Good thursday morning. Welcome to squawk alley. I am Carl Quintanilla with Morgan Brennan and jon fortt at post nine of the New York Stock Exchange record highs as you know by now, up almost 250, yields close to seven week highs carl, we have record highs in all three major indexes. You can see behind me, you look at those particular moves with the dow, s p 500 and nasdaq, we will put stars next to every one, record highs for every one of these indexes, and trade optimism fueling a lot of that you look at sector leaders over the course of the past month that pushed those averages toward record highs, within the s p 500, financials, industrial, technology up 10 for financials, 9 for industrials, technology up 7 . These two sectors, tech and industrials are close to their own record highs now, on pace for some closes at record levels then if you want to look at stocks within the dow, check out these names, ones more tied to trade optimism or pessimism throughout the course of the last year, shares of caterpillar, 3m, up 14 to 24 for cat. Morgan, i point out, record high for apple shares keep an eye on all trade sensitive stocks, driving the action to record highs i will send things back to you dom chu, thank you. Caqualcomm is up today jon sat down with the ceo steven mollenkopf, he has more from that interview and results from the quarter. Good chunk of california i was able to get done there qualcomm up close to 9 , at one point during the morning up above 92 bucks a share, close to 20 year highs there. Given everything that qualcomm had to deal with in the past couple years that do not have to do with the fundamental functioning of the product, having to do with legal challenges, having to do with takeover threats, i asked the ceo Steve Mollenkopf, are we at the point where investors are focused on the product and business and not the other stuff. Heres what he said. It really feels that way, if you look at kind of where the energy is with the company, it is all about how do we take advantage of the ramp for 5g you know, i have been with this company a long time, this is my third big g transition this is the one were doing across tiers, geographically at the same time, tremendous amount of energy at qualcomm. It is great. Were very comfortable doing that, but it feels like we turned a corner. More from the conversation coming later in the hour the question for investors now has to be you have been through three g transitions, not every g for qualcomm translates into gs for investors. So how big a Financial Impact is this transition going to have . We talked a bit about that and the factors behind it. It will be a conversation that continues into the next couple weeks. Qualcomm will be in new york for an analyst day something they havent done a long time, they have the nxp thing hanging over their heads, that acquisition didnt get done, they had the other legal stuff. Now theyre talking about growth and investors. At least today, investors are buying it. The stock up 61 year to date, 45 the past year, despite dramas, legal stuff et cetera that you laid out. Because a number of those things cleared up. I was looking on my flight back at sort of everything that qualcomm has been through, and back at broadcoms bid for qualcomm which was at 70 bucks a share, i dont know if you remember that, two years ago to the day, they were offering 70 a share. Now theyre at 91. Since then broadcom is up about 26ish over that time period qualcomm, more like 45 so there you go. Interesting to see more of the interview as the hour unfolds. Returning to a story broken by cnbc late yesterday, alphabet board investigating executives over inappropriate relationships, the reporter behind the scoop, Jennifer Elias joins us at post nine. Welcome to squawk alley. Thanks for having me. Tell us what exactly is being investigated and why so whats being investigated is handling of Sexual Harassment cases by executives. Now, it could be broader than that, but thats at least part of what we know for now, and why. Thats a great question were trying to figure out i mean, there wasa class actio lawsuit earlier this year that went into shareholders had against the board, now that the board is hiring a subcommittee and law firm to investigate with executives, it is not clear what the motive of that is. Do they have does alphabet have some specific protocol in place in terms of interoffice relationships and what that looks like i know Different Companies have different policies. Their policy has changed now. It is that people cannot date their subordinate. Anyone thats reporting to them. That has changed a couple times. It wasnt always like that but right now, thats the policy, thats what theyll be looking into google is infamous in Silicon Valley in the past for not having that type of policy on this sort of thing one of the cofounders was openly dating a marketing employee as he was breaking up with his wife. Er eric schmidt, larry page, larisa meyer, different sorts of issues what do they really have to investigate . A lot of the stuff is out there. Right, it has been considered an open secret in the company for years and we know this particular investigation will include the companys chief legal officer, david drummond, and this has been an open secret, people have known he has supposedly allegedly dated employees, thats what theyre going to look into, but no doubt the Company Knows this already all right Jennifer Elias, thanks for joining us. All this happening as the journal says google is weighing changes to its stance on political ads. Well turn to far hod man june and bethany mclane good to see you. Cnn has a piece, not looking at changing the overall policy on ads but to targeting how much is this conversation evolving i mean, it is shifting quickly in part because of twitter changing the policy last week, theres been outrage over facebooks policy. Google slipped under the radar here, even though google is the biggest digital ads company, and a lot of political spending and advertising spending happens at google but google hasnt gotten a lot of attention, this is true of all of