♪ welcome to squawk alley we'll talk twitter in a couple minutes, but markets are trying to snap a three day losing streak as we watch stimulus h p hopes continues. pfizer with a potential vaccine. retail results were strong goldman saying a lot of that might have been deferred back for school spending in august and also some of the supplementary payments that came via executive order. big week for retail. >> and i'm also looking at auto desk which raised guidance after being very cautious in its earnings, it is up with 9% for the week better than 2.5% today and also zoom, i mean i don't know when i've seen a company have a better conference week. a year ago this was a point product that made the case for

themselves as a platform investors seem to be buying it with that stock up 13% this week >> it just keeps going up nearly 4% today and it laid out the case for longer term growth and ironically, it will come from the good old phone, right a lot of that conference was focused on the zoom phonewhich basically enables you to take it wherever you go. and there is s ais an axios rept saying that uber may be looking to celebrate its elevate unit, the moon shot flying taxi unit it reflects obsession with profit ability, but i might argue that it reflects his obsession to please sharehold s shareholders backing away from some of the longer term ambitions such as freight, elevate now and as well as self-driving cars, it does raise a few questions. yes, it may give the share price

a bump in the short term, about where does it position uber lon term >> yeah, when these companies don't have a clear business start talking about that we're a media company or a helicopter company or we're a freight company, really? okay i don't know how much stock investors -- >> the big disrupter >> yeah, the self-driving thing, lyft and uber were both pushing that hard, but now can they profitably do their core business going back to the bird, twitter changing its policy on hacked materials after facing backlash for its decision to block links to the new york "post" story about joe biden's son hunter and whether he made introductions between ukranians and his father jack dorsey tweeting straight bloking of urls was wrong and we up indicated our policy and enforcement to fix twitter will no longer remove

hacked content unless it is correctly shared by hackers. and they provide links to context. joining us noud w to discuss is casey newton and also nick thompson guys, good morning casey, we had a couple guests on yesterday arguing that twitter had done the right thing, but you now they are doing something different. so is this right, was that right, what do you think >> first thing i would say is i love jack dorsey because he always seems so surprised that he is the ceo of twitter he wanders in like five minutes late saying what is going on here i was supportive of the initial steps. all it did was slow the spread of reporting and give the truth

time to tie its shoes. so you can argue about whether straight up blocking the links is worse than providing context around them, but we've seen in the past that when twitter tries to add konlg texcontext, a put summary that lot of people miss. so i think it remains to be seen whether there is a better policy >> i know people were trying to apply different context and maybe come to conclusions over what might be the facts in story. but if you are going to start slowing stuff down selectively doing it on certain publications about certain politicians and not others is likely to get you in trouble >> likely to get you in less trouble if you block full access to the story what happened with in new york post thing, the piece comes out and we're not sure exactly if it is true or hacked. and hacked material has a bunch of laws and rules that apply to

it but we weren't sure kind of. so twitter said nobody can read it, we'll block access to it of course after it went trending. i think that was too much. i actually thought facebook's policy was pretty much right on. they just slow down disdri abtro until we know what is going on so i thought that that was clear clearer, better and more in line with the general principle of free speech which is you make everything accessible and then set the rules over how many can see it >> and we had dick talking about deep fakes and his general point was that twifrt atter and all platforms would have to overcorrect and people would be upset about it, but it thit hase done because the

underrestriction was not cutting it is that endemic to the company and just not starting to come into sharper relief in. >> i think it is we've seen twitter take more aggressive asks to police the platform this year than probably we ever have before. and i think that you are starti starting to see people get really concerned about it. i believe that platforms should exercise confident editor i can't remember judgment in the same way that cnbc exercises editorial judgment twitter will enable a much rider range of debate, but it is to being say this looks suspicious so we'll put a pause on it until we know more >> i think what i'll hearing is two different things case cit casey you're saying that it was appropriate to block it but

