Tesla’s pain seems to be Uber’s gain

Uber has been strong out of the gate in 2025, with Goldman Sachs adding the taxi company to its “conviction list” of stocks to own on Tuesday.

Matt Phillips

1/3/25 10:43AM

Ride-hailing app Uber is seeing its second straight day of strong gains, in early trading, with a catalyst apparently being the addition of the company to Goldman Sachs’ “conviction list” of stocks to own in 2025.

The Fly reports:

“The firm sees scaling end markets, rising profitability levels, and increased evidence of the platform cross-sell and ‘flywheel’ effects driving a sustained mix of growth, margins and free cash flow for Uber. Goldman has a Buy rating on the shares with a $96 price target.”

Uber is in an interesting spot. After an underwhelming 2024, in which its shares slipped 2% and badly underperformed the 23% gain in the S&P 500, it seems investors are taking a second look at the company, which could benefit from any eventual autonomous-driving revolution, while at the same time generating real and growing profits now. (That’s a key difference from Tesla’s still largely theoretical Cybercab business, which is supposedly a key driver of Tesla sentiment of late.)

In fact, recently there’s been a bit of a divergence between the performance of Uber and Tesla shares, with a more negative correlation between the two — that is, when one goes up, the other goes down — than we’ve ever seen before. That might suggest that some investors see less of a threat of tech takeover of Uber’s key business from Tesla as it struggles to turn its self-driving taxi ambitions into a reality.

Tom Jones1h

Texas Instruments slumps on disappointing Q4 revenue and profit outlook

Texas Instruments is down a little over 8% in premarket trading, as investors react to the weaker-than-expected fourth quarter guidance the company gave in its Q3 earnings yesterday.

The world’s biggest analog chipmaker said that Q4 revenue would come in between $4.22 billion and $4.58 billion, where analysts had expected $4.5 billion on average, per Bloomberg. TI’s profit forecast for the period also disappointed, after the company said that earnings would be in the region of $1.13 to $1.39 per share, compared to reported Wall Street estimates of $1.41.

While its actual third quarter numbers were broadly solid all told, with adjusted EPS at $1.59 meeting expectations, the Q4 outlook is a clear signal to some that recovery will likely be a little more sluggish than they expected. As the company’s CEO, Haviv Ilan, put it on an analyst call:

The overall semiconductor market recovery is continuing, though at a slower pace than prior upturns, likely related to the broader macroeconomic dynamics and overall uncertainty.

Texas Instruments counts more customers than anyone else in the semiconductor business and has a broader range of products, too, making it something of a bellwether for the industry more broadly, with its softer outlook weighing modestly on stocks such as Analog Devices, AMD, and Intel.

Matt Phillips14h

DraftKings moves to counter prediction market threat

DraftKings is holding onto its gains from after the bell yesterday, trading 6% higher in the pre-market, following news that it is buying Railbird in an effort to address the competitive threat from prediction markets that has weighed on its share price — and that of FanDuel parent Flutter Entertainment — for weeks.

The deal is then latest example of the increasing linkages and overlap between worlds of financial markets, gambling, and prediction markets.

Earlier this month, ICE — the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange and the ICE futures markets, among others — announced it would invest up to $2 billion in prediction markets company Polymarket.

And Robinhood shares have recently gotten a lift from its ongoing partnership with prediction market platform Kalshi, which has seen growing uptake of its events contracts that allow buyers to take positions on football games.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

By and large investor excitement over prediction markets — which has picked up since the start of football season — has seemed to come at the expense of Flutter and DraftKings, the two companies that dominate US sports betting.

Over the last three months through the end of regular trading on Wednesday, DraftKings and Flutter were down 23% and 18%, respectively, while the S&P 500 is up about 7%.

DraftKings acquires predictions platform Railbird

The deal is then latest example of the increasing linkages and overlap between worlds of financial markets, gambling, and prediction markets.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

Over the last three months through the end of regular trading on Wednesday, DraftKings and Flutter were down 23% and 18%, respectively, while the S&P 500 is up about 7%.

Max Knoblauch

15h

As Netflix drops on earnings miss, it’s investing just $0.40 into content for every $1 of revenue

Netflix shares fell in after-hours trading on Tuesday, following the release of the streamer’s third-quarter earnings report.