Markets
markets
Claire Yubin Oh

BABA rises after its relaunched AI app Qwen hits over 10 million downloads in one week

Alibaba is trading 3.5% higher in the US premarket after the Chinese e-commerce giant disclosed that its revamped Qwen app was downloaded more than 10 million times in the week since it was relaunched, per Bloomberg.

The impressive download figures follows Alibaba’s decision earlier this month to streamline and consolidate its AI services under the Qwen banner, with plans to add agentic AI features to support its main Taobao business in coming months — a move in line with Alibaba’s recent rebrand as an AI-first business under CEO Eddie Wu. Qwen’s latest results and the company’s wider AI strategy will be in the spotlight during its third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.

The early user figures for Alibaba’s Qwen followed a similar pattern seen by Chinese peers like Ant Group Co., which saw its new multimodal AI assistant LingGuang downloaded more than a million times in the four days since its launch last week, Bloomberg reported. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still unavailable in China.

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markets
Claire Yubin Oh

Novo Nordisk sinks after Ozempic’s key ingredient fails to slow down Alzheimer’s in trials

Novo Nordisk is down nearly 9% in trading in Europe, with its US-listed ADRs dropping a similar amount, after the pharma giant shared that oral semaglutide — a key ingedient behind its Ozempic and Wegovy drugs — didn’t slow Alzheimer’s disease in two trials.

Per the company’s press release, oral semaglutide failed to show a statistically significant reduction in early-stage Alzheimer’s disease progression compared to a placebo across two large-scale, late-stage trials. From the release:

The two trials were randomised, double-blinded, enrolled a total of 3808 adults and evaluated the efficacy and safety of oral semaglutide compared to placebo on top of standard of care.

Treatment with semaglutide did result in improvement of some Alzheimer’s disease-related biomarkers, but it “did not translate into a delay of disease progression.”

Noting that the trials were conducted “despite a low likelihood of success” from the start, chief scientific officer Martin Holst Lange commented that, “while semaglutide did not demonstrate efficacy in slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, the extensive body of evidence supporting semaglutide continues to provide benefits for individuals with type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related comorbidities.”

markets
Luke Kawa

Retail traders have hit the eject button on Sandisk

Souring sentiment on the AI trade has caused retail traders to flee one of the boom’s biggest beneficiaries in recent months.

The masses are voting with their feet by exiting Sandisk en masse in recent sessions, notes JPMorgan analyst Arun Jain.

Sandisk JPM

Shares are down nearly 30% from their peak after soaring more than 450% from the end of August through November 12. Aggressive data center build outs have spurred a need for flash memory chips (provided by companies such as Sandisk) as well as processing memory (offered by the likes of Micron).

Tasha Matsumoto
11/21/25
Stocks rebound from yesterday’s sell-off but still post weekly losses

The rally was broad-based, with every sector ETF rising.

Chicago Bulls Dennis Rodman (91) and Michael Jordan (23) in action, rebounding vs Charlotte Hornets
Luke Kawa
11/21/25
How bitcoin’s moves show that the stock market is actually fueled by vibes

Bitcoin has been strongly correlated with the S&P 500; the low-volatility stocks within the S&P 500 have not.

Roller coaster steel car full of riders
markets
Luke Kawa

Nvidia spikes on report that the Trump administration is considering letting Nvidia sell its best Hopper chips to China

One big headline really can change price action.

Shares of Nvidia popped 2% after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration is internally discussing the idea of letting Nvidia sell its H200 chips to China. These chips, unlike the H20, are not the nerfed versions that Nvidia designed specifically for sale to China, but rather are its best chips from its Hopper generation, which preceded Blackwell.

The president had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China ahead of talks with Chinese President Xi in late October, but this item was reportedly axed from the agenda at the last minute, per The Wall Street Journal.

Nvidia’s success in 2025 has come despite, not because of, its China business. New export restrictions weighed on its ability to send H20 chips to the world’s second-largest economy. The company took a $4.5 billion impairment charge in its Q1 earnings related to this export ban, and said Q2 sales would have been $8 billion higher if these curbs were not in effect.

After Nvidia reached a deal with the Trump administration that restored its ability to ship that chip, China reportedly responded by banning its domestic technology companies from buying these semiconductors.

“Sizable purchase orders [for the H20] never materialized in the quarter due to geopolitical issues and the increasingly competitive market in China,” CFO Colette Kress said on a conference call with analysts on Wednesday.

Ahead of Nvidia’s earnings report, this headline had hit the wires:

*TRUMP: IF NVIDIA’S HUANG IS HAPPY, I’M HAPPY

Well, the CEO didn’t seem too thrilled by the market’s reaction to the chip designer’s strong Q3 results. Perhaps this will cheer him up.

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