Stocks Little Changed As Traders Watch Yield Moves

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Looking for strategies to help you protect your portfolio in these uncertain times? Visit robblack.com, robblack.com, powered by EP Wealth.

Rob Black (0:12)

Good morning, September 29th, Tuesday. Market is working through some issues. September's starting to wind down. Turning the calendar to October should provide some relief and opportunity for a stock rally if certain conditions are met. Ten-year treasuries moved up to 5.27%. That's one of the bigger stories, as is oil in the month of September. Crude oil slightly down to day 1%.

If oil and yields start to slide, go lower. If we can get the ten-year back to 5% and then 4.9 and 4.8%, you'd see the stock market have a nice opportunity. This does not mean that it will happen, but it is an opportunity. Taking a look at the 30-year, it sits at, where is it, 30-year, 5.6%.

Ouch, the 10-year, the 5.27. Crude futures are down 2.3%. Today, reacting favorably to a report that oil out of the Middle East hit a post-war high. So, getting more oil out of the Middle East now. Not necessarily through the straight-up formulas, although some of it is. Surprising part of all of this is that there hasn't been a strong response from either the bond market or equity as of yet on the markets. But that's okay. We're early in the day, and one day does not make a trend. So we're watching the paired trade of falling oil prices and potentially falling treasury yields. That's what we're looking for. And if yields begin to fall, logically, the max pain yields fall. The max pain deficit talks slows, the max pain inflation fears slip, and the max pain hawkish Fed goes lower. This is what Tom Lee said this morning. He thinks those four things, the being at max now leads to stocks moving higher in the back half of the year.

One issue that needs to be brought up continually is AI and AI safety. OpenAI said it's not going to release its GPT 6.1 ASTRA model because of safety concerns. Competitor Anthropic, meanwhile, put out an IPO prospectus that reportedly indicates its model could pose a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity, that's in quotes.

It's a stark warning to a risk factor in an IPO prospectus. President Trump is holding a meeting with AI executives at the White House today that will focus on finding balance between AI safety and innovation. 75% of Americans pose data centers, including a majority of Republicans. What's interesting is that it's an election year, and that's a story this year. There is a plushy doll that is being sold for $99 that basically makes fun of AI data centers. I think that shows you where we are at this point in time. That we have built up, not in my backyard. And I guess to be honest, if I would be telling here is that I live in Marin County, and you just can't build anything in Marin County. Even when they try to get low cost housing, it turns into a major political fight for one of the wealthiest counties in the country.

We do enjoy our massages, we do enjoy our restaurants, and people who work at massage places and restaurants, they have to come from the East Bay, they have to come from way north to work in our county, because the housing is just so unaffordable here. But let's get back on task today and talk about OpenAI's enterprise business taking off.

Annualized revenue is now approaching $70 billion.

That's up more than 70% since the beginning of the third quarter enterprise revenue has more than doubled since July.

OpenAI has added more consumer revenue in third quarter than it added during all of 2025 So this isn't just a business buying AI, consumer monetization is accelerating as well. In just a few months, OpenAI has gone from reporting $40 billion in annualized revenue run rate up to $70 billion. The pace has accelerated dramatically. OpenAI and Anthropic are moving towards potential IPOs, which could finally give public market investors a much clearer look at revenue, margins and the enormous cost of running those AI models.

In interesting news today, Aura is postponing its IPO, citing market uncertainty. That doesn't make a lot of sense because the markets are close to all time highs. Five Fed officials are slated to give speeches today, which could give some color on what they're planning for future rate hikes, rate normalization, maybe rate cuts in 2027, their thoughts on inflation. So we're going to get Bowman. He's a FOMC voter, as is Barr speaking today. Goalsby is a non FOMC voter. Williams is giving a speech day and Waller, all giving a speech day throughout the day. I'll try to get into that a little bit, but not much as the show unfolds. So back to AI. Metta is debuting kind of an enterprise vibe today. They've launched Muse for Small Business with 200 million small businesses already on its platform. There's a natural fit there. Metta President Dina Powell McCormick is out making media rounds today, and we'll hear more about that. Apple faces a new threat for Metta's Muse. Metta's Muse shows how agentic artificial intelligence could pose a risk for Apple as people shift how they use the internet. This is according to Bank of America Securities Analyst. Metta Muse has already gained a lot of traction since launching earlier this month. With 2.5 million people downloading it in the first 2 weeks, Muse's capabilities are what make it so popular that agent can complete a variety of tasks for a user based on the simple prompt, including booking travel, making online purchases. The user never has to leave the chat bot to get those tasks done.