Whale-shaped kite flies in the sky during a kite championship in Weifang, Shandong Province of China. (Wang Zhide/VCG via Getty Images)

Mainland, gainland

A record 99.75% of major Mainland Chinese stocks are in on the rally

A historic share of Chinese stocks gained on Monday — right before markets close for Golden Week.

Luke Kawa

9/30/24 8:56AM

How intense is the rally in Chinese equities, propelled higher by pledges of government stimulus and direct measures to support the stock market? Well, it’s so strong that basically nothing is going down.

Both key Mainland China indexes had fantastic sessions to start the week, with Shanghai’s gauge up more than 8% in its best day since 2008 and Shenzhen’s surging nearly 11%, its biggest one-day gain since 1996. And yet, that may undersell how special the session was.

Over 5000 stocks went up and only 6 retreated on Monday. Across both exchanges, the 99.75% of stocks rising in one session is the highest share on record, based on data going back to July 2001.

On the Shanghai Composite, literally nothing went down:

There are 2230 stocks in the Shanghai Composite. Not a single one fell today. The four worst stocks in the index were flat pic.twitter.com/KQ8gOKQxBM
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) September 30, 2024

For reference, even on the S&P 500’s best for breadth in recent memory — the near 5% face-ripper on December 26, 2018 that defined the equity market’s Q4 bottom on Christmas Eve — one constituent in the benchmark stock gauge still fell. And that’s just 500 stocks (with some dual-class listing funkiness); Shanghai has more than four times that.

Over in Shenzhen, the six companies that fell were:

Jiangsu Zhongli Group (-5.1%), a manufacturer of cables and wires
Hunan Jingfeng Pharmaceutical Co (-5%)
Xinjiang Haoyuan Gas Company (-3.1%)
Nanjing Red Sun Co. (-2.4%), an agricultural chemical company
Zhejiang Reclaim Construction Group (-0.6%), an infrastructure firm
Chongqing Sansheng Industrial Co (-0.4%), which makes building materials

Unfortunately for Chinese traders, this hot streak will have to go on hiatus no matter what: the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges are now closed until October 8 for Golden Week.

Matt Phillips1h

Snowflake jumps on Palantir partnership announcement

Snowflake jumped after announcing a partnership deal with AI software and defense data company Palantir Technologies, in which Snowflake’s AI-focused data storage product — called “AI Data Cloud” — is integrated into Palantir’s Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform software.

Data storage and management has emerged as a popular market theme this year as an offshoot of the all-things-AI trade.

Providers of relatively cheap, hardware-based storage options like hard disk drives — such as Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital — have been some of the S&P 500’s top performers.

Data management software firms like Snowflake and Datadog have also picked up momentum recently. Snowflake has doubled over the last 12 months, while Datadog has seen a 27% gain.

RBC analysts spotlighted Snowflake in a note Wednesday, writing, “We continue to believe Snowflake is well-positioned as an AI beneficiary as organizations turn to the company to prepare their data for AI workloads.”

Snowflake and Palantir Announce Strategic Partnership for Enterprise-Ready AI & Analytics

Providers of relatively cheap, hardware-based storage options like hard disk drives — such as Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital — have been some of the S&P 500’s top performers.

Data management software firms like Snowflake and Datadog have also picked up momentum recently. Snowflake has doubled over the last 12 months, while Datadog has seen a 27% gain.

Max Knoblauch3h

Nio denies Singapore wealth fund’s accusations of inflating revenue

Court documents indicate that Chinese EV maker Nio has been sued in US courts by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, which alleges the company inflated its revenue, causing “significant losses.”

The news sent Nio shares down 8% in premarket trading on Thursday.

The EV maker “issued materially false and misleading statements and omissions that misrepresented... the Company’s true revenue and earnings figures,” the lawsuit alleges. The suit accuses Nio of unlawfully recognizing more than $600 million in leased battery revenue in fiscal year 2021.

Last month, Nio announced a $1 billion share sale to fund development around smart EVs. The company has yet to post a profit in its 11-year history.

