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Highlights this week include Tesla's (TSLA) expected unveiling of its self-driving robotaxi at a Thursday event as well as the release of earnings reports from JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Wells Fargo (WFC) on Friday.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) for September comes as investors monitor inflation following the Federal Reserve’s recent interest rate cut. Minutes for the September Federal Reserve meeting will also provide insight into the central bank’s recent actions, while several Fed officials are scheduled to deliver remarks throughout the week. 

Data on wholesale inflation, consumer credit, and the federal trade deficit are also on the calendar.

Tesla is expected to introduce its self-driving “robotaxi” at a Thursday event, where the company could provide more details about several of its products. 

After delaying the highly anticipated event from August, Tesla will likely show off the driverless vehicle, provide details on its costs, and possibly demonstrate the ride-sharing app used to hail the vehicle that might be called a “Cybercab,” analysts said. 

In addition to the robotaxi, Tesla could also provide updates on its Optimus Bot humanoid robot, self-driving software, and a low-cost version of its electric vehicle (EV). 

Also on Thursday, chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices will provide updates for its artificial intelligence (AI) products as it hosts its “Advancing AI” event, where its chief executive officer, Lisa Su, will deliver remarks.  

Investors get a look at the performance of the financial services industry of late as several big banks will report 2024 third-quarter earnings on Friday. 

Leading the way is JPMorgan Chase, reporting after its prior-quarter results beat analyst expectations on strong revenue from its investment banking services.  Earnings for the country’s largest bank come after an executive last month lowered expectations for net interest income following the Federal Reserve’s move to lower interest rates.

Wells Fargo reported a decline in net interest income in its second-quarter report, despite its results coming in ahead of analyst projections. BlackRock will deliver earnings after it reported a record $10.6 trillion in assets under management (AUM) in the prior quarter.

Delta Air Lines’ report on Thursday will offer insight into the air carrier’s performance during the summer travel season, while soda maker PepsiCo will deliver its financials after scaling back its growth outlook amid mixed results in its previous quarter. 

Market watchers will get a look at whether inflation continued to decline in September with the Thursday release of CPI. With recent data showing that price increases continue to slow, market participants are looking to see if inflation continues to trend down toward the Federal Reserve’s target. 

Easing price pressures prompted the Fed to reduce its key federal funds rate in September, which influences borrowing costs across the economy. Updated inflation data could send signals about the next moves for the central bank.

Throughout the week, investors will have an opportunity to hear individual Fed officials’ thoughts on interest rates and the economy. Federal Reserve Gov. Michelle Bowman’s remarks on Friday will come after the inflation report, while New York Fed President John Williams, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, and St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem are also on the week's speaking calendar. 

The Fed will also release the minutes from its Sept. 17-18 meeting on Wednesday, providing another look at how monetary officials are viewing the current economy.

Markets could move on other economic data releases this week, including consumer credit on Monday, jobless claims on Thursday, consumer sentiment and wholesale inflation figures from the producer price index (PPI) report on Friday.

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Netflix Inc. (NFLX) is one of the world's leading subscription streaming entertainment services. The company had 277.65 million paid streaming memberships globally as of Q2 2024. Members can stream TV series, documentaries, and feature films in a variety of genres and languages. Netflix also offers a subscription DVD-by-mail service to customers residing in the U.S.

The top shareholders of Netflix are Vanguard Group Inc, BlackRock Inc (BLK), FMR, LLC, Reed Hastings, Jay Hoag, David Hyman, and Ted Sarandos.

Netflix's twelve-month trailing net income and revenue were $7.6 billion and $36.3 billion as of October 2024, respectively and it's market cap was 308.9 billion.

This list reflects direct ownership. All information was current as of Netflix's April 2024 Proxy Statement and the holders' latest Form 4 filings. Many of the top shareholders moved their holdings to privately owned companies or trusts after receiving restricted stock units after a vesting period ended in April 2024.

The term "insider" refers to people in senior management positions and members of the board of directors, as well as people or entities that own more than 10% of the company's stock. It has nothing to do with insider trading in this context.