the tech scandals google has the biggest, slides by they make a lot of utilities people use and we dont really associate them with political ads. They own youtube, theres a lot of advertising there, lot of questions about misinformation there, i think this conversation will really come around to google and youtube specifically, and i think they have run many of the ads that have been people criticized facebook for running. I think that this is going to be a question for them over the next year as we have been to the political season bethany, do you give dorsey credit for setting goalposts in some ways, yes, but his statement which is really beautiful and lovely that political reach should be earned rather than bought is just not the way our system works, so i put that out there as sort of a big picture statement. More narrowly, it is interesting. Washington state, both google and facebook actually did ban political ads because Campaign Laws are so tight, they didnt want to run afoul of them, and it hasnt worked well. Theres a lot of controversy whether it made things better or worse. So this isnt just about banning ads, it is about how you do it, how you implement it, and i think those are questions that have to be asked before we say a ban on advertising solves all of the problems it doesnt necessarily we had Ellen Weintraub on air talking about this earlier this week, what she basically said is what twitter is doing is kind of missing the point, it is not the right prescription for the problem, that really what you need to look at is microtargeting, and maybe the Companies Need to basically put levels in or insist that anybody thats buying political advertising do it on a broader level so more people can see the ads and debate it. Would that actually fix the situation . Is that another alternative, and if so, why hasnt it been potentially implemented . Yeah, i mean, i think thats a good point the real question is not sort of theres the content of the ad and who it is targeted to, how widely people can figure out what it is saying. Facebook has this thing called ads library, it will show you the ads that a politician is running but it is for journalists to access. It is not sort of obvious to users of the system what the ads are. I think the question of whether political ads should be allowed and if theyre allowed, whether they should be targeted, no one sort of has a good answer for it particularly because we dont have a good definition of what a political ad is. If exxon runs a Climate Change ad, is that a political ad or exxon ad those questions, nobody has figured out where the lines are. And that makes it particularly tricky for all of the companies. Very difficult thing to separate into two. Lets get to twitter as well, guys two former employees accused of spying for saudis as doj alleges they used access at twitter to get nonpublic information on dissidents of the saudi regime we talked about whether dorsey did a great thing setting a goalpost, seems in some ways, no one is clean sort of ironic juxtaposition, right . I think the sub text in this conversation is enormous, unprecedented powers the companies wield. A power not even clear the government can control if they want to, and not clear the companies can control the power they wield, even if they want to i think thats frightening add on top of that their interests are not necessarily aligned with the interest of the united states. So we have something really unprecedented playing out right now, and it is frightening to me, one of the more interesting parts of the lawsuit is that one of the people who was targeted has sued previously saying twitter knew long in advance that he had been targeted and didnt do anything about it whether or not thats just an allegation, but if the news didnt come as a surprise to twitter and they knew already there had been a problem, that kind of speaks to my earlier point. What can the companies do to control it, do they even want to, and where do their interests lie. It is one thing if this happens or when this happens at twitter, it is bad enough. Imagine if it is happening at facebook, the level of personal information that some people are posting, if theres spying at that level, is this argument for end to end encryption, perhaps not for nonobvious reasons or maybe the more obvious reasons of facebook wanting to Keep Personal Information out of the hands of our government or other governments, maybe facebook wants to keep data out of its own hands because you cant trust your own employees with users personal data what do you think . Yeah. No, i mean, it definitely is an argument for end to end encryption i was going to say it is a wakeup call but it is actually not. There have been these kinds of instances, Edward Snowden revealed how various Government Entities were tapping into big tech data and ever since then we have had a parade of stories, especially internally. These companies have controls from people on the outside getting to their systems, but on the inside, we dont have a lot of insight how though police the data, what controls about who gets access to it. I think this is a problem that twitter says it is trying to work on, but it is definitely a problem for all of them. We had numerous instances of employees doing this, having access to data they shouldnt have, it is not a surprise that governments would hire them for doing this. Disturbing story. Wish we had more time. Look forward to talking soon thanks thanks. Thanks a lot. After the break, shares of roku heading downstream this morning. Down about 11 now, so off the lows of the trading session. But the roku Ceo Anthony Wood joins us in a cnbc exclusive thats coming up next right afteth bakr isre most people think of verizon as a reliable phone company. woman but to businesses, were a reliable partner. We Keep Companies ready for whats next. man we weave security into their business. Virtualize their operations. woman and build ai customer experiences. We also keep them ready for the next big opportunity. Like 5g. Almost all the fortune 500 partner with us. woman when it comes to digital