Hey Snackers,
Not content with generating money through digital assets, BitMine Immersion Technologies, the biggest ethereum treasury company, is also attempting to cash in on another largely incorporeal industry: the attention spans of young people. It’s making a $200 million equity investment into Beast Industries, the holding company for the various ventures of YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, who officially blew past 100 billion views last year.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 rose as TSMC’s blowout quarter, guidance, and capital expenditure plans lifted AI-adjacent stocks. The Russell 2000 rose 0.9%, outperforming the S&P 500 for the 10th consecutive session, the longest winning streak for small-caps since 1990.
🧠 Test yourself on our recent stories with the Snacks Seven Quiz:
How many hours of AI-generated music do most Gen Zers and millennials listen to per week?
Retail traders just poured the most money into the stock market since the post-tariff bottom
The retail traders are back in a major way, according to a blockbuster new report from JPMorgan Equity Strategy & Quantitative Research.
“This past week was exceptional for retail, sustaining the momentum from earlier this year,” JPMorgan strategist Arun Jain wrote of the period ended January 14.
“Retail investors bought $12.0B in cash equities — the largest weekly inflow since the post Liberation Day V-shape recovery,” he continued.
“ETF activity was steady and strong at $7.1B, but notably, retail purchases of single stocks surged to their highest level in nearly 9 months” at $4.9 billion.
Among those single stocks, the Magnificent 7 (excluding Apple) got a lot of love, accounting for a little more than one-third of inflows, led by Nvidia and Tesla. The iPhone maker, on the other hand, saw an exodus of about $185 million. Year to date, however, the Mag 7 is negative, lagging the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100.
The Takeaway
A rising tide lifts all ships, and tech stocks excluding Magnificent 7 stocks also enjoyed elevated buying activity. Per Jain, trends from the past five years suggest retail traders’ appetite for stocks should stay robust for about another month.
OpenAI’s Sora 2 started off scorching hot, but it’s cooled off quickly
OpenAI’s stand-alone app for the AI video generator Sora 2 launched on iOS in late September. Despite initially requiring an invite to sign up, it was an instant success, reaching No. 1 overall on the iOS App Store’s charts after just four days. A day later, it cracked 1 million total downloads, which was faster than ChatGPT, and the early engagement on its content was stratospheric.
Sora was designed to interface seamlessly with social media. Users could easily turn videos generated by Sora into Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikToks, Snaps, and more.
Each repost would be free publicity for Sora, even if the views and engagement went to its rivals. OpenAI seemed to think it could generate the same AI content wave for video that it had unleashed for text and images.
Accounts like @bestsoravids on Instagram and Epic Rankz on YouTube have recorded millions of views, likes, and comments on their Sora reposts.
But all of their most successful posts happened in the week or two after the app’s launch, at the height of its visibility. In the first half of December, for example, only 20 videos with #sora or #sora2 in the hashtags received 1 million views or more on YouTube. Other popular Sora reposting accounts, like @bestsoravids, stopped uploading videos entirely after just a few weeks.
The other metric we have for measuring the health of Sora is downloads of the app itself. Those have fallen off — way off, as you can see.
The Takeaway
It’s possible that Sora wasn’t a social media play at all, but rather a shrewd bit of advertising to entice a partner for something greater than the title of “the next TikTok” — OpenAI and Disney announced in December that they were partnering on a deal to let Sora users have exclusive access to Disney AI inside the video-generating app. It’s an interesting partnership for sure, but one we worry could become very unmagical, to say the least.
The Best Thing We Read Today
For better or worse, Wikipedia’s future will depend on AI
Yesterday was Wikipedia Day for those who celebrate, and marked 25 years since cofounder Jimmy Wales first wrote “Hello, World!” onto a blank web page that would quickly become one of the world’s most popular websites. But the site may be having its own quarter-life crisis, as the past 20 months have seen total page views slump behind figures recorded for the year prior — coinciding, perhaps not so coincidentally, with the dizzying rise of AI.
Snacks Shots
Snacks Shots
🏈 AFC: The Denver Broncos are narrow 52% favorites over the Buffalo Bills for their Saturday matchup, while Sunday’s Texans-Patriots game is considered by markets* to be a little more lopsided, with New England priced in at a 62% chance of victory.
🏈 NFC: Saturday’s prime-time matchup between divisional archrivals the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers looks to be breaking toward Seattle, which the market gives a 74% chance of victory. Sunday night’s game between the Chicago Bears and Los Angeles Rams is currently breaking in favor of the Rams, which have a 64% chance of winning, according to traders.
*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
What Else We're Snackin'
Spotify is increasing subscription prices… again
X says it’s stopping Grok from putting real people in bikinis… at least on X
The ACA enrollment deadline passed for most… and Congress is still at an impasse
Everyone’s got a theory on when bitcoin will pass $100,000 again… but it went down on Thursday
Snack Fact Of The Day
Cryptocurrency scammers stole $17 billion last year.
Today's Events
Earnings expected from PNC, State Street, M&T Bank, and Regions Financial