nick, you're saying reducing the spread of the story was better but nick, let me chamg thi chalu on that. facebook said that it was subject to fact checkers, but be don't though anything about their fact checkers. >> yeah, we don't know yet how they are going to rule on this particular piece of content. so facebook is kind of putting it in a slowdown box but it is true, even when we hear back from the fact checker, we want to know exactly who did it and why and we don't have total trust in them. so to your point, i agree with casey 100% on every principle h laid out tech companies have -- >> but you don't think -- >> i think twitter did the wrong thing, they did not give it an explanation, they went too far and jack dorsey threw the

communications team under the bus. they were not clear, they were into the precise and i think without a clear justification, you cannot take that strong an action that they took. they were less clear, who are district, and i think that was the right move >> casey, let's immediayou wrote is most comfortable in the role of the laggard where does that put youtube and going is the story less about them >> hard to say exactly what youtube did because it said so little we know he that when the "post" put up a video about the story, it only got like 100,000 views which is not many by the standards of youtube so youtube said look, we're watching it closely. i think to date we haven't seen, up know, a massive disinformation campaign about this particular story play out on youtube but i do being that youtube owes

us a better examinatiman explan and how it would apply its policies around it i think that there is stemg still a lot of you beof uncertay there. >> and i think the socieshl necl networ networks, what they have done is make themselves the editors of the world's paper and say that i'll decide -- let me see your sources, i'll decide whether it gets on page one or if i bury it on a dshl 1asa-15 how do they walk back from that? they have the power to take the paper off our door steps because they own them. >> yep, they absolutely do but i think that they have that

responsibility they have to develop very clear policies that they then apply in way that's with understand and then the world will understand that yes, there are a bunch of tools that all these companies can have if something meets another threshold, there will be a warning sign if something meets another threshold, its amplification will be slowed down. and wield know how you meet the thresholds or what reason. and i think if people understood the rules, then the conversation would be a lot clearer and you wouldn't have twitter spinning around like a top and politicians screaming at them. >> maybe in twitter's case when jack dorsey is in versus being in at square, but not only is mark zuckerberg elected, he is not even subject to shareholder approval to anything that he does is that okay i think it casts the whole thing

in a different light given the sorts of decisions these plat forms made with democracy. >> there is a famous philosophy who said no one man should have pa power and it applies to mark zuckerberg when you are running a country with 3 billion people and your citizens have no means to address any grievance they may have, you have a problem so we're starting to see facebook start to take some steps, they are working on the oversight board that you will eventually be able to appeal to. but in examples like we saw this week when there is a very controversial decision, if you disagree, you are just out of l luck and that is a continuing pr problem for facebook >> yeah, kanye west wanting to write himself in for president, he wants even more power nick, casey, thank you

when we come back, judgment o'newe jim o'neill will talk about the stocks rising, dow up 348.

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dow trying to go positive for the week here of a of early session high, but up about 250 as we get good retail sales data, encouraging vaccine news out of pfizer giving stocks a boos boost, joining us, jim o'neill from goldman sachs good to see you again. >> nice to be with you >> let's talk some europe to start. we have europe printing about 100,000 koefd case 1 100 koefd case a 100,000 cases a day, some new lockdowns.

how concerned are you? >> it is spreading across europe, so it looks as though the strong v like momentum in the third dwaur is certainquarte a minimum easing and unless they can get the infections under control, so it might become worse it is the optimism a few weeks ago is starting to look a bit more concerning in europe for sure >> and part of the optimism to the degree there is in the states is two-fold, one, it is europe, not us and two if it were to come to us, this wave, we would not be doing the lockdowns that we saw in the spring. do you think that there is holes in either one of those two narratives >> you know what, what i ponder every day is how come the u.s. and europe have the repeated

