Ford bets big on $30K electric truck

0:00Welcome to Seeking Alphas Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news and analysis. Good afternoon, today is Thursday, September 3rd, and I'm your host, Kim Kahn. Our top story so far, Ford aims to sell more than 100,000 units of its new electric truck in the first year of production, the Wall Street Journal reported. The starting price for the truck, called the Ford FAMM, will be nearly $30,000. Ford will begin taking customer orders early next year. Besides Tesla, no other automakers sold 100,000 units of a single EV model in the US in a year. Tesla sold about 357,000 Model Y SUVs in 2025, and more than 190,000 Model 3 sedans. Ford executives say Fathom's price tag, which is similar to mainstream sedans and SUVs, along with its design, will help drive sales. Fathom trucks will include Apple Maps built into their navigation system, and Ford's Blue Crew's hands-free driving system. The Fathom will also have more passenger space than the best-selling Toyota RAV4 SUV.

1:02Among active stocks, after a week of speculation, Nvidia sealed the deal for hugging face, agreeing to pay $12.9 billion for the AI platform. Cugging face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem, Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong said. Snowflake is rallying more than 20% after the data warehousing company reported Q2 results and guidance that taught forecasts. Snowflake said it expects product revenue of between 1.588 billion and 1.593 billion above the 1.51 billion estimate. Adjusting operated margin is forecast of 15.5%. CNN is higher after the optical networking company reported better than expected results in guidance. CEO Gary Smith said AI continues to drive compounding waves of network investment. And Campbell's is slumping after missing revenue estimates for Q4, the company said top line softness and inflation driven margin headwinds were factors. Campbell's also cut its quarterly dividend to 25 cents per share from 39 cents. In other news of note, New York City, the largest US school district,

2:04is imposing a one-year moratorium on students using generative artificial intelligence in public elementary and middle schools. The policy which will take effect in the 2026 27th school year and impact nearly 600,000 public school students bars AI use for students in 2K through 8th grade. This includes all software that uses student facing generative AI. Companion chatbots will be banned across all grades. And Wal-Mart said it is expanding its restaurant delivery business through a collaboration with Inspire Brands, a global multi-brand restaurant company whose portfolio includes Duncan, Arby's, Baskin Robbins, Jimmy John's, and Sonic. Wal-Mart continues to expand the restaurants available through its app, including those located beyond its stores. Duncan will launch first through its 150 in-store locations, with plans to expand to the majority of its 10,000 locations nationwide. And in the Wall Street Research Corner, society general strategist Manish Cabra says investors may want to buy any equity weakness triggered by a renewed Federal Reserve hiking cycle.

3:04Sock Jen has shifted its house view in a hawkish direction and now expects the Fed to deliver three rate hikes starting in September. Fed funds futures price in a 60% chance of a September hike. History suggests stocks initially struggle when the Fed resumes raising rates been cycle, with the SMP 500 typically going through a 1-3 month digestion phase, Cabra said. However, the benchmark has historically gone on to reach new highs within 6 months if the yield curve doesn't invert. That's all for today's Wall Street Lunch. Look for links for stories in the Shownout section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at SeekingOffa.com slash WSB. And for a wealth of coverage on stocks and ETFs, go to SeekingOffa.com slash subscriptions.