to try to realign themselves.

You know what the weakest LEI was? It was April of this year, Liberation Month. A lot of things were distorted then. That was a five-year low that we had in April, so we see that we are rebounding to some extent, even though this is still a negative number. Sara, back to you.

Sara Eisen (3:07)

Okay, thank you, Rick. Rick Santelli, 3 year, 3.8, as you're seeing. We are 30 minutes here into the trading session. Here are three big movers we're watching. On the earnings front, Cleveland Cliffs moving higher after reporting a much smaller loss than expected. With CEO saying, in the relief, Cliffs is a major supplier of steel to the automotive manufacturers. And the Trump administration continues to show strong support to both the domestic steel and domestic automotive sector. Stock rising a nice 7%. Meantime shares of FinTech player Block higher as well on news that it is joining the S&P 500 and replacing Hess now that Chevron has completed its acquisition of that company. As we spoke to the CEO of Chevron about on Friday. And then Strategy also higher after the company said it bought more bitcoins, 6,000 bitcoins last week for around $740 million. It just keeps buying and buying and buying. I'm putting bitcoin on its balance sheet. But Carl, it's a light week of macroeconomic data. All the focus this week is going to be on earnings, numbers from the quarter and outlooks. And what companies are saying about their business and the economy. And we started talking about last week just how much better it was than has been so far than expected early April after Liberation Day. But look what we're going to hear from 20% of the S&P 500, five Dow components, consumer companies like Coke. We'll talk to the CEO tomorrow. AI companies like IBM, Alphabet, Tesla. Wednesday is going to be a big day for that. It is so far so good this morning, for instance, Domino's. OK, so Domino's same store sales in the US were 3.4 percent. The expectation was around 2 percent. And look at what the CFO is saying on the call. We have not seen any material impacts to date from global macro or geopolitical uncertainty. You just wouldn't have thought we would have had comments like that during the huge sell off that we had in early April around all those tariffs and all those fears. It really is amazing.