escalations. and it looks to me from the u.s. data that the caseload is picking up and dwryet in vast ways of asia particularly northern asia, going through the same weather change as ours, they seem to be managing it so much better and it is quite concerning and, you know, from a big picture perspective, i think that it is simply out at the margins that maybe this is indeed the century of asia so many different asia countries are handling it so much per than europe and the united states >> so what do you think are the implications, the consequences of that? a bigger k in this k shaped recovery here, markets go one direction, main street and the middle class goes another, and does that have political

implications, policy implications that investors should be thinking about >> i think all those kin d of issues and let me add before i go too far down the pessimistic path because i try to be optimistic, as you touched on, i do think that we're getting close to where perhaps two or three vaccines will get to the end of stage three results. and they look quite promising. so i think personally this is more of a fourth quarter issue and that come q1 in many parts of the west, we may be having a vaccines distinributed and give us immunity. so i still first believe first half of next year, it is not impossible to think that we could still have some kind of

economic boom. but i do think that we have a pretty challenging period before that and god forbid if all those trials turn out to be negative, then it will be a lot worse. but meanwhile as i've already said, asia seems to be coping with it. i marvel at some of the stories about the holiday where in china where so many seem to be living normal lives despite the fact that that is where it started. >> and keeping the focus then on your optimism, how do the u.s. elections coming up in a few days and are in fact happening now as many people are voting early or voting by mail, how do those fit into that? we've seen a shift toward nationalism. if the polls bear out, is this going to be just a u.s. thing, do you think that there is a possibility for that to spread, maybe reversing some of the trend of the past few years and would that be positive >> you know, i should aare have

said this at the start who knows any of this start. for what it's worth, i do think because of the nature of how the u.s. economy is structured and how it has grown the past few years, despite the fact that if biden wins, we're obviously got to get tax increases which would normally be regarded as a negative for growth. given that the way trump has resided over policy in the u.s., it's essentially been pretty negative for proper investment spending and of course for exports because of how the u.s. has engage the with the rest of the world. i find myself thinking that biden might be better and certainly better for building alliances with some of the places in the rest of the world both with respect to dealing with the battles on china, but importantly also trying to do

things krublgts differenconstru issues like climate change with china. so i think that it oddly might come as a bit of a relief if we end up with biden. and if we are trump, yes, we'll probably end up with more tax cuts which might give another boost to corporate profits, but i think at least the concerns that we've had for many of the past four years, if not more >> i leerappreciate your honest. you said in the first half of the year we could see some kind of economic boom, but many of us are focused on the possibility of fiscal stimulus how important is that and even if biden wins the election, still some hurdles to actually get that through come january.

>> just to emphasize it seems that what happens with the more promising vaccines is almost definitely the most important thing for the anglo-saxon and maybe the whole of the western help physical fear giv hemisphere given the challenge that we're all having with the dreadful pandemic. so i think that that is way more important than what happens on fiscal policy. i do think obviously that fiscal policy is additionally important but not as important especially when you get into the question we were pursuing whether it is more like a k. there are exceptionally challenging issues of inequality that we had beforehand, which this pandemic has just highlighted and grown to be even more and how fiscal policy both at the macro level and to some degree even on the micro level in a number of our societies, i think that it will be more important than what happens

during and after the first quarter because going back to what i was asked at the start, there will be deep long lasting political consequences if we continue to preside over ever wir widening inequality in some of our western democracies. >> certainly one of the warnings that our own fed chair has given us, jim, something that monetary poli policy is sort of toothless on appreciate all charity, jim, good to see you. see you next time. >> all right, thanks for having me on. and a reminder as we head to break, do not miss the financia summit the webest explore the state of markets. there is a huge lineup of guests we'll have for you on tuesday october 20th head to cnbc events.com right

