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Your Evening Briefing

December 24, 2025

The S&P 500 closes at a record high for the 39th time in 2025

In today’s shortened trading session, the S&P 500 closed at a record high for the 39th time in 2025, the benchmark index’s first Christmas Eve closing high since 2013. While volumes were thin, the rally was broad-based, with all sector ETFs rising except for energy. The Nasdaq 100 and Russell 2000 also climbed higher.

Stocks that moved higher:

  • Nike rose as Apple CEO (and Nike board member) Tim Cook bought $2.95 million of the sneaker company's stock
  • Micron jumped after South Korean media reported that its biggest competitors are raising selling prices for a line of high-bandwidth memory chips, even though these will soon no longer be the most cutting-edge offerings available.
  • Dynavax, a publicly traded vaccines company with a hepatitis B vaccine, soared after entering into an agreement to be acquired by Sanofi for $2.2 billion in cash.

Stocks that moved lower:

  • Intel dropped on a report that Nvidia stopped testing the 18A chip production process used by the chip manufacturer.

Report: OpenAI has started mocking up what ads in ChatGPT could look like

It’s only a matter of time before there are ads in AI chatbots. 

Read more.

For American companies building AI today, it is basically a free-for-all, a self-regulation zone with zero federal restrictions.

But for Chinese AI companies, the Chinese Communist Party exerts strict control over what models get released, and what questions they cannot answer.

A report in the Wall Street Journal details the rigorous tests that AI models are subjected to before being released on the global stage to compete with Western AI models.

AI models must answer 2,000 questions that are frequently updated, and achieve a 95% refusal rate for queries related to forbidden topics, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or human rights violations, according to the report. Read more. 

  • Opendoor acquires HomeBuyer.com in bid to boost home flipping and mortgage opportunities
    Some vertical integration for the online real estate company.
  • NHTSA investigates Tesla Model 3 over concerns mechanical door release is “not readily accessible or easily identifiable”
    This is separate from the probe this fall over Model Y electronic door handles becoming inoperable from the outside. 
 

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