Dear Trader,
Andrew Giovinazzi's taking Mark's seat on today's show, and he's bringing Olivia Voz on as a special guest.
Voz is showing up with a stock she loves and one she'd happily never hear about again.
Her two picks go on the table next to the 10 the team already brought.
Andrew's starting with the three stories below. That covers the G7 cracking open its oil reserves, Washington's nuclear loan to Vistra, and a jobs report ugly enough to make a record-low unemployment streak look strange.
After that, Voz sticks around and the arguing starts. The crew will grind those 12 names down until one survives as the option play of the week.
Tap this link to join Ticker Highlight Show before 10:30 AM ET and get the pick.
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The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: Oil slipped Monday after the G7 agreed to raid the emergency pantry. The group committed 100 million barrels of crude and diesel from strategic reserves, and Middle East exports beat pre-war levels on four of September's last seven days. Brent fell 66 cents to $101.59 in early trading, while WTI gave up 95 cents to $90.12.
That's still triple-digit Brent with a war going on. The Houthis say they fired missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco sites, though Riyadh hasn't confirmed it. Aramco, meanwhile, cut November prices for Asian buyers to six-year lows, which feels like an odd flex in the middle of a shooting war.
OPEC+ also shelved its 2027 quota review because nobody can figure out what Gulf capacity looks like anymore.
SIGN: Washington just lined up a roughly $4 billion loan for Vistra (VST) to upgrade three nuclear plants. The Department of Energy approved the package for plants that feed PJM (the country's largest power grid, stretching from Chicago to the mid-Atlantic), where data centers keep piling onto demand.
The catch sits at FERC (the federal power regulator). Vistra's fighting a PJM stopgap rule it says could misprice capacity for big power users and chill investment. So the government's paying to modernize the plants while the rules that decide what those plants earn stay up for grabs.
Simply Wall St's community models peg the stock anywhere from about $171 to $213 a share, which tells you how wide the guessing gets.
SNEAKER: The unemployment rate's closing in on a record that's stood since the mid-1960s, which is a funny thing to say right after a jobs report this ugly. Truist strategist Keith Lerner flagged the streak, counting consecutive months with unemployment under 5%. Meanwhile, employers added just 29,000 jobs in September when economists wanted about 90,000.
The revisions hurt more. July's 21,000 gain turned into a 10,000 loss, and August got cut from 162,000 to 133,000, erasing 60,000 jobs combined. Unemployment ticked up to 4.2%, with participation flat at 61.8%.
BlackRock's Rick Rieder calls it a low-hire, low-fire market. Anyone job hunting right now could've told him that.l