Reed Hastings owned 5,426,708 shares as of the April Proxy Statement but listed 2,154,241 Netflix shares in a family trust in which he is the trustee.

Hastings is Netflix's chairman and one of its co-founders. Hastings created Netflix with Marc Randolph in 1997 as a rent-by-mail movie service, which grew into the giant streaming platform it is today.

David Hyman owned 244,781 shares as of the April Proxy Statement, but listed 31,610 Netflix shares as of October 2024.

Hyman has served as the company's General Counsel and Secretary since 2002 and is responsible for both legal affairs and public policy.

Ted Sarados owned 673,889 shares as of the April Proxy Statement but listed 1,278 as of October 2024.

Ted Saranos was the co-CEO of Netflix until 2023 and was responsible for all content operations.

Jay Hoag owned a total of 555,345 shares as of the April Proxy Statement but listed zero Netflix shares as of October 2024.

Hoag has served as a Netflix director since 1995 and is chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee. He's also a founding general partner of Technology Crossover Ventures, a venture capital firm. Hoag serves on the board of directors of TripAdvisor, Inc and Zillow Group, Inc as well

Institutional investors hold the majority of Netflix's shares at 85.61% of total shares outstanding as of June 30, 2024.

Vanguard Group owned 37.01 million shares of Netflix representing 8.6% of total shares outstanding as of June 30, 2024.

The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with about $9.1 trillion in global assets under management (AUM) at the end of June, 2024. The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) is one of the company's largest exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with about $472 billion in AUM in 2024. Netflix makes up 0.64% of VOO's holdings.

BlackRock owned 31.6 million shares of Netflix representing 7.36% of total shares outstanding as of June 30, 2024.

The company is primarily a mutual fund and ETF management company with approximately $10.47 trillion in global AUM. The iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) is among one of BlackRock's largest ETFs with approximately $535.43 billion in AUM in October 2024. Netflix represents 0.63% of IVV's holdings.

FMR, LLC, the parent organization of Fidelity Investments, held 21.23 million Netflix shares as of June 30, 2024.

Fidelity is one of the largest investment advisors in the U.S. It offers a wide range of financial services including brokerage services and investment funds. Total assets under administration were valued at $5.3 trillion as of March 31, 2024.

As part of our effort to improve the awareness of the importance of diversity in companies, we offer investors a glimpse into the transparency of more than just who are the shareholders at Netflix. We highlight the company's commitment to diversity, inclusiveness, and social responsibility as a whole.

Find out how Netflix reports the diversity of its management and workforce. The ✔ shows if Netflix discloses its data about the diversity of its board of directors, C-Suite, general management, and employees overall across a variety of markets.

Netflix's biggest shareholders are institutions such as Vanguard, Blackrock, and FMR.

Netflix is owned by its majority shareholders, like Reed Hastings, David Hyman, and Ted Sarandos.

Many institutions and individuals hold Netflix stock, but the biggest holders are insiders and institutions.

Netflix is a giant in the subscription streaming entertainment services industry with some notable original content series as well as TV series, documentaries, and feature films in various genres. Most of its stock is held by institutional shareholders such as Vanguard, BlackRock, and FMR, LLC.

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Homeowners are finally ready to list their homes, which could relieve some of the pressure weighing on the housing market.

According to a new report by Realtor.com, 11.6% more homes were newly listed in September than a year earlier, a three-year high. The new listings contributed to the highest number of active listings since April 2020. Buyers, meanwhile, toured more homes last month.

As mortgage rates fall from record highs, more homeowners are encouraged to list their homes. Homeowners who had bought or refinanced during ultra-low mortgage rates were hesitant to list their homes and give up their rates. This decreased home inventory and pushed home prices far higher than wages.

“Falling rates are an incentive for homeowners to sell because they know demand is coming back, and they feel less locked in by their relatively low rate,” said Max Shadle, a Redfin real estate agent in Phoenix, Ariz.

