Brad Smith and Madison Mills take a closer look at some of today's trending tickers.

Pony AI (PONY) and Tencent (TCEHY) announce a partnership on robotaxis.

Alphabet-owned (GOOG, GOOGL) Waymo reported more than 250,000 paid rides a week.

Meta Platforms (META) cut jobs in its Reality Labs division.

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

Now time for some of today's trending tickers. We're watching Pony AI, Alphabets Waymo and meta. First up, Chinese startup Pony AI is teaming up with Tencent to develop self-driving technology. The companies will integrate Pony AI's ridehailing services into Tencent's extremely popular WeChat app and Tencent maps here. We're taking a look at Pony AI. It's up by about 10, 11% on this news with the strategic partnership they're calling it to advance autonomous driving technology and Robo taxi commercial deployment there.

00:35 Speaker B

Yeah, a huge move to the upside. That stock up right now nearly 11%, but in other Robo taxi news, Alphabets Waymo did report over 250,000 paid Robo taxi rides per week in the United States. That's up from 200,000 in February, which was just before the company expanded in San Francisco and opened up in Austin, Texas. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says Waymo is building partnerships with Uber and other automakers to help expand its footprint even further. You can see those shares up over 2%, of course, off the back of those results, but interesting to see that amount of growth in Waymo considering that it seems like the growth pace is quickening at this point, given the fact that they were able to add on those additional 50,000 riders just over the course of about a month here.

01:29 Speaker A

Yeah, so they're now safely serving and on the earnings call talking about safely serving over a quarter of a million paid passenger trips each week. That is actually up five times, five X from a year ago.

01:47 Speaker B

Yeah.

01:48 Speaker A

Also here finally meta is laying off more than 100 workers in its reality labs unit. That was first reported by the Verge. These cuts will impact the team that creates content for the company's Oculus VR headsets. And we're taking a look at shares of meta here. They're still fractionally higher on the day, especially as we're kind of waiting for even more of those tech results to come forward next week. It'll be interesting to see if we see some more head count moderation unfortunately, um, especially going into some of the employment data that's also coming forward on the econ side next week.

02:26 Speaker B

I think it's interesting that we're not seeing Alphabet results leading to a broader lift in some of the big tech names. Obviously, the macro environment and uncertainty weigh on stocks more broadly today, but I thought that if Alphabet was going to be a lift to any other name, we were talking earlier that meta might be one of those beneficiaries because the ad revenue stories are relatively similar between the two.

02:54 Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah, I was taking a look at it at the open and meta was up. I think it was up by about 2% at the open. So it's moved off of some of the early session highs, but still holding on to some fractional gains right now. And you're absolutely right, as we were talking about it earlier, it really comes back to how digital advertisers are thinking about where they want to place some of those marketing dollars. Uh, and this essentially has been for a long time. The dupoly has been shaken a little bit, but for meta and Alphabet or Google, they really have been that digital advertising dupoly for many, many years. It's getting shaken up a little bit.

03:36 Speaker B

Yeah. Absolutely. It's getting shaken up. I mean, the uncertainty is of course the word of the day and you can scan the QR code to track the best and worst performing stocks with Yahoo finances trending tickers page.  Related Videos

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