Homebuilders are having a rough time lately—just look at their Q4 earnings reports.

Lennar announced earlier this week that the company delivered 23,034 homes in the fourth quarter ending November 30, up 4% from the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, orders for new homes rose 18% year over year to 20,018.

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad: The company missed earnings and revenue expectations because it tossed those shiny new homes into the bargain bin. Lennar slashed its average home price by 10% year over year from $430,000 to $386,000, whittling gross margins below expectations to 17%. For the current quarter from December through February, the builder is bracing for prices to fall to between $365,000 and $375,000, and for margins to contract to between 15% and 16%.

Shares have fallen 9.56% over the last five days.

Although cheaper homes may bring some relief to buyers, for homebuilders it triggers an existential crisis. “If builders are unable to achieve sufficient returns, they may be forced to slow or halt construction,” CEO Stuart Miller warned on the earnings call Wednesday. That’s not good, given the US is already stuck in a housing supply shortage of 4 to 7 million missing homes.

Homebuilder heartache

Four in ten builders resorted to price cuts in December, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). But these deals have not always been good enough to entice buyers to bite.

In its earnings announcement late yesterday, KB Homes trimmed its prices to $465,600 in Q4—quite a haircut from $501,000 last year. Even so, sales slumped from 3,978 to 3,619, and orders fell from 2,688 to 2,414. In 2026, KB hopes to build 11,000 to 12,500 homes, slightly below analyst estimates. Shares of the homebuilder tumbled 8.57% today.

The only builder that seems to be doing okay-ish lately is Toll Brothers, which delivered 3,443 houses in Q4, with another 10,300 to 10,700 in the pipeline for fiscal 2026, on par with Wall Street projections. Blame it on the K-shaped economy: Toll Brothers caters to wealthier clientele who can stomach average prices of $990,000, more than double the usual cost of a house.

While KB Home is down 12.71% this year, and Lennar has fallen 18.22% in 2025, Toll Brothers is up 10.99% YTD.

A glimmer of good news: The NAHB reported that builder confidence inched up one point to 39 in December. “Builders report that future sales expectations have been above the key breakeven level for the past three months,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz. Plus, “the recent easing of monetary policy should help builder loan conditions at the start of 2026.”

In other words, the new year could bring better conditions that will help builders keep on building.—JD

🟢 What’s up

• Nine large pharma companies inked a deal with the White House to sell medications for less, in exchange for a three-year grace period from tariffs. Gilead Sciences gained 2.32%, Amgen added 0.91%, and Bristol Myers Squibb climbed 1.61%.
• CoreWeave jumped 22.64% after Citi resumed coverage with a Buy/High Risk rating, highlighting strong demand and capacity tracking into Q4.
• Cruise company Carnival Corporation rose 9.81% after beating fourth-quarter earnings expectations and issuing upbeat full-year guidance.
• Micron Technology extended its rally by 6.99% following a standout fiscal Q1 driven by surging AI-chip demand.
• Amicus Therapeutics soared 30.21% after BioMarin agreed to acquire the company for $4.8 billion. BioMarin shares climbed 17.71% on the news.
• Motorhome manufacturer Winnebago Industries gained 8.43% after reporting a robust fiscal Q1, with revenue up 12% vs. the 1% analysts expected.
• Trump Media continued its rally today, rising another 8.28% after surging yesterday on news of its merger with fusion-energy firm TAE Technologies.

What’s down

• Target fell 1.05% after a major outage hit its app and website during the peak holiday rush, disrupting online orders and some gift-card processing.
• Frozen food company Lamb Weston plunged 25.94% despite solid Q2 results, as executives warned profits will be squeezed by heavy discounting and rising international manufacturing costs.
• Nike slipped 10.54% as strong fiscal Q2 results were overshadowed by margin pressure, with gross margins falling to 40.6% due to US tariffs.

North Korean hackers brought their A-game this year: A report from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis revealed that DPRK thieves stole over $2.02 billion in crypto in 2025, a new record, and a 50% increase from 2024. A large chunk of that haul came from the hack of Bybit in February, when North Korean cyber thieves pilfered about $1.5 billion.