transformation. Verizon keeps business ready. Woi felt completely helpless. Hed online. My entire career and business were in jeopardy. I called reputation defender. Vo take control of your online reputation. Get your free reputation report card at reputationdefender. Com. Find out your online reputation today and let the experts help you repair it. Woman they were able to restore my good name. Vo visit reputationdefender. Com or call 18778668555. Travel stocks are getting crushed. Expedia, trip adviser down more than 20 , new year to date lows, after reporting poor results that we talked about with facebook era few moments ago seema mody can explain to put it in perspective, worst day for expedia since 2013, disnmal set of earnings. They compete with airbnb, saw Revenue Growth slow to 14 in third quarter, year over year, from 17 last quarter. On the call, the ceo talked about the competitive nature of the business and need to spend more on advertising and the tern is that could weigh on profitability going forward. The stock down 20 pivot to trip advise or, similar in terms of earnings, missed by a wide margin. Guidance was also not good the big concern there is the growth from hotels if you look at hotel earnings from marriott, hyatt, hilton, not as strong as previous quarters trip adviser plays in that space. If results arent good, that wont be good for trip advise or we have to see if results are similar or buck the downward trend. Back to you. Big impact across that space, seema mody shares of roku being hit hard, despite revenue and earnings beat. The stock now down just about 10 . It was down a lot more than that some buyers coming in. The roku Ceo Anthony Wood joins us now on those results in a cnbc exclusive anthony, good morning. Good morning. So you are investment mode in a sense. Average revenue per user up 30 , at the same time, Gross Margins coming down as you move into some new areas, including video ads. You have pending acquisition of data zoo explain to investors what youre doing here, the impact on margins, where you hope it takes you in the longer term sure. We had a great quarter our results exceeded expectations and outlook we, advertising impressions more than doubled year over year on the platform, a big area of growth for us. You know, theres a lot of new content services launching, things like disney plus, apple tv plus, great accelerators, we are an essential partner for those types of companies we set a goal of running the company this year at roughly ebitda break even, we exceeded that, slight ebitda positive this year because we are putting most of our increasing gross profit back into the business. You can see that because it is such a big opportunity, you know, most of the world still doesnt stream, even though it is getting very popular, the u. S. Is leading screening platforms. It is a big opportunity. You see things like us launching kids and family on roku channel, roku smart sound bars, new way to get active customers. A lot of products were investing in that will pay off in the future. You mention disney and apple, both launching streaming services, used a metaphor on the call, people may not realize, youre like a retailer you have people coming through roku and disney and apple can pay to get in front of those people and say subscribe to our service. You have not only revenue share when people sign up through roku but potential marketing dollars you can make off putting those users in line to get onto those services tell me how do you expect that based on what youve seen previously to trend, so when they launch, of course, expect them to spend to get users after the holiday season, maybe when people bought new devices, do you expect to see another surge in spending on these companies trying to get subscribers . Yeah, i think what were going to see, i mean, whats happening is you have the Technology Companies creating new streaming services and you have the incumbents realizing wow, most of my users are moving to streaming, so i need to follow them, so theres a lot of new streaming services launching. And were an essential partner for those services, great way to launch the service thats our business. Our business is connecting end users that are watching television with streaming services that want to reach those users. Yes, we get paid when we help sign up customers, so when our partners win, we win we help sign up customers and get a percent of revenue on that, also, we built a purpose built platform for streaming telephones and built into that platform a lot of features to merchandise, services, help these companies acquire subscribers. We get paid for that thats part of our Business Model and it is a good business. I want to ask about data zoo. I know that this hasnt closed yet so youve been a little oblique in how you talk about it, but to what degree is this going to be relevant beyond just roku are you going to continue to pursue their strategy of tv buying overall, ott, across all different platforms, even outside of roku . Are you aiming to be the go to spot for video ad program i can . Data zoo is an omni channel, the main reason we are buying data zoo is expanding the platform we have a great world class leading streaming ad platform built into tv first experience, and most tv ads even streaming today are sold direct, meaning direct sales team goes out, talks to agencies and marketers. But the world is shifting to tools automated buying for us, adding to our platform is part of our technology road map, moving that forward, getting ready for the day when all tv eventually will be ads purchas purchased, so for us, the acquisition is about a great team and expanding our ad platform to be more feature ready. Big debate happening now within Digital Advertising around political advertising, whether it is twitter, facebook, whether today, reports about google reviewing some policies as you get more involved with data zoo or otherwise into advertising, how are you thinking about that at roku . So advertising is our biggest growth profit driver you think about all television moving to advertising, there wa