markets

Luke Kawa9/16/25

Institutional investors are the most bullish since the February peak in stocks, and no longer think a trade war is the biggest risk out there

The trade war is over and risk appetite is high.

That’s the message from Bank of America’s September survey of fund managers with $426 billion in assets, who are collectively their most optimistic since February 2025 (an intermediate peak for the S&P 500).

BofA FMS August

Key to this view seems to be that investors have capitulated on the idea that higher prices on US imports and disruptions to cross-border trade are the top threat to economic activity. “Trade war triggers global recession” was deemed the No. 1 tail risk from the February through August surveys. It’s now No. 4, trailing a second wave of inflation, the loss of Fed independence/US dollar debasement, and a disorderly rise in bond yields.

Positioning among institutional investors is “starting to close the gap to retail investors’ stock allocation,” Bank of America Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett wrote.

BofA positioning

Implicit in this increasing bullishness is a desire for companies to take part in the AI boom and invest for growth and efficiency.

“Asked what companies should do with their cash flow, 39% of fund manager survey investors said they want companies to increase capital spending (the most since Dec’24) while 27% said they want companies to improve balance sheets (lowest since Feb’22),” Hartnett wrote.

BofA FMS capex

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Matt Phillips20m

Palantir continues to dive as retail favorites, momentum stocks get hit

Palantir’s market pounding continues, as the intelligence, defense, and commercial AI software company slumps along with other retail favorites, bitcoin, and high-beta momentum trades such as space plays AST SpaceMobile and Rocket Lab, and quantum computing trades D-Wave Quantum and Rigetti Computing through the first half of Thursday’s session.

Palantir partisans could credibly argue that Alex Karp’s company shouldn’t be lumped in with that sort of crowd, some of which are a long way from profits, when Palantir has posted outstanding financial performance in recent quarters. But the market doesn’t seem to be listening — or at least, has stopped hearing reassurance after the stock’s massive run-up.

Thursday’s drop of more than 5% — shortly before 12 p.m. in New York — brings its cumulative losses to more than 35% since its November 3, 2025, all-time closing high. And that’s done considerable amounts of damage to the technical backdrop for the shares.

Late last month, Palantir traded far below its 200-day moving average, a key level of technical support that had held since May 2023, when the shares first started to gather steam. A break below the 200-day moving average underscores a serious loss of momentum for a stock, and can prompt some traders to reconsider their views on whether a stock that has been a winner has truly lost its mojo.

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How the character of the AI trade has changed — for the worse — in 2026

A smattering of observations on how the character of the AI trade has changed this year — with, obviously, some of these trends not having waited for a full turn of the Earth around the sun to start to establishing themselves:

All the bullish oxygen is being sucked out of the room and squarely into the memory chip shortage, which is offering bumper profits for a handful of firms. On a related note, semicap equipment stocks have been an upstream beneficiary of this dynamic. The underlying message is that near-term scarcity is being rewarded by the market.
That the big capex spenders will generate a high return on investment from their outlays is not something traders are willing to take for granted. Big budgets are not necessarily getting applauded; even companies that seemingly earn the benefit of the doubt by posting accelerating revenue growth, à la Meta, aren’t able to maintain those gains for long.
The big “consumers” of memory chips are getting squeezed. This includes the hyperscalers, obviously, but even more so the likes of Qualcomm, which has to wait behind these giants in line for supplies, which played a role in the company’s underwhelming outlook.
For public markets, the theme is more of a net negative than a positive. Firms seen as the most likely to be disrupted by AI (basically, the entire software industry) are getting indiscriminately clobbered, regardless of how good their quarterly results and guidance are.
The facilitators of disruption, in many cases, have not yet arrived on public markets but plan to do so this year. That’s SpaceX/xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. So if the AI theme has seemed a little “negative sum” in this year, that might be about the room that investment firms know they’re going to need in their portfolios to add these stocks once they’re able to (or, in some cases, ahead of time).
And this isn’t really a 2026 dynamic, strictly speaking, but the two biggest chip companies have been dead money for months. Since the end of Q3, Nvidia and Broadcom are both negative, with the S&P 500 up about 2% over this span.

markets

Matt Phillips3h

Memory chip makers bounce back after report of customers turning to China for supplies

High-flying memory chip stocks like Sandisk and Micron bounced back early Thursday after dropping in pre-market trading following a Nikkei report that some PC makers are considering turning to Chinese companies — such as ChangXin Memory Technologies — for supplies amid a historic chip price spike sent them down in the premarket session.

HP, Dell, Acer and Asus mull using Chinese memory chips amid supply crunch, Nikkei Asia reports

HP, Dell, Acer and Asus mull using Chinese memory chips amid supply crunch, Nikkei Asia reports

We have the futures market — and Ray Dalio — to thank for the Chicken McNugget

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio reimagined the chicken as an entity that consumes corn and soybeans on its way to being consumed by you.

Dozens Gather To Watch McDonald's Fan Eat Chicken Nuggets

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Max Knoblauch4h

Nio projects its first quarterly profit, sending shares surging

Chinese EV maker Nio on Thursday said it expects to achieve its first-ever quarterly profit in its fourth quarter. Its US-traded ADRs rose more than 6% in premarket trading.

Based on a preliminary assessment, Nio projects Q4 adjusted profit from operations of between $100 million and $172 million. Wall Street analysts polled by FactSet estimated a Q4 adjusted operating loss of $19 million.

Nio attributed the preliminary results to sustained sales volume growth, vehicle margin optimization, and cost reductions. Nio delivered 124,807 vehicles in its fourth quarter, which ended in December, up 72% year over year.

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