Chainalysis believes a total of $3.4 billion in crypto was stolen around the globe this year, which means North Korean hackers basically carried the team. The firm also estimated that they’ve nabbed about $6.75 billion in crypto since 2016. So, what are they doing with all that money?

Well, it’s believed that North Korea gets around 50% of its foreign currency from stolen crypto. The country utilizes one of the world’s most sophisticated money laundering operations to avoid international sanctions and turn those stolen funds into cold, hard cash. The money supports its nuclear weapons programs—though like any good investor, the country likely reinvests some profits into its elite hacker squads, like the Lazarus Group, to nab even bigger scores.

North Korean hackers are basically the Grinches of the crypto world, and as financial markets get more comfortable with crypto, the opportunities for a quick heist continue to grow. If you don’t want your Christmas to be ruined, make sure you keep your finances secure with strong passwords and cold wallets.—MR

Oracle has been all over the news lately, but nobody could have predicted this latest plot twist.

The company has become the poster child for AI trade woes: Investors are worried that Oracle is taking on too many liabilities at once in order to meet its commitments to building out data centers en masse, and have punished the stock accordingly. While shares were up 68% in 2025 through the end of September, the stock has tumbled 31% since then.

But TikTok just threw the struggling software giant a life line: The Chinese social media platform has agreed to sell its US operations to a joint venture that includes private equity investor Silver Lake, Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, and Oracle, with each company getting a 15% piece of the pie.

That was enough to give Oracle shares a 6.87% boost today.

Will TikTok bring in the big bucks?

Oracle’s role is to be the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing US user data and making sure that the new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” according to a memo from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. US data will be stored in Oracle’s data centers, and Oracle will also play a key role in retraining the TikTok app’s recommendation algorithm on US data “to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation.”

On paper, this is a much-needed win for Oracle: Good press, stronger ties to a household name, and most importantly, a use for those expensive data centers it can’t stop building. TikTok is already one of its biggest customers, but now that operations are heading stateside, it will rely on Oracle’s cloud business even more heavily, driving more revenue to the non-AI side of the company.

The deal also values TikTok at about $14 billion, and Bloomberg reports that parent company ByteDance is poised to rake in a record $50 billion in profits this year. But it remains to be seen how much of that actually trickles down to Oracle. William Blair analysts forecast an additional $1 billion to $2 billion in annual revenue for Oracle, though that number is a rough estimate.

Still, this is a big break for a company in desperate need of good news.—MR

• OpenAI’s latest fundraising round could value the maker of ChatGPT at $830 billion.
• Today marked a quadruple witching, and the largest day of options expirations in history.
• Here’s why bitcoin and ether are set for a comeback in 2026, according to Citi.
• A star investor at Point72 Asset Management is spinning out his own hedge fund, and secured hundreds of millions in backing from his former employer.
• This is how the S&P 500 could reach 13,000 by the end of the decade.
• Sony is acquiring Snoopy and Charlie Brown in a $450 million deal.
• The White House website mysteriously displayed a YouTube livestream from creator Matt Farley talking about investments. And no, he doesn’t know why it happened either.

Next week brings us some holiday cheer, so things are pretty quiet on the ol’ economic calendar. There isn’t a single company reporting earnings, and the only data to keep a lookout for is the delayed Q3 GDP report on Wednesday and the usual initial jobless claims reading on Thursday.

As a reminder, US markets close at 1pm on Wednesday for Christmas Eve and are completely shuttered on Thursday in observance of Christmas. They’ll be open on Friday as usual, but let’s face it, nobody’s going to be in the mood to work that day.

That includes us! Morning Brew’s closed for the holidays, and the Brew Markets team is taking a bit of R&R next week—but that doesn’t mean you won’t hear from us. We’ve prepared a series of stories recapping all the wild market moves of 2025 and taking a look ahead at what’s coming next in 2026. They’ll hit your inbox as usual beginning on Christmas Eve, so sneak away from the holiday festivities when you can to give them a look.

In the meantime, we’ll see you all on Monday!