Update (10:35 a.m. ET): Nio has responded to the lawsuit, telling CnEVPost that the complaint stems from false allegations made in a short-selling report by Grizzly Research and is “not a newly occurring incident, nor is it directed at NIO's recent operational performance.”

Hyunsoo Rim3h

ABAT sinks after the US Department of Energy terminates its grant for lithium facility

American Battery Technology Co. is in a hole early on Thursday, currently trading 20% lower than yesterday’s close price, after the company revealed in an SEC filing that the US Department of Energy has terminated its $57.7 million grant supporting the construction of a lithium hydroxide facility.

The termination follows a May memorandum ordering audits of all grants issued by the DOE’s Manufacturing Energy Supply Chain office.

In September 2023, ABAT signed a $115 million funding deal with the DOE for the lithium plant, under which both sides were to contribute $57.7 million each. After the DOE’s audit announcement in May, the agency terminated the grant on October 9. ABAT says it appealed the decision the next day and that it plans to seek dispute resolution remedies, according to its 8K filing.

As of last week’s grant termination, about $52 million in DOE funds remain unused. The company said it has “already raised over $52 million of funds from the public markets” this year, and intends to keep the project going “without impact to timeline or scope.”

In April, the firm also received a $900 million financing letter of interest from the US Export-Import bank to back its Nevada lithium mine and refinery.

Tom Jones5h

Hewlett Packard sinks on disappointing revenue, profit, and free cash flow guidance for fiscal 2026

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is down about 9% in premarket trading after revealing an outlook at its analyst meeting that came in well below Wall Street’s expectations.

At its Securities Analyst Meeting in New York yesterday, the company revealed that it expected revenue growth of 5% to 10% next year — analysts were expecting ~18%, per Bloomberg data.

HPE also said that earnings per share for FY2026, which runs from next month until October next year, will be $2.20 to $2.40, below analysts’ estimates of $2.41 per share, according to Bloomberg. Meanwhile, it announced that free cash flow for the year would be between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, again falling short of the $2.41 billion that was expected, per Bloomberg’s data.

The company also said it would be increasing its annual dividend for the year ahead by 10% and added that it’s expecting the free cash flow figure to rise to $3.5 billion by FY2028 — news that failed to drown out the negatives.

As a key player in the computing equipment industry, the company’s tighter-than-expected financials reflect the impact the booming AI industry is having on its margins, as HPE and peers source more expensive AI chips for their servers.

Hyunsoo Rim5h

Salesforce rises after forecasting revenue north of $60 billion by 2030, with double-digit sales growth expected to return

Salesforce rose as much as 6% in early trading Thursday after issuing an upbeat revenue target and projecting a return to “double-digit growth” within the next 12 to 18 months.

At an investor event Wednesday, the software maker said it expects annual revenue to top $60 billion by fiscal 2030, ahead of Wall Street’s $58.37 billion estimate, per CNBC. The forecast excludes any impact from Salesforce’s pending $8 billion acquisition of data management firm Informatica, slated to close by mid-2026.

The new outlook comes less than six weeks since Salesforce issued underwhelming Q3 revenue guidance, extending a slowdown to single-digit sales growth since mid-2024 — as the company has yet to translate the AI hype into cold, hard cash. Chief Financial and Operating Officer Robin Washington acknowledged the company’s had “some lower-stage growth for a while,” but said it’s now “reaccelerating.”

Salesforce’s biggest bet is Agentforce, the AI assistant launched a year ago that CEO Marc Benioff calls “the core of every product we make now.” Still, AI is likely to make up just ~3% of the company’s FY 2026 revenue, with concerns emerging that new AI tools could replace legacy software providers like Salesforce — a notion that Benioff called “nonsense.”

Earlier this week, Salesforce rolled out Agentforce Voice, which allows AI agents handle customer calls, and expanded partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI to integrate their latest models into its platform.

Despite the premarket bump, shares remain down 26% year to date and 32% below their December 2024 peak.