Airlines climb with end of shutdown in sight, despite widespread flight cancellations

Shares of major US airlines are rising Monday as investors react optimistically to the Senate getting closer to a deal to end the government shutdown.

Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, United Airlines, and JetBlue were all up about 2% in premarket trading, despite hundreds of flight cancellations and delays across the US.

Nearly 1,600 flights within, into, or out of the US have been canceled on Monday, data from Flight Aware shows, and more than 1,400 have been delayed. According to a CNN analysis, this weekend was the worst for air traffic control staffing since the beginning of the shutdown 40 days ago.

The Senate just advanced a deal that could end the government shutdown

Nearly 1,600 flights within, into, or out of the US have been canceled on Monday, data from Flight Aware shows, and more than 1,400 have been delayed. According to a CNN analysis, this weekend was the worst for air traffic control staffing since the beginning of the shutdown 40 days ago.

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Matt Phillips29m

Coinbase rises after token platform launch is confirmed

Coinbase shares jumped early Monday, after The Wall Street Journal confirmed rumors about it launching a new site offering retail traders access to “token offerings” reminiscent of the “intial coin offering” craze from a few years back.

After soaring between 2016 and 2018, the ICO market imploded amid a “collapse in crypto prices, along with the rampant fraud,” that “led to regulatory scrutiny and a drastic decline in token offerings in the following years,” the Journal reported.

The new site from Coinbase, however, will “provide users with a more professional, safer way to buy new tokens. It will feature investor-protection mechanisms that discourage quick profit-taking and prevent immediate token dumping by project founders,” company officials told the Journal.

Exclusive | Coinbase Launches Platform for Digital Token Offerings

The new site from Coinbase, however, will “provide users with a more professional, safer way to buy new tokens. It will feature investor-protection mechanisms that discourage quick profit-taking and prevent immediate token dumping by project founders,” company officials told the Journal.

Luke Kawa29m

Bank of America: Claiming an AI bubble over OpenAI's money situation is a “lazy/cherry-picked argument”

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya is throwing down the gauntlet: there’s one bear case against AI stocks he really doesn’t like.

“The common argument that ‘AI stocks must be overvalued because OpenAI cannot justify $1.4 trillion of long-term commitments’ is a lazy/cherry-picked argument in our view,” he wrote in a note to clients on Monday, in which the analyst reiterated his confidence in his favorite data center and semi stocks.

He added:

“While we agree OpenAI’s plans are very ambitious, none of that spending has yet been put in place and will be gated by practical constraints such as access to power and data center space. The majority of AI spending is being done by profitable, public hyperscalers for whom upgrading infrastructure is mission-critical (upgrade to accelerated from traditional CPU-computing) and defensive (e.g. Google’s $92bn capex ‘defends’ a $200bn+ search leadership by providing Gemini-chatbot driven results to all customers who might otherwise defect to ChatGPT, Perplexity or other search engines.) Meanwhile private AI companies are making rapid strides attracting business customers (1mn+ by OpenAI, 300K+ by Anthropic) which will continue to put pressure on public software and infrastructure-as-a service vendors to raise AI investments.”

On the one hand, yes, I concur: while ChatGPT may have been what brought the AI boom into public consciousness, it’s not the alpha and omega of the movement. The continued push from the publicly traded, immensely profitable tech companies that lead the S&P 500 is probably the more important factor behind the mile-deep, inch-wide AI spending boom in the here and now.

On the other hand, OpenAI’s spending commitments have driven big valuation bumps for Amazon, Broadcom, AMD, and Oracle in just the past two months. In other words, those stocks have priced in that demand being real and realized. To the extent it isn’t, or can’t be, well then some overvaluation worries would be somewhat justified.

Reports that OpenAI is moving toward an IPO, however, would offer some enhanced confidence that it’ll be able to get its hands on the cash necessary to follow through on these pledges.

Luke Kawa

2h

Inside Opendoor’s plan to give short sellers a temporary middle finger

“I mostly just pity them. They don’t really build anything,” Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian said of short sellers.

Anti-immigration Rally And Pro-immigration Counter-demonstration In Toronto, Canada

J. Edward Moreno2h

Health insurers slide after Trump targets them in social media posts

Major health insurers are down in premarket trading on Monday after President Trump took aim at them over the weekend in a series of antagonizing social media posts, as lawmakers make progress on a deal to end the government shutdown.

Affordable Care Act tax credits, which subsidize plans provided by private insurers, have been a major point of contention among lawmakers as they inch toward a deal to reopen the government. Over the weekend, Trump suggested in a Truth Social post that “THE MONEY MUST NOW GO DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE, TAKING THE ‘FAT CAT’ INSURANCE COMPANIES OUT OF THE CORRUPT SYSTEM OF HEALTHCARE.”

The Senate voted on Sunday to advance a proposal to end the shutdown (now the longest in history), a proposal that reportedly does not include an extension of the ACA tax credits. The market-implied probability of ACA tax credit extensions making it to the first funding bill fell from over 60% on Sunday to 4% on Monday morning, according to data from Polymarket.

The biggest providers of ACA marketplace plans like UnitedHealthcare, Elevance Health, Oscar Health, and Molina Healthcare fell by Monday morning.

Plug Power soars on planned collaboration with US data center developer, highlighting its “growing presence in the rapidly expanding” sector

Shares of Plug Power are jumping double-digits as of 7:30 a.m. ET after the hydrogen fuel cell company announced that it “has signed a non-binding Letter of Intent to monetize its electricity rights in New York and one other location and collaborate with a US data center developer.”

Access to energy has emerged as the key bottleneck in the US AI boom, as recently highlighted by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Management highlighted that expanding its footprint in the “rapidly expanding data center sector” by offering back-up power solutions is a priority for the company.

In October, HC Wainwright analyst Amit Dayal spotlighted Plug’s potential role in providing power to data centers, upping his price target to $7 from $3, the highest on Wall Street, which set off record call activity in the stock.

Amid rising energy demand, Plug’s offerings begin to look “increasingly price-competitive and case for adoption becomes stronger,” he wrote. Peer Bloom Energy has also cashed in on the AI boom, striking a deal to deliver power to some of Oracle’s data centers, which accelerated the stock’s surge.

In the press release, Plug also noted that it expects to generate more than $275 million in “liquidity improvement” through monetizing assets (like the aforementioned electricity rights in New York and elsewhere), the release of restricted cash, and lower maintenance expenses. Management added that they are suspending activities related to the Department of Energy loan program (which was going to be used to increase hydrogen production), saying that its July announcement for hydrogen supply reduced its need to produce more itself.

The company is slated to deliver its Q3 results today.

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