During the pandemic, the Federal Reserve dropped its federal funds rate to near zero in an effort to revive the economy and avoid a recession. The Fed’s rates influence mortgage rates, which fell to record lows in 2021, according to Freddie Mac. Homeowners took advantage of low mortgage rates to buy houses or refinance mortgages during that time.

As inflation began to flare up in 2021, the Fed lifted its fed funds rate to a 23-year high. Since mortgage rates typically follow the trajectory of interest rates, the Fed’s efforts to tame inflation also raised mortgage rates.

However, data from Freddie Mac showed that mortgage rates hit a two-year low a week after the Fed’s interest rate cut in September. At almost two percentage points lower than the peak from last October, more homeowners are willing to let go of their pandemic-era mortgage rates.

According to a Redfin report this week, homeowners listed 4.3% more houses the week after the Fed's decision.

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By fighting off pathogens, the specialized cells of our immune systems help to keep us healthy and free of infectious diseases. Immunotherapies teach those same cells to recognize and destroy cancer. The drugs have been remarkably successful in treating melanoma — a type of skin cancer — as well as cancers of the lung, bladder, kidneys, and blood. Just one form of immunotherapy, a type of cancer vaccine, is currently approved for prostate cancer.

A new approach

Researchers at City of Hope Hospital in Duarte, California, are now reporting promising results with a different method called CAR-T cell therapy. It involves engineering immune cells called T cells after they've been obtained from a patient's own body. The engineered cells are studded with proteins called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) that bind to specific molecular targets (antigens) on cancer cells.

Upon being returned to the body, the engineered CAR-T cells kill tumor cells expressing their target antigen. CAR-T cell treatments are currently approved only for blood cancers. The treatments can be highly effective against these diseases, but they also have challenging side effects, including in some cases a widespread inflammatory reaction known as cytokine release syndrome.

During their investigation, the researchers engineered CAR-T cells that bind specifically to a protein called prostate stem cell antigen (PSCA). PSCA is preferentially expressed at high levels in prostate tumors, particularly during advanced disease stages and after the cancer has spread to the bones.

The investigators treated 14 patients, all of them diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer that was no longer responding to hormonal therapy. Each patient was treated with 100 million CAR-T cells either with or without an additional treatment used to prevent a patient's other T cells from interfering in the anticancer attack. This other treatment is called lymphodepletion.

What the study showed

Results were encouraging: In four patients, levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) — which drop when prostate tumors shrink — declined by 30% or more. One patient had a greater than 90% decline in PSA during the 28-day monitoring period, as well as shrinking cancer in his bones and soft tissue. That positive response lasted for eight months. Five patients had mild cytokine release syndrome that was effectively treated, and two patients experienced cystitis, which is irritation of the bladder.

Unfortunately, the CAR-T cells did not persist at high levels beyond the monitoring period, and that could limit the treatment's effectiveness. The team plans to explore strategies to extend CAR-T-benefits in upcoming research.

Prostate cancer tends to be immunologically "cold," meaning that it's well hidden from the immune system. Most immunotherapies have therefore met with limited success against prostate cancer. But CAR-T offers a more powerful approach to overcoming tumor defenses, according to Dr. Tanya Dorff, a medical oncologist at City of Hope and the study's first author.

Observations

Dr. David Einstein, a medical oncologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, points out that lymphodepletion can leave some patients vulnerable to infections. Given the added risk of cytokine release syndrome, CAR-T cell therapy will likely be suitable "only for a selected group of patients," he says.

"This is a different and more intensive treatment experience than hormonal therapy and even chemotherapy," he says. Still, he says, the results suggest that CAR-T therapy may emerge as an additional immunotherapeutic option for men with prostate cancer.

"This research is very encouraging," says Dr. Marc Garnick, the Gorman Brothers Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and editor in chief of the Harvard Medical School Guide to Prostate Diseases. "It represents the beginning of a completely novel method to eliminate cancer cells which have spread beyond the prostate gland, independent of the traditional methods for prostate cancer elimination that include hormone therapy, chemotherapy, and various methods of radiation therapy.

