00:00:00 Speaker A
Time to take a look at some of today’s trading tickers. We got our eye on Alphabet, Casey’s General Store, and Flutter all seeing their share prices rise today. We’ll start off with Alphabet. It is seeing increases after reportedly striking a deal with OpenAI. This cloud deal coming despite OpenAI threatening Google’s core internet search advertising business. It marked yet another deal that the artificial intelligence company has struck with major software and technology players. This is according to Reuters, by the way, that this is happening here. Um, and it is interesting to see this happening. It isn’t necessarily what you would expect.
00:00:47 Speaker B
So, Colin Sebastian, very smart analyst over at Baird, put out a note on this, gave his thoughts, called this a high profile win for Google Cloud, likes this, says it also diversifies a key Microsoft partner away from that rival Azure platform, and by telling his clients, listen, it’s unlikely near term due to the obvious rivalry and AI answers. But a relationship between Google and OpenAI could eventually open the door to other strategic collaborations over time in his view.
00:01:31 Speaker A
Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating to see all of the back and forth that we’re seeing amongst, um, the various AI providers. I, I would mention, you know, those Alphabet shares, uh, we talked earlier in the day about how the MAG 7 has not recovered all the way this year, and indeed, Alphabet is still down nearly 6% so far this year. So they’ve come back from the lows, but they haven’t gotten back into positive for the year.
00:02:15 Speaker B
All right, next up, let’s talk about Casey’s General Stores, which is seeing record highs after announcing a record-breaking fiscal year for that company. Uh, so fourth quarter earnings beat reports, during strong fuel margin, growing market share. I do see RBC analyst site is talking about the company’s unique positioning in lower cost geographies and small markets.
00:02:53 Speaker A
And guess what? Our Brooke DePalma today had the chance to chat with the CEO, Darren Rebelez. Um, and he said what was behind this? It’s just doing what we’ve always done pretty well, but just doing it at a higher level and doing it very consistently. He said, when you look at our growth pillars that we set out our strategic plan a few years ago, we said, first we’re going to accelerate our prepared foods business, the crown jewel of which is pizza. So pizza, he points out, is a big driver for them. He said, aside from prepared foods, the other goals were to accelerate the store growth, so they’ve opened more stores, and he also said is to run the business more efficiently. So as they grow, they’re trying to get more leverage out of the scale of the company.
00:04:07 Speaker B
Stock, my around 20, up around 25% this year. It’s at a record. Also around 50% of the past four months, and most analysts think it’s going to move higher from here.
00:04:26 Speaker A
Yeah, a next, uh, why behind the high candidate, perhaps. Finally, we’re watching shares of Flutter also seeing gains after an announcement of 50-cent fee on all sports bets made in Illinois. It’s, of course, the parent company of FanDuel saying that due to that recent Illinois law taxing all sports bets, they’ll be instituting a fee to offset the costs to the company. Uh, the leading online sports betting and gaming operator, uh, seeing the stock rise to its highest since February 28th. We’re also watching DraftKings, uh, which said it is trying to figure out, it anticipates taking action on this as well.
00:05:24 Speaker B
Yeah, it’s just this week. I saw MoffettNathanson, the team over there published a note on Flutter, and they were talking about sort of the different risks for the company, and they did include on the regulatory front these bills, several bills proposed at the state level to raise the tax rate on both online sports betting and iGaming. But ultimately, actually, they did reiterate the buy on this one. They said it’s just a, in a unique position, they thought, to take growing share in the online gaming market.
00:06:07 Speaker A
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like investors are worried about these transaction fees.
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