Jobs, Car Deliveries, Tech Gets Trounced and More!

Vonetta Logan's weekly recap of the big business, news, markets, political, cultural and viral trending stories featured this week on Daily Dose

What’s up tastynation! Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekly Dose! Each week, I recap the top stories that I covered on Daily Dose. If you missed any eps of Daily Dose you can catch up on them here. 

Let’s get to this week’s recap. 

Happy New Year! I don’t care what Larry David says, I’m going to keep wishing people Happy New Year at least until Valentine’s Day because I’m an introvert who hates making small talk and this is a verbal lay-up. Are you ready for the first Weekly Dose of the year? Me either, but I tried faking cramps to get out of writing this, but my editor said no dice. Dammit. 

It’s time for the situation … the employment situation 

We are starting the new year off with lots of economic news and reports. It’s good for the data girlies as well as for the traders who love the volatility that sometimes comes with a binary announcement.

Starting off the short week, we got the Fed minutes, which the central bank released on Wednesday. Oh man, we do love a mercurial Fed. It seems the Fed hasn’t ruled out rate hikes in 2024. Good to know that even though it's a new year the Fed is still in equivocation mode from 2023. Federal Reserve officials said at its most recent meeting in mid-December that it was possible the economy could evolve in a manner that would make further rate hikes appropriate. Imagine your boss being like “It’s possible that your job could evolve in a manner where a raise might be appropriate.”

Also, on Wednesday we got the JOLTS report. Which will forever and always remind me of this 80s classic. U.S. job openings fell to nearly a three-year low in November, as the labor market gradually cools. Finally on Friday, the big daddy report of them all got dropped: The Employment Situation Summary (such a fire title) Basically the labor market in 2023 was even better than anyone thought, and lots of people already thought it was pretty damned great. Friday’s report could challenge the market narrative of a substantially easier Fed. Great news all around, except for this guy who thinks everyone is too damn happy. 

You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! 

The first week of the year was a great time for automakers to show off their end-of-the-year delivery panache.

It was a good news/bad news situation for the preeminent EV manufacturer, Tesla (TSLA). Tesla delivered 1.8 million vehicles in 2023. The new numbers represent delivery growth of 38% year over year and production growth of 35% year over year.

But the bad news is that the guy she told you “not to worry about,” BYD, is now the global leader in EV vehicles. BYD (BYDDY) a Chinese automaker, delivered 526,409 cars in the fourth quarter of 2023, easily surpassing Tesla's 484,507.

But in a weird bright spot for Tesla, one of its Cybertrucks was in a head-on collision with a Toyota Corolla and the crash photos are astounding. There looks to be relatively little damage to Tesla’s steel-reinforced behemoth, meanwhile the Corolla was yeeted into outer space and later seen orbiting Mercury.

Tesla’s domestic EV rival Rivian (RIVN) didn’t fare as well this week. Shares of Rivian fell 10% earlier in the week when the company released its delivery numbers. The company said it delivered 13,972 vehicles from October through December, down 10.2% from the third quarter of 2023 but in line with Wall Street’s expectations.

General Motors (GM), however, did see a modest bounce in its stock this week as the company said its 2023 deliveries were the company’s best since 2019. General Motors’ U.S. vehicle sales increased 14.1% last year to represent the automaker’s best year since 2019. Basically, a crap ton of people bought Buicks and I guess they’re okay with never having sex again.

Ford (F), not to be left out, weirdly announced this week that the price for its Lightning F150 pickup truck would be going up … and down. Cool marketing message, Ford! 

Tech gets trounced 

The first week of the year was not kind to tech stocks. The Nasdaq (QQQ) finally managed to tick into the positive range on Friday, but the start of the week was brutal.

Kicking things off, Xerox (XRX) announced the first massive layoffs of the year. Announcing a cut to 15% of its workforce.

From there, things worsened as Apple (AAPL) got downgraded by Barclays because of weak cell-phone demand. Apple’s stock ticked down 4% on the downgrade. If I were Apple, I’d brick every single one of those analysts' phones and I would wipe their iCloud accounts (#staypetty). But in positive Apple news, if for some inexplicable reason you wanted to turn your pricey iPhone into a 2000s era Blackberry now you can!

Meanwhile, Nvidia (NVDA) announced it would tweak some of its chips to be China compliant. Sadly though, chip stocks are not having a great start to the year.

Google, a unit of Alphabet (GOOGL) announced the start of its Great Cookie Purge. Google just disabled cookies for 1% or 30 million of its users much to the chagrin of marketing departments everywhere.

Good news for those of us who no longer want to be haunted by the purchase of a hemorrhoid pillow from 2009.

In other news, the Department of Justice reminded Big Tech that those companies are still in federal crosshairs for 2024, so don’t get too comfortable on your private islands, I guess. Investors might be sour on the Magnificent 7 but are sweet on the bonds the companies are issuing.

Another bright spot, Peloton (PTON) announced a partnership with TikTok this week and that brought the stock some much-needed gains. 

Random chicanery

These were my favorite funny stories of the week:

• Apparently, people want human dog beds. 
• Disney’s (DIS) Mickey enters his slasher era 
• two million women, one cup 
• GE releases indoor smoker 

Will Tom Eat It? A Chicago hot dog gets a glow up. 

That’s it for this week, see ya next week! 

Vonetta Logan has more than a decade of markets experience and has been a trader for five years. She is an on-air personality, creative writer and news correspondent at tastylive. Vonetta  appears Monday-Friday on Daily Dose and contributes to Luckbox Magazine. @vonettalogan

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