The software that people working in sales stare at for hours on end is itself selling like hotcakes.

Salesforce shot up 10.99% today after the customer resource management platform purveyor reported strong Q3 revenue and said its recently debuted AI assistant AgentForce is starting to appear in cubicles worldwide.

• Revenue of $9.44 billion exceeded analysts’ expectations and was 8% higher compared to the same period last year.
• Adjusted earnings per share were $2.41, up 14% from a year ago but below analyst expectations (largely a result of losses from investments into other companies).
• Salesforce expects $9.9 billion to $10.1 billion in sales in the current quarter, roughly as analysts projected.

The company says it's counting on an all-out AI push to keep growing its top and bottom lines.

AgentForce reporting for duty

Investors were enthused to hear that AgentForce—an AI assistant that helps answer customer queries and perform other tasks using company data from Salesforce’s system—has been met with interest from customers who are charged $2 per agent conversation.

The company said it delivered on 200 contracts for the tool in just a week following its late-October launch, with corporate giants like FedEx, Accenture, and IBM embracing it. Salesforce itself says it is saving human labor hours by employing AgentForce alongside its flesh-and-blood workers, embedding it into various company functions.

Salesforce CEO Marc Bernioff noted during the earnings call that AgentForce’s “unfair advantage” over other AI assistants is that its output is grounded in Salesforce data, a treasure trove of information about its client businesses and its customers. He stressed that Salesforce has made it easy for its existing customers to try out the tool on its website, which differentiates it from competing products like Microsoft’s Copilot.

Bernioff said he expects the company’s momentum to continue, confirming plans to hire as many as 2,000 new salespeople. The AI-fueled optimism comes after two years of belt-tightening at the Silicon Valley heavyweight and investors dumping its stock this spring after it projected revenue growth to slow down.

But…analysts say that it's too early to tell whether AgentForce can become a major growth engine that keeps Salesforce from turning into a stagnant software giant. Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci expressed skepticism about whether Salesforce could get away with charging extra for a service that might become commonplace, per MarketWatch.—SK

🟢 What’s up

• Eli Lilly’s hit drug Zepbound led to more weight loss than rival Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy in a head-to-head trial. Shares of Eli Lilly popped 2.03%, while Novo Nordisk fell 0.21%.
• AI data storage stock Pure Storage is minting pure profit for shareholders today, rising 22.06% after announcing strong earnings and a new contract with a big tech company.
• Cloud company Okta climbed 5.38% thanks to a solid beat-and-raise earnings report.
• Chip maker Marvell Technology is the new chosen one: Shares surged 23.19% thanks to an impressive quarter, and several Wall Street analysts raised their price targets for the stock shortly afterward.
• Needham analysts highlighted Roku as a potential acquisition target for a number of companies. Shares of the streaming provider rose 9.58%.

What’s down

• Foot Locker sank 8.63% after the struggling retailer missed Wall Street expectations last quarter and issued a poor fiscal forecast for the coming quarter.
• PSQ Holdings, parent company of online marketplace Public Square, soared yesterday on news that Donald Trump Jr. is joining its board—but shares tumbled 37.75% today as investors took profits.
• Campbell's CEO Mark Clouse is retiring from the soup behemoth to become president of the NFL's Washington Commanders. Shares dropped 6.24%.
• Couchbase, which is a data platform company and not a company that only makes the legs of furniture, fell 21.92% after announcing a lower-than-expected forecast for next quarter.

The US stock market is big. How big is it, you ask? Oh, about twice the size of the US economy.

“In November 2024, for the first time in history, the total value of stocks in the United States exceeded $60 trillion,” Chief Economist at Global Financial Data Bryan Taylor wrote in a recent blog post. “If you compare the market cap with the US nominal GDP of $29.354 trillion, you get a ratio of 207 percent. The ratio of the market cap to GDP has never been this high in the nation’s history.”

While you probably already knew that the US economy is the largest in the world, if the domestic stock market is double its size, then how big is the US market compared to the rest of the globe?

“The three largest stocks in the world by capitalization, Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft, have a market cap of more than $10 trillion. That is more than any stock market in the world outside of the United States,” Taylor wrote. He continued: “The United States represents over 60 percent of all investible stocks in the world.”

