It's time now for today's trending tickers. The government may be stopping, but the stock markets, well, they're not. First trending ticker, Lithium Americas. The Canada-based miner is surging more than 30% in pre-market trading after a big government deal overnight. The US Government of Energy said it's taking a 5% stake in the company, which has big plans to turn a Nevada mine into one of the world's largest, helping the US government strategy to build a domestic battery metal supply chain.

Okay, next up, we're looking at Big Tech. And we're looking at at Meta, Google, and Apple. Big tech names are going to face lawsuits over casino gambling promotion, despite their request to dismiss the suit. A judge in San Jose ruled that consumer protection claims should proceed, except for California. Now, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet are accused of allowing promotion of illegal gambling through their platforms.

Now let's take a quick look at Berkshire Hathaway. The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal reported that Warren Buffett's firm is in advanced talks to buy Occidental Petroleum's Oxychem petroleum petrochemical unit for about $10 billion dollars. Shares of Occidental Petroleum are up as you would typically imagine and in in these M&A situations. a sale of Warren Buffett, a sale to Warren Buffett's company, which already owns about one-third of Occidental, would certainly help Occidental to reduce its heavy debt load. This would be Berkshire's biggest deal in three years.

Finally, Nike. The swoosh is up more than three and a half percent in pre-market after it reported better than expected earnings, suggesting that its turnaround strategy might be working.

The sportswear giant's sales driven by improving wholesale revenue and early success under the new CEO Elliot Hill, defied concerns about consumer spending and China weakness, at least for now. Well, David Swartz from Morningstar came on Yahoo Finance to share his insights on Nike's earnings.

Yeah, it looks like that the sales were a little bit better than expected and you know, that's typical for Nike. Even in bad quarters, Nike tends to outperform estimates. Uh we were looking for a sales decline of about 5 or 6% in the quarter. So a small increase is a positive. It looks like that the benefit was really on the wholesale side. Uh Nike did have a number of new product releases in the quarter and continues to to release new products.

Uh Nike has released a whole new line of running shoes in uh for three of its major brands, uh Pegasus, Structure and Vomero. And it looks like those have been well received by retailers and by the public too. and I think that selling of those running shoes and other products uh helped the sales in the quarter.

Let's talk about CEO Elliott Hill. Uh David, you know, his plans, his strategy for Nike based on these on these results, is it working, David?

Yeah, I think it is working, but we're still far away really from what Nike should be reporting. This is a company that typically uh reports sales growth in the the mid to high single digits and, you know, 1% gain on a a relatively easy comparison with last year is nothing to get too excited about. But, you know, Nike has been struggling now for almost two years. So it's certainly positive to see them, I think turning a corner.

It's probably going to be a few more quarters before we really see some strong results, but I do think that they're coming. Uh next year in calendar 2026, uh Nike has the Olympics in February and then the World Cup in the summer. and those are going to be two great events for Nike to do a lot of promotions. Uh certainly the World Cup is going to be a huge event next year because it's in North America and Nike has invested heavily in its international soccer business. So, you know, Nike has a lot of new products and marketing opportunities coming and I do think that retailers want Nike to succeed because this is still the company that drives this whole market and I think that hasn't changed despite Nike's problems over the last few years.