TOGETHER WITH
Hey there weekday warrior,
Here’s what’s on the agenda today…
FICO changes the game, Elon’s blowout quarter, and we’re never getting Amazon drones, are we?
Enjoy the next 4 minutes and 23 seconds of blue-chip news and commentary.
Keep on snapping necks and cashing checks,
PS, I need your help.
Completing this quick survey (seriously, it’s 10 multiple-choice questions) will help me make The Water Coolest even better (I know… seems hard to imagine).
Oh, and I’m giving away two (2) $250 Amazon gift cards to 2 random weekday warriors who complete the survey. Thanks in advance, you guys.
Unfair Isaac
Hope she’s doing ok…
Name something that has a bigger stranglehold on males in their mid-50s (besides WW2 and Miatas) than their FICO score. I’ll wait.
The (credit score) game done changed.
Fair Isaac $FICO ( ▲ 17.98% ), the company behind the FICO score (hand up… I was today years old when I learned the ‘FI’ in ‘FICO’ stands for Fair Isaac), just made it easier for mortgage resellers to buy credit score data directly from them (vs. the bureaus like Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion).
What did they do?
For decades, the major credit bureaus (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) acted as the middleman between Fair Isaac (the dorks who calculate your FICO credit score) and mortgage resellers.
To put it in Office Space terms… the credit bureaus have “people skills…”
Unfortunately for them, FICO just hit ‘em with “what would you say you do here?”
Fair Isaac’s new approach will offer two “direct” pricing models for mortgage resellers.
Shares of Fair Isaac popped nearly 20% on the news. At one point, the stock was up more than 32% before trading was halted. Meanwhile, the 3 bureaus got rekt.
So why did Fair Isaac make the change?
It appears that the move by FICO wasn’t driven by some desire to make the bureaus their b*tch and/or do the American people a solid. The move probably has more to do with Fannie and Freddie’s recent decision to destroy their monopoly by allowing brokers to use VantageScore Solutions’ scores for mortgage decisions.
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+ Save some for the rest of us, Elon…
Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 5.11% ) just set a new sales record, delivering 497k cars (like 3 of which were Cybertrucks) in Q3. That’s well above analyst estimates of 456k... because math. Too bad Tesla isn’t a car company anymore (isn’t that right, Elon?).
The yuge delivery figure comes after two consecutive quarters of brutal numbers…
But before you call it a comeback… the good times aren’t expected to last. You see, the end of Q3 2025 marked the expiration of the $7.5k EV credit available to consumers. That means sales likely got pulled forward.
Not that Elon cares. The richest man in the world has made it abundantly clear that Tesla is an autonomous vehicle, robotics, and AI company now… which is exactly what someone who isn’t good at selling cars would say.
+ Good news for everyone who finally caved and bought bitcoin at $119k back in August… it just broke $120k and is flirting with ATHs. Why, you ask? Because nothing gets the HODLers going quite like a rate cut. And the piss poor jobs report on Wednesday all but guaranteed the Fed will slash rates at the end of the month.
+ Warren Buffett’s still got it (no, not an er*ction lasting longer than 4 hours)…
Charlie Munger’s totally, 100% platonic best bud just made his biggest acquisition in 3 years. It appears someone reminded him, “you can’t take it [Berkshire’s $BRK.B ( ▼ 0.46% ) $344B cash pile] with you.”
The Oracle of Omaha is buying his favorite energy company’s petrochemical subsidiary. He’ll pay $9.7B for OxyChem… which sounds like something Billy Mays would sling on infomercials at 3 AM that promises to “fight tough stains with the power of oxygen.”
+ And this is why we can’t have nice things (… delivered to our house within the hour)...
The FAA is investigating two Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 0.81% ) drone crashes that happened Wednesday. Not one, but two of their delivery drones crashed into the same crane boom. And I think we can all agree that the crane operator is in the pocket of Big ground delivery…
+ US stocks “finished at fresh records again Thursday as a US government shutdown dragged into a second day.” (Yahoo! Finance)
+ The 10-year yield was “relatively unchanged on Thursday as investors monitored the government shutdown and ramifications of an economic data blackout.” (CNBC)
+ Oil “settled down about 2% at the lowest in four months on Thursday, extending a run of declines into a fourth day, due to concerns about oversupply in the market ahead of a meeting of the OPEC+ group over the weekend.” (Reuters)
+ The “smart” money (prediction markets) thinks there’s a 55% chance Chipotle mentions “Autocado” (its avocado-making robot) during its next earnings call. (Kalshi)
⏪ Yesterday…
+ The Fed issued its latest balance sheet report
+ We got Tesla’s delivery numbers
⏩ Today we’re keeping an eye on…
+ The September Jobs Report won’t be released. Thanks, government shutdown.
Here’s today’s question…
Did you help shape the future of TWC by completing a 2-minute survey?
Oh, and one more thing…
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Sent from my Amazon Fire Phone. Please excuse any mistakes and typos.
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