Mobileye to acquire robotics company Mentee, First Solar downgrade

Published: Wednesday, January 7, 2026 · 3:44 PM  |  Updated: Wednesday, January 7, 2026 · 3:44 PM

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00:00 Speaker A

You’re watching Mobile Eye for Solar and strategy. First up Mobile Eye, one of the top trading tickers on Yahoo Finance. The self-driving car company announced a $900 million acquisition of humanoid robot maker Mentee. And I’m joined by markets and data editor Jared Blikry to chat about this one. Now Mobile Eye has been in focus at CES because there’s been some talk about some new customers that it didn’t reveal. And to be clear, it doesn’t make self-driving cars, it makes tech that goes into self-driving cars.

00:27 Jared Blikry

Much like the name suggests, it helps your car see mobile eye. And so that’s really its main business model. and now they’re getting into robots. And as you just pointed out to me uh before the break here, that the founder of Mobileye is also the founder of this company. So they shared there’s a nexus there. Also, I just remind people that this was Mobileye itself is an Intel spin-off. Intel had acquired this company years ago. It didn’t kind quite fit into their business model. So they got spun off.

00:54 Speaker A

Yes, for sure.

00:54 Jared Blikry

Yes.

00:55 Speaker A

And they still own um quite a big chunk of mobile eye.

00:57 Jared Blikry

Yes. Uh they do. And guess what? The Uncle Sam owns a big chunk of Intel, too. so uh there’s a bit of circular circularity there. Um so this is kind of a new thing for them and robots are cool. We’ll have to see where this goes. but I thought we’d uh dial up the Wi-Fi interactive and just show some of the charts. This is uh what mobile has done over the last year. So not that great, down 35% and you can see plunging to new lows there. And I’ll give you a max chart. excuse me there. uh since inception, since their IPO a few years ago. and you can see they’re right hugging those lows right there. So, they need something to kind of uh stoke investor appetite again. And to be fair, they just came off of uh some inventory adjustments with respect to the auto uh companies, uh manufacturers who buy their products. China has been a rough spot for them. So, they’re trying to turn things around and this is just, you know, an interesting story that got us talking about it.

01:46 Speaker A

Yes, for sure. And it looks like analysts are pretty positive on it as well. They think that this makes sense. And we should point out Mentee, which is the name of the company bought, it doesn’t have a mar it doesn’t have any product on the market yet. It’s been around for about four years. It’s been developing different different robots. And these are, I it’s my understanding, they’re designed to help build stuff, right? Whether that is mobilized um tech itself or other kinds of tech.

02:12 Jared Blikry

Yes, the pictures I saw, they look humanoid and so not all robots are designed to are in our image, but uh these are.

02:20 Speaker A

These are, but again, they’re not on the market yet. They’re still they’re still figuring it out. All right, let’s talk about First Solar here because it’s leading declines in the S&P 500. Jeffries has cut the company to hold amid tariff risks as well as its valuation and some questions about its sort of long-term strategy here. So, um, interesting call that’s really having quite a big effect. It was Julian uh Dumelin Smith over Jeffries who downgrade. It’s just a downgrade to a hold by the way, but we’re seeing the stock down 9%.

02:54 Jared Blikry

Well, I let’s go to the chart first because I think this kind of informs as to why Jeffries is putting that hold on. They say, and look at this nice run. That’s since uh the post liberation day lows right there. The stock has had a nice run and that is that is all that’s baked in right now. So that is uh impressive off of those lows up 23% over the trailing year. I’m going to show you a max chart here and I know Jeffries is not making a technical analysis call, but I will point out that this company IPOed in 2006, within a couple of years, they reached their all-time high and uh this was very was very recently tested not only once in the preceding years, but also within the last year. And so this is there’s a technical ceiling here and it’s the stock is going to need a new catalyst to uh drive beyond that. But first Solar has enjoyed a stret has enjoyed um relative out performance uh from some of the other solar manufacturers because they are not in the business of necessarily outfitting your home. They’re more of an institutional play. They also manufacture in the US, so, you know, it kind of aligns with the Trump’s uh America first strategy. And uh, you know, the other interesting thing is that Solar did very well in the first Trump administration and that was not expected. And uh Solar has actually done pretty well in fits and starts and it depends on the company, but it’s also done well over the last year. So it depends, you got to pick your company here, but I think people looking for that America first angle probably uh might have stumbled on this stock and then again, it has has some technical hurdles there.

04:21 Speaker A

Right. And well and the analyst says that the visibility into bookings next year is just not great and so that’s one of the reasons why he’s downgrading. He said, you know, if you look to 2025, the company cut guidance, uh had margin compression, but the stock kept going up and he thinks that the policy support is not necessarily going to be there this year. So

04:47 Jared Blikry

Especially in an election year, yes.

04:49 Speaker A

Yeah, exactly, mid-terms. All right, and then let’s talk about strategy. Those shares are getting a boost. MSCI is pausing its plans to exclude digital asset Treasury companies from its market indexes. Now, to give a little bit of background on this. So, MSCI is one of these big companies that makes big indexes. and they have rules around those indexes. And there had been talk that they were considering excluding digital asset treasuries entirely. Now, this would be bad because when a company goes into an index, a lot of money follows it.

05:27 Jared Blikry

Asset flows just automatically.

05:28 Speaker A

Yeah. And strategy has pushed back and other digital asset companies, Dats have pushed back forcefully against this rule change. It doesn’t seem like it’s entirely off the table, but they’re not doing it right now.

05:41 Jared Blikry

Yes. And to be fair, I don’t know how much the MSCI waiting or, you know, whether or not they include them in the indices is going to really provide that incremental bid on micro strategy because if we go to the Wi-Fi interactive, I just want to point out that this is a levered bet. This company strategy is a levered bet on Bitcoin. So I have uh an ETF here which is I bit, that’s my Bitcoin proxy here. Um, and you can see that micro strategy is down 53% over the last year versus Bitcoin down 5% and they really started diverging last year. And one thing I’ve noticed and I’m going to defer to my technical analysis uh here, and one thing I’ve noticed is that strategy uh when it is leading either to the upside or the downside, that is a direction you’d kind of want to be in with respect to Bitcoin. So I would look, I’ll pull this up on a one-month chart, you can see strategies still leading to the downside. Once that turns around, that to me is a good sign that it’s time to buy Bitcoin. Um, but as far as inclusion in the index, I mean, you can go either way there. I don’t think the passive flows are going to help it that much. I think when people are excited about Bitcoin, they buy strategy and that is what propels the stock.

07:05 Speaker A

Right. Well, I think it would be different if we’re talking about the S&P 500 in particular because there was also chatter at one point that it might be included there. Um that could provide a little bit of a more meaningful upside.

07:22 Jared Blikry

Yeah, you’re going to get a lot more funds tied to the S&P 500 through VOO, SPY, etc. MSCI, for all the work they do, they just don’t have the same cachet or the same uh assets under management.

07:38 Speaker A

Right. Well, and most of their indexes are bigger. so there’s just more stocks in it, so it’s less incremental for the individual ones too.

07:49 Jared Blikry

Very well.

07:49 Speaker A

All right, well, we’ll see we’ll see what happens. Jared Blikry, thank you so much.

07:54 Jared Blikry

Thank you.

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