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welcome back here is your cnbc news update. in georgia, more than a million people have voted already. that is three times as many as at the same point in the 2016 election half of the ballots were cast in person during early voting that started on monday. the colts have closed their facility after several

individuals in that organization tested positive for covid-19 the colts are scheduled to play the sbengals on sunday. and the atlanta falcons are back at their training facility after shutting it down yesterday in illinois, a nursing home has been forced to evacuate after more than a dozen residents became infected with the coronavirus. another 19 are considered exposed to that virus. and bad news for fans of a classic diet soda, the tab brand is being retired as part of coca-cola's broadcaer effort to narrow its lineup. it was popular before the launch of diet coke you are up-to-date >> my only familiar airity with that i think is that from back to the future. >> that's true >> moving on, three major events set to take place before year end and that is what our next guest is watching.

alpha one capital partners, dan, good morning and before we get into your buckets, i wanted to ask you about twitter and facebook and particularly the reaction or nonreaction that we have seen in their share prices wroek la regul regulatory risks is nothing new, but it may be that they are focusing on article 230. do you think investors are accomplico accomplice answer or just more noise? >> i think the good news is that we've had historic tore cal resc for this thought that it would be awful and we've had a lot of other things that happened and stocks

have seen right through it and businesses continue to grow. so i own facebook and amazon, yes, is there going to be something that happens just because populous sentiment, yes, we have to attack big he companies because they have been successful even though in china and europe, they are trying to build their companies up so i think that this is really stupid on our part but having said that, i think that investors are rightly saying that it won't be a bid deal and probably be four or five years for anything to happen anyway. >> and a lot of folks agree but. i want to look at the bucket of stocks that yyou do like. and it includes in automotive and green energy it doesn't include malls, airlines, cruises, hotels. is that because you see structural changes that you

think about outlast the current pandemic in. >> yeah, i mean if you -- i call them the moack four financials in particular servicing that and before this all happened obviously e-commerce was growing pretty rapidly this pulled in two tothree years worth of demand into this year and you have seen the demise of malls in particular getting worse and i think that you will see 30%, 40% of mall space getting rationalized as question go through this. same thing with business traveln go through this. same thing with business travel. a lot of business meet beiings e being done through zoom and it will continue after the pandemic because people figure out getting on a flight may a would be hour meeting may not be the best use of your time.

people will obviously travel and go to mall, but not as big as it was. >> and i see that you have automotive and gm here as a potential beneficiary of stimulus but namely the starting to set in, covid-19 resurgences and a lot of smaul businesses that will be negative negatively negatively impacted when people can't walk around outside. should that be a bigger factor >> absolutely. as you rightly point out, you have covid that will rarm will p i have two college age students

doing things remotely instead of going back to school and just like the flu season ramps up, so will koefd. and we've seen the markets driven by stimulus you have 30% used by the fed expanding their balance sheet by about $3 trillion and government response and we're looking at a $2 trillion give or take stimulus bill, gdp for the u.s. is about $21 trillion so about 10% more of gdp we're thinking of throwing into the markets. so those are the two things that you have working with each other and then obviously what happens with the election. if you have a $2 trillion climate plan that will help stocks so we're trying to stay nimble because i think there is so many things that can move drastically. and you will probably get $2 trillion in stimulus raurlegard of who wins.

and i think wrongly to some extent is driving the market right now. >> dan, i want to ask you about disney looking back, march 10, you were with us, understand my base case is all the domestic parks shut down and that is when i get interested can't get any worse and right now the parks aren't shut down six days later, disneyland closed and has been closed for 215 days what is your thought process now on disney and parks at large >> well, my first thought, you have a much better memory than i do you're right, i do remember talking about that yeah, right now i look at disney and i think this is what scares me about disney. they are going all in on their streaming business year in the involved in dizfully bay t disney bay the way we covered our shorts. but the problem is if you have three streams of revenue, one is

that you are showing kept conten you're saying focus it on streaming, that will cause a big change in your financials. they are looking at netflix and it doesn't make any cash flows still, et cetera, and so they are looking at that saying that is where we need to go for us, we're buying viacom is where we said that is more speculative, stock down 30% year to date. but they have got a very large streaming business so i agree with everything that you said because obviously i said it, but right now, that is how we're sort of looking at what could be a recovery play more than disney because they may be shutting down two very large or really de-emphasizing two very large revenue streams in the future.

