Musk’s xAI unveils Grok-3, plus is the bull market due for a pause?: Morning Brief 2/18/25

Kicking off this shortened trading week, Seana Smith and Brad Smith break down the day’s top market stories while interviewing Wall Street experts on the Morning Brief.
Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, debuted its new Grok-3 chatbot, claimed to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Gemini, and DeepSeek’s V3 model. In a recent back and forth between Musk and fellow OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI’s board rejected Musk’s bid of $97.4 billion for the company’s non-profit parent last week.
Longview Economics global economist and chief market strategist Chris Watling weighs in on how much further the bull market run for US equities (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) has to go.
Also, Wall Street is feeling bullish as Bank of America’s global fund manager survey pointing to cash levels having fallen to a 15-year low.
Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Josh Schafer joins Morning Brief to discuss the latest Bank of America survey, highlighting that fund managers are moving away from the crowded Magnificent Seven trade — the group of tech stocks comprised of Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Apple (AAPL), Nvidia (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META), and Microsoft (MSFT).
Ahead of Walmart’s (WMT) fourth quarter earnings release this Thursday, Jefferies senior vice president of equity research Corey Tarlowe explains why “expectations are high” for the global retailer.
Other top trending stocks on the Yahoo Finance platform include Baidu (BIDU), Broadcom (AVGO), Intel (INTC), Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM), and Southwest Airlines (LUV).
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here. https://finance.yahoo.com/videos/series/morning-brief/

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