Thursday's Final Takeaways: Software Sees Strength, Memory Stocks Under Pressure

0:00Back to market on close, I'm Marley Caden here in Chicago alongside San Bodice at the New York Stock Exchange. Here's some final thoughts on the session. Today is certainly no shortage of things that we covered today. But oil, one of the top discussions, resuming it's surge today, topping $80 a barrel as the conflict with Iran continues. U.S. crude oil prices jumped to their highest level. We've seen since January of 2025 after Iran said it hit an oil tanker with a missile. Traffic in the state of Ramuz remains halted as Iran threatens to hit any ship attempting to pass. International benchmark rent crude futures traded higher as well at more than $84 a barrel. Oil prices have surged about 20% just this week. Retail gasoline prices have jumped nearly 27 cents since last week to 325 per gallon. That's according to AAA and pivoting here to some stocks that have been beaten down, but had a good day cloud and software stocks rallied led by octa after the identity software company posted better than expected earnings. The stock jumped more than 10% after

1:00reporting $0.90 a share in adjusted earnings on $761 million in revenue. Both of those top the streets estimates as demand tied to AI driven security continues to grow. That strength lifted the broader cloud and cyber security group. As the sector had its best day since last April companies like MongoDB in tap, sale point and Z scale are all moving higher as investors rotated back into the beaten down software names and AI resiliency narrative is starting to reemerge too. JPMorgan and UBS recently highlighting octa and Z scale are as names that will most likely withstand this AI related threat. Some of these fears we've been watching and find value from the rapidly developing technology. Those were two stories that stuck out to me, Sam. How about you? Yeah, I was looking at some of the international ETS which were under pressure today and that perhaps coming amid the dollar strength. We know that the greenback has pressured some of the appetite for international stocks. The EWY for instance, the South Korean ETF was down. It closed the session just over 6% despite the

2:02cost be out in South Korea over night rebounding 9%. So there are concerns around higher energy prices on some of these Asian economies in particular given their heavy dependence on that imported oil and gas. Now memory stocks were also under some pressure today. Other chip stocks were broadly down. There were a few other stories floating around some of which we've mentioned on the show, but there was an interesting story out of the information earlier today which talked about how Chinese tech giants like Alibaba bite-dance and Tencent are pivoting to domestic memory chip makers amid the global crunch. They reportedly want more standard chips for their data centers. That could be a big deal for China's local chip industry in a country with over 1 billion people using the internet. That's a lot of memory. The Chinese tech companies have reportedly been asking South Korean memory firms for more supply, but they're prioritizing allocating supplies to big US firms like Microsoft and Google. So I thought that was a really interesting takeaway. Mali, but heading into tomorrow, what are you going to be

3:04looking out for? It's such a fluid fluid situation I'm dealing with. Yeah, certainly. I mean, we'll just be looking to see how we open tomorrow, but also getting our February jobs reported at 30 Eastern. It's expected to show the labor market cooling, but still holding up. Economist forecasting about 60,000 jobs added that will be a sharp slowdown from January's 130,000 while the unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 4.3%. Wage growth still expected to run ahead of inflation, suggesting that consumers may continue to have spending power even as hiring slows. But all of that said this report could be a little bit noisy, Sam. 31,000 striking health care workers are temporarily going to be dragging down payrolls on the month. And we also had the severe winter storms. Those likely took some hits to the hiring in sectors like construction and leisure. So it's a potential noise there. But what will you be watching? Well, similar kind of things, I mean, obviously the weather may have impacted some of the retail sales. We're going to an update on the data out of January as to how things held up with

4:05consumption, because obviously this is a really good gauge of how things are going on that front. But you know, it feels like a lot of the data as we were speaking about with KG has been largely overshadowed by obviously the conflict in the Middle East. So you just wonder, depending on what we get with these numbers, I mean, how much credit the market gives to, you know, the strength of the economy right now, given some of the other concerns on the horizon. So I think it's going to be important to obviously watch the Asian session tonight as well, just to see if we see any follow through particularly with that green backer looking a little bit firmer today as well, given, of course, the action we saw earlier this week. Yeah, I mean, you bring up a great point. We're not even seeing some of this data in the top headlines right now because there's so many other headlines going on. But we'll be watching all of it for you tomorrow. But that's going to do it for us today on market on close.