and as jon said, covid is ramping up into the colder weather. >> andrare you viewing the e-commerce names i know you like it, but what did you make of the amazon release of what they sold, but they left out the line that they usually have and that was calling it the biggest shopping day ever. did you read anything into that? >> you bring up a good point in that all these tech names are up a ton. we own lot less of some of our favorite positions than we did before and that includes sonl. we have a position, but not

nearly as larnlg ge as it was and you see names like sienna, where they were supposed to benefit from optical demand. and the stock has gone from 60 to 40 as they negatively mixed and that is a risk are that you are facing with amazon, i still like it i don't read too much into that, demand still seems to be strong. everything prime day being in the third quarter instead of, you know, earlier in the year, that should help as we go forward. covid ramping don't think that people will go into malls so we're trying to be in some of the other name that's with think that there might be more up side in them gaming is our favorite and quite honestly, pcs is a space that we're looking at hard because pc unit demand is up over 10% year over year. it is at a 10 year high in terms of growth.

this is a space declining for six to seven years and so we're trying to find areas of maybe overlooked -- everybody knows amazon is doing well to your point and so big risk quite honestly is if there is something that goes wrong that we're not expecting, you know that is a problem, but i don't see it right now >> right thanks so much for being with us talk to you again soon >> thank you we're back below 3500 on the s&p, we're watching bed bath and beyond, what a tear it has been on since announcing the sale of its christmas tree shops on tuesday. it is up nearly 20% for the week and halfway through october on pace for its largest monthly gain ever. i can't believe it. what? that our new house is haunted by casper the friendly ghost?

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robinhood warning to raise cash buffers on some popular stocks 3 a stocks that is about people trading on margin >> yes, it happened in a late night email. they pointed to more valolatili and they increased minimum investor needs to hold in their account trading on margin. if they can't do that, robinhood

says that they might issue a margin call. if the client gets a margin call and doesn't resolve it by the end of the a trading day, robinhood may need to sell some or all of the customer stocks to cover the calls. robinhood users took to twitter to complain that they only gave them about 12 hours to increase their cash the company telling cnbc rather than doing a blanket change that impacting all customers, robinhood is only raising requirement for his certain securities but it is not just robinhood e-trade sent a similar requirement but that increase didn't go in-to effect until monday and interactive brokers gave their client as head's up about three weeks ago. and the move by mothst of the brokers show just how volatile

the election season could be back to you. >> yeah, first election cycle we've been in with these kind of -- >> i know that -- sorry, rear all remote kate, quick one for you. i know relevance has been booming. but any sense of how robinhood has been handling costs in terms of all the different hurdles, the election being the latest one, but in terms of security and hacks and things like that >> they have beefed up hiring in some of the areas. so security is one of those. customer service is another. we reported about some hacks that customers have been canning about. so those are the two areas where they are spending a lot and also pulling back in other areas. the launch in uk got scrapped so it seems like they are change

the game plan. >> and we haven't been through an election cycle with these kind of trading dynamics in place. so fascinating to watch. kate, thanks so much when we come back, the colds the latest nfl team to close facilities as they try to contain the outbreak, but the game is on defense the bengals on sunday. we'll talk about thawit th drew rosenhaus.