"Because the CAR-T program uses a novel and exciting way of eliminating cancer cells, more work will be needed to help understand both the mechanism by which this occurs, and as Dr. Einstein emphasizes, methods to lessen the side effects associated with this new technology."

Source: Harvard Health Publishing

Major U.S. equities indexes moved higher on the final trading day of the week after the release of strong labor market data. The S&P 500 added 0.9% on Friday, while the Nasdaq jumped 1.2%, and the Dow gained 0.8%. All three indexes ended posted moderate gains for the week.

U.S. employers added 254,000 jobs in September, marking the quickest pace of hiring since March and blowing past economists' forecasts. The indication of resilience in the jobs market could lower the likelihood of another jumbo rate cut by the Federal Reserve.

Shares of lithium producers moved higher following reports that British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto (RIO) might be considering an acquisition in the lithium industry. Although Rio Tinto is well known for its copper, iron ore, and diamond business, the company produces lithium and is reportedly looking to expand, even as prices for the metal have been pressured by soft electric vehicle (EV) demand. Shares of Albemarle (ALB), the world's largest lithium producer, surged 8.2% on Friday, marking the top performance in the S&P 500.

United Airlines (UAL) shares gained 6.5% following reports that low-cost rival Spirit Airlines (SAVE) is considering a bankruptcy filing in the wake of its failed merger with JetBlue Airways (JBLU). Spirit is also said to be exploring options to restructure its balance sheet as it faces billions of dollars in debt. Spirit shares plummeted 24.6% on Friday, while JetBlue shares soared 14.2%.

Deckers Outdoor (DECK) shares added 6.4% on the day. The parent company of the Ugg, Hoka, and Teva footwear brands is a relatively fresh addition to the S&P 500, having joined the benchmark index in March. More recently, Deckers Outdoor completed a six-for-one stock split in September. Following the split, Baird analysts highlighted Deckers stock for its "best-in-class growth."

Extra Space Storage (EXR) shares dropped 3.9%, the biggest loss of any S&P 500 stock on Friday. The downtick for the self-storage real estate investment trust (REIT) came after regulatory filings revealed CEO Joseph D. Margolis sold around $1.34 million worth of shares in the company. Investors often consider significant sales by company insiders as a potential warning signal.

Shares of credit reporting agency Equifax (EFX) sank 3.4%. Earlier this week, UBS initiated coverage on Equifax stock with a "buy" rating, asserting that the company could be positioned to benefit from an expected normalization in the mortgage market. However, there could be less certainty around a mortgage recovery after today's jobs report, which raised questions about the likely pace of interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.

Concerns about Fed rate cuts and the trajectory of mortgage rates weighed on companies in the homebuilding industry. Shares of homebuilders D.R. Horton (DHI) fell 2.9%, while shares of both Lennar (LEN) and PulteGroup (PHM) were down 2.5%.

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Governor Dikko Radda of Katsina State has launched the distribution of 21,924 bags of rice as part of the Federal Government’s food security programme.

The governor while launching the program at the Katsina People’s Square on Sunday, revealed that the aim was to alleviate the current economic hardship faced by the citizens.

According to him, the programme targets various segments of the population mostly the vulnerable women and youth groups at various ward and local government levels where a total of 6,652 polling units will be covered. Katsina State is in the North-West region of Nigeria.

He recalled that this is the second time, the Federal Government has distributed palliatives to Katsina State after the President recently procured fertilizer for farmers in the State to use for both wet and dry season farming. Governor Radda explained that Katsina State in this year’s farming season recorded a significant reduction in insecurity compared with last year when 95 percent of farmlands he said have been successfully cultivated.

“The State Government has also awarded N30 billion contracts to boost the agricultural sector of the State. This is what we have been doing to make life easier for the masses,” he stated.

On his part, the Minister of Budget and Economic Planning Atiku Bagudu maintained that the palliative measure aligns with President Bola Tinubu’s Renewed Hope agenda. He therefore commended the governor for his efforts in supporting vulnerable populations during these challenging times.

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