Taylor ascribes the dominance of the US stock market to the success of the tech sector fueling its growth, particularly in the last few years. The only question is, how much bigger can it grow before something gives?

2024 is coming to a conclusion, which means Wall Street’s 2025 predictions are coming in hot.

Most of them—actually, all of them—are outright bullish, and expectations are high that 2025 will bring lower inflation, higher economic growth, and yet another year of stock market gains.

Look, we’re glass-half-full people here at Brew Markets. But we’re also investors, and good investors need to anticipate the out-of-left-field, black swan scenarios that can blindside them before they put their hard-earned cash into the market. And that is exactly what the fine folks at Saxo Bank have done.

While Wall Street tries to wow investors with their crystal balls, the Danish bank released a list of outrageous predictions for global markets in the coming year. Note the key word: outrageous. Not worst-case scenarios, not out of the realm of possibility—just believable enough that you may want to keep them in the back of your mind as you position your portfolio for 2025.

Here are a few of Saxo’s outrageous predictions for the next year:

• Trump 2.0 blows up the US dollar: The dollar dominates the global economy, but a second Trump administration will usher in a new era of de-globalization thanks to massive US tariffs—such as 100% tariffs on BRICS nations. Gold and cryptocurrencies rocket higher as the dollar drops.
• Nvidia balloons to twice the value of Apple: The company’s new Blackwell line of chips will be a huge success, propelling Nvidia to new heights. Saxo thinks shares will rise from $145 today to $250, far outpacing the rest of the Magnificent 7, before regulators get involved to stop the burgeoning monopoly.
• China unleashes CNY 50 trillion stimulus to reflate its economy: The Chinese government will bet it all on reflation, injecting trillions of stimulus money into its faltering economy to great success. Both the Chinese economy and developing markets flourish, while commodity prices rise around the globe.
• First bio-printed heart ushers in new era of longevity: The healthcare industry will be revolutionized by new advances in the coming years, including 3D-printing human organs. Success begets success, as startups in this nascent sector quickly go public while investors pour money into the space.
• A natural disaster bankrupts a large insurance company for the first time: Record rainfall in 2024 only gets worse in 2025, and eventually the damage from a storm is too much for an insurer to bear. Panic spreads across the industry, though Berkshire Hathaway is able to weather the storm, while the housing market is turned upside down as the value of disaster-prone real estate is re-evaluated.

Are these predictions entirely out of left field? No. Are they downright silly? Not really. But are they outrageous? You be the judge.—MR

• Peter Navarro has been named the top trade advisor of the second Trump administration. He is an economist who served under the first Trump administration and was released from a four-month prison sentence earlier this year.
• Private payrolls grew more slowly last month than economists expected, though wage growth accelerated.
• A Vietnamese billionaire convicted of massive fraud has been given the death penalty—but she can avoid execution if she pays back $9 billion of the $12 billion she stole.
• The CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the largest private health insurer in the US, was fatally shot outside his hotel in New York City where parent company UnitedHealth Group was holding its investor conference.
• An acquisition of 7-11 fell through earlier this year, but the Japanese convenience store chain may be heading for an IPO instead.
• One last holiday shopping stat: Americans spent $100 million shopping on TikTok Shop on Black Friday.

Employment-palooza continues with tomorrow’s weekly initial jobless claims report. Last week’s report revealed that the recent slow-but-steady decline in unemployment insurance filings continued, and economists hope for more of the same this week.

Before the open

• Dollar General has had a very bad year. The largest dollar store brand in the US has seen its core customer segment of low-income consumers tighten its purse strings thanks to high inflation. The result was a big miss in its last earnings report and a brutal selloff that shares still haven’t recovered from. The good news is that this stock is starting to look so cheap it may have a place on Dollar General’s shelves. Consensus: $0.95 EPS, $10.14 billion in revenue.

After the close

• Petco Health and Wellness Co. has taken full advantage of its status as a meme stock. The company’s got a new CEO as of late July who has big plans to turn around the struggling retailer, and the stock’s surge this year has bought him time to put his plans into action. Shareholders will want to see the turnaround taking shape last quarter, including bolstering mediocre revenue growth and halting last quarter’s bottom line decline. Consensus: -$0.03 EPS, $1.15 billion in revenue.