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the kro coronavirus pandemic continuing to ravage the sports world with multiple outbreaks i keep wondering if the wheels will come off the nfl. >> we'll see, right, it is another week, more covid chaos happening across sports. the latest, the nfl's indianapolis colts closing their 3 practice facility this morning several members of the organization testing positive. the team is in the process of confirming those results but the colts ti s still scheduo play cincinnati on sunday. and the falcons reopened their facility after no new positive cases. the team had been practicing virtually this week, but their game on sunday also expected as to go on assuming no new positive results in new orleans, the saints are gletsing in

getting frustrated with with their marsyor's office preventi to have fahave fans, but now lot play at lsu where they could have 25,000 fans in attendance teams could move across city, county or state lines to find more business friendly rules the saints want limited fans

the game will be on, although it's just another wrinkle about how some cases are going to turn up negative and then be confirmed positive or vice versa, i should say. how confusing is that for fans and for those trying to actually work in the league >> it's a challenge. the colts had a game against the bengals and they had to go off, just like the falcons did. but the tennessee titans show you can be away from your facility and come out and play well as they beat the buffalo bills. it's something you can work through in today's nfl fortunately the falcon's game is

on and so is the colts' game against cincinnati the nfl and nfl-pa keep making adjustments to protect the integrity of the players and the health of the game for example, they're adding testing now to game days, which they weren't doing and they're actually sending players, coaches, administrators home who are sick, even if they haven't tested positive but have covid-like symptoms. they continue to tighten their belt and come up with new ways to improve their system and it's working. basically every game that's been played up to this point and hopefully new england gets their postponed game in this weekend >> you're right. they're feigneding ways to adapt and going through the season much better than some had expected at the beginning of the season do you think there's a different right now in how things are playing out within the nfl and

college football or is it too early to tell at this point >> it's playing out much different. the nfl, while they postpone games for a short period of time, they have been manageable and it looks like all the games that are going to get played here in the future, i'm not so sure about college football. i think 10% of all college games so far this year have been postponed and potentially some of those won't be replayed it's a much bigger concern in college football obviously they are dealing with major problems nick saban is the icon of college football coaching and he has got covid-19 we wish him a speedy recovery. they're going to try and play their big, big game against georgia tomorrow without him but that's a huge loss for the crimson tide but even worse are games like baylor and oklahoma state and of course florida and lsu was just

this week that a confident dan mullen, the great coach for the university of florida was saying he would like a packed house at the swamp in gainesville and unfortunately it went from a packed house to no one being in the house at all there will be no game this weekend. very scary >> you said the league has been adapting what about the nhl, the hockey league, they had a few bubbles that they did quite successfully do you think that would ever be on the table >> not at this time. i think you're talking about so many players away from their families for so long it's just not realistic. and i think the system that the nfl has in place is effective. really no one has gotten seriously ill, thank goodness, and people are recovering and coming back and we're getting

the gales in with the nfl and nfl-pa is doing is working a double is not necessary at this time. now, it may work for a short tft like the playoffs, where we're limited to a couple weeks and fewer teams, that could become a possibility. but right now hats off to the nfl and nflpa, they're winning the battle against covid, even though every week is a new challenge, a new scare, let's face it, i believe it's something the country can learn from they're spending millions on testing and precautions and they're doing a fantastic job. >> we're all trying to find ways to work and it next time we got to talk viewership because there's some surprising declines across the spectrum of sports which we'll get to hopefully next week or

whenever you're free yve a great weekend >>ou, too. stay safe. >> we're back in a minute.

of all the times they said 5g, maybe they can say it enough to actually convince you >> we'll see it's been, carl, eight years since the transition to 4g phones back then apple was neck and neck with exxon. so a lot has changed but i think these reviews are going to be fascinating, not just from the profl reviewers but from individuals out there who are going to be running speed tests and seeing if the connection on these phones with 5g are really that much better

>> i hope no one did that as a drinking game. you have to be careful when it comes to these next generation technologies >> speaking of ibm, earnings next week, img, verizon, it's going to be extraordinarily busy a good weekend, everybody. let's get to that. carl, thank you. welcome to the "halftime report." i'm scott wapner one market watcher says a big breakout could be on the way joining me are pete najarian, steve weis, shannon is the chief investment officer and meggon, head of investment strategy at