Squawk on the Street: 12/29/25

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Carl Quintanilla (1:00)

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 Monday morning.

David Faber (1:09)

Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm David Faber. She is Sara Eisen. We're live in Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange. Jim and Carl have a morning. I think they have a whole week off.

Sara Eisen (1:18)

Yeah, just me and you.

David Faber (1:19)

All week long, three hours.

Sara Eisen (1:21)

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David Faber (1:23)

This is the way you want to end your year. Speaking of ending the year, let's take a look at futures of course. We are looking down, Sara, as you can see right there. Perhaps a bit of a sharper lower open when we get started a half hour from now. Our roadmap does begin with what's been a very strong year for Wall Street. Of course, the S&P is still hovering right near those record levels, financials hitting new heights and the metals trade. Man, silver, for example, a record run.

Sara Eisen (1:49)

Plus Lululemon founder, Chip Wilson, launching a proxy fight to change the board. We'll explore what it means for the athletic apparel retailer and the California tax backlash. Tech founders in Silicon Valley threatening to flee the state over a proposed wealth tax aimed at billionaires. This dominated my social media feed last night.

David Faber (2:07)

Oh, I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did. We'll discuss that, of course. Let's start, though, with the markets. We're going to kick off the final trading week of the year. We've got three more sessions. And then on Friday, of course, we'll begin the new year as well. What's on your mind?

Sara Eisen (2:21)

Well, just seasonality, first of all. This is part of the Santa Claus rally. And we don't make too much of seasonality, but it has historically been a very strong period for the market. So we have two days of the Santa Claus rally under our belt, and the market is up over those two days. Let's see what happens today. There's five more days left of this. But over the full seven days, the S&P 500, on average, gains 1.3 percent and is up 70 percent of the time. So we're up 0.3 percent already going into today. But today doesn't look like it's going to continue. Just just a seasonality thing, you know, because there's not much happening on the fundamental front. We'll get some data releases today. We'll get some housing data tomorrow. We'll get minutes from the last Fed meeting. On Wednesday, we'll get jobless claims. They early them up because of the New Year's holiday. So I'll be watching that. But we're kind of in this sweet spot where the economy is doing well. Last week, we got a really solid GDP number. And the Fed could be gearing up for more cuts as the president has made clear, he's not going to pick someone that doesn't want lower interest rates. Now, it's just one vote, but the chair does sway the committee. So we're on guard for that news. But generally speaking, good, solid economic backdrop on top of the Fed continuing to cut interest rates and all the investments still pouring into AI. Nothing really has fundamentally changed about that picture, has it?

David Faber (3:41)

Not really. I mean, a lot of the rally that we saw on some of the big names last week, of course, Friday was a bit of a different story, although NVIDIA was up in part, perhaps, in that story that we broke around the licensing agreement they have with Grok and, of course, the basically employment of virtually all of Grok with a Q employees. But I think it was more specific to OpenAI. They're out there raising that potentially as much as a hundred billion dollars. Don't have a lot of hard facts on that, so I don't want to share too much. But I think they may be looking in the retail channel in Asia, but apparently it may be going fairly well. I don't know, Sara, but to the extent that market participants last week were just emboldened by the fact that hey, they're going to have another hundred billion dollars potentially. That helped shares of Oracle to a certain extent. We just saw some of the names certainly come to life last week. We'll keep an eye on many of them as well. Today is that fundraising just continues for the likes of OpenAI and others.