Squawk on the Street 2ND Hour 1/2/26

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What made you confident that you could do something that hadn't been done before? I have no fear of failure.

SPEAKER_3 (0:21)

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SPEAKER_4 (0:23)

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SPEAKER_5 (0:29)

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Sara Eisen (0:52)

Good Friday morning, happy new year. Welcome back to Squawk on the Street. I'm Sara Eisen with David Faber. We are live as always from Postline of the New York Stock Exchange. Carl Quintanilla has the morning off. Coming up this hour, some solid gains for tech stocks and early trading after a standout year for the group driven by AI developments. AI expert Jack Hittery from Sandbox AQ will lay out his expectations for the industry in 2026 Plus, Tesla in focus today as fourth quarter deliveries fall double digits, but we'll talk to an analyst who sees big upside for the stock after a volatile year. And the recent swings in silver carrying over into the new year, with a jump in prices to start 2026, we'll discuss with one expert who says a correction could be coming. But first up, last week or last week, two days ago, I did some stocks that defined or charts that defined 2025 in terms of the macro landscape. Today, I'm looking at some under the radar charts that I think also defined the year that we should be watching in 2026 We talked a lot about Bitcoin, having a down year. How about Solana? Having talked about this much, you talk about it when the prices go up. These are the other crypto assets. Solana was down double digits, more than 30% for the year. I think what that shows is that the momentum came out of Bitcoin, and when that happens, the benchmark, everybody else also suffers. Bitcoin was coming off of a few years of triple digit gains, and it really stalled out. I'm not sure how people are reading into that, especially when gold, if you're looking at, I don't know, alternative currencies or anything like that, alternative dollar assets, when gold had such a strong year, Bitcoin did not.

David Faber (2:30)

No, it didn't. Now, Solana is a platform as well. It's a technology, it's not just a currency.

Sara Eisen (2:38)

But it's correlated with all of them.

David Faber (2:41)

Without a doubt. But it is a public blockchain, obviously. So in that way, it's kind of similar to Ethereum, which is another one, of course. We've seen Ethereum treasury companies. Yeah, remember when that was all the rage for a period last year as well? Yeah. Obviously, well, we saw what happened to strategy. Micro, the former micro strategy in terms of its holdings of Bitcoin, how much that stock came down. What else you got?

Sara Eisen (3:02)

So Rare Earth, the ETF that tracks Rare Earth stocks, which I think is also a big story of the year. Rare Earth Magnets, last year was the year that this came on all of our agenda. Look, it was helpful that the US Defense Department essentially took a financial stake in MP materials, but this is the year that the administration helped wake us up to the fact that we need to cultivate a supply chain outside of China for Rare Earth minerals and magnets, which is so important for the US industrial manufacturing process. And so we have a few of them here in the US, and clearly their stocks boomed 92% on this idea of government support and also the fact that they're going to be in very high demand, ramping up production there. So that was one I wanted to highlight. And in the final, we talked a lot about the COSPI as one of the best-performing indexes in Korea, South Korea market up more than 70%.

Do you know what the best, I mean, you don't know, but the best-performing stock in the COSPI, and one of the best-performing in the entire world last year? Not AI, beauty, a beauty stock. Really? Yes, this is K-Beauty, APR Beauty. And the reason I mention it is because it's a phenomenon that's kind of gone global, which is all the cool beauty trends, whether it's in products or devices, they happen, they start in Korea and then they go global. If you go into a Sephora in New York City, one of the first things you'll see is the Korean beauty product. And so it's actually been a big export and a major growth driver for the Korean market, besides of course SK Hynix and Samsung.