Bank of America recommits to Nvidia as “top pick” in chips

EV maker Rivian is climbing for the tenth-consecutive day on Wednesday, putting the company on pace for its longest winning streak ever.

The stock has climbed more than 40% in the two-week stretch, as the company prepares to start customer deliveries of its highly anticipated R2 SUV on June 9. The EV will launch at nearly $60,000, with a lower-priced variant in the $45,000 range due to release late next year. Rivian has implied it expects to deliver up to 25,000 R2s this calendar year.

Despite the hot streak, Rivian shares are down about 7% year-to-date and nearly 90% from their all-time high in late 2021.

Intel rose Wednesday morning, recovering some of its losses from earlier this week after Nvidia announced that it would enter the laptop market with its new PC “superchip.”

Speaking at the Computex ​expo in Taipei on ‌Tuesday, Intel executives gave bullish updates on the company’s business, including:

• Intel’s 18A process is now “at full scale” with “hundreds of design wins” and has been ramped to “high volume with multiple products,” according to Alex Katouzian, head of the company’s physical AI group.

• It also noted new deals for custom silicon, including a deployed Google Infrastructure Processing Unit and infrastructure silicon for Ericsson.

• Intel is making “tremendous progress” building its foundry business, according to CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

• A new partnership with Foxconn will “develop rack scale products built upon Intel Xeon processors.”

Intel has risen about 3.4% as of 11 a.m. ET Monday, leaving it only slightly red for the week. The stock has nearly tripled in value since the start of the year.

Shares of major US alternative asset managers like KKR & Co., Blackstone, Ares Management, and Blue Owl Capital are tumbling after Switzerland-based Partners Group capped investor withdrawals from a flagship private equity fund, reigniting broader market anxieties over private asset valuations and systemic liquidity.

Overseas, Partners Group’s stock dropped 17% in Zurich trading, marking its worst single-day drop on record and sending it to a 52-week low, according to CNBC.

The panic was triggered when Partners Group announced it had restricted redemptions within its $8.6 billion Global Value SICAV fund in a statement and filing to investors, according to Reuters. In a Bloomberg TV interview, Partners Group CEO David Layton said that the sudden surge of investor exit requests hit 9.8% of the fund’s total value during the second quarter. Because this nearly doubled the fund’s internal safety threshold, Partners Group automatically triggered structural guardrails to limit quarterly cash withdrawals to just 5% of net asset value.

“There are some idiosyncratic factors for this fund in particular, but indeed you do see investors broadly, after having redemption pressure within private credit for a number of quarters, now starting to redeem other asset classes,” Layton said on Wednesday.

The sector-wide drop followed a similar announcement just one day ago from asset manager Cliffwater, which capped quarterly redemptions at 5% after investors asked to withdraw roughly 17% of shares from the $31 billion private credit fund, according to Bloomberg.

The market’s sharp reaction stems from the fact that US giants like Blackstone, KKR, and Ares have spent years courting wealthy individual and retail investors to fuel their growth. With a surge in redemption requests starting in private credit late last year and now officially bleeding into private equity, investors are growing skittish that portfolios are holding over-marked assets that cannot be quickly liquidated.

Air taxi maker Beta Technologies climbed by 5% in premarket trading on Wednesday after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted a video about his recent flight in the company’s electric aircraft.

The Department of Transportation announced Duffy’s Beta flight on Monday, writing that he’d become “the first Transportation Secretary in American history to fly in an electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft.”

Late Tuesday, Duffy posted another video referencing the flight, writing, “🔥A HOT NEW AIRCRAFT ENTERS THE VILLA👀”

Air taxi rivals Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation were each down about 1.4% in premarket trading. All three companies are participating in the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. All three are also down at least 10% year to date heading into market open on Wednesday.