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Stocks sink as strong Nvidia earnings fail to ease Wall Street’s AI anxiety

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 all fell, with tech leading the sell-off.

Stocks wiped out early gains from post-Nvidia earnings euphoria, as the chip designer’s blowout earnings weren’t enough to ease investors’ concerns of bloated valuations and an AI bubble. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF opened over 1.5% up and closed over 1.5% lower, a feat seen only three other times since the fund’s inception.

All major US indexes dropped as the tech sector led the sell-off. Every company in the Magnificent 7 fell, despite Alphabet notching a new intraday high in early trading.

Odds of a December Fed rate cut crept higher after the September jobs report presented a mixed bag: much better job growth than anticipated, but the unemployment rate unexpectedly edged higher.

Stocks that moved higher:

Walmart spiked after reporting earnings and sales results that beat Wall Street estimates, showing American consumers are flocking to the company’s stores.

Stocks that moved lower:

Despite blowout earnings and CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress dismantling most of the recent arguments and bear cases put forward by their naysayers in yesterday’s earnings call, Nvidia dipped.
Shares of US auto giant Ford ticked down following reports of another major fire at its primary aluminum supplier’s plant in Oswego County, New York.
Tesla initially spiked amid AI bullishness as Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter said Full Self-Driving software is “already better at driving than the average American” before closing lower along with the rest of the Mag 7.

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Luke Kawa2h

US stocks just suffered one of their most stunning reversals in 32 years

Only four times in the more than 32-year history of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF has the fund opened at least 1.5% higher only to end the session down 1.5% or more.

And one of those days was today, with early enthusiasm over Nvidia’s strong earnings report turning into a wave of selling as speculative assets, chief among them bitcoin, cratered and dragged everything down with them. The S&P 500’s winners in particular saw heavy selling. Among the 15 stocks in the index that are up at least 70% year to date, the average performance on Thursday was down 5.6%.

The other occasions where US stocks have suffered such a violent turnabout:

April 8 of this year (the bottom, year to date!), when the White House said tariffs on China were going up to above 100%, kneecapping a nascent bounce-back attempt after a 10% drubbing in the three days after the Rose Garden tariff announcements. President Donald Trump would go on to announce that he was slashing reciprocal tariffs for 90 days the following session.

And the other two such instances both occurred in October 2008 (on the 7th and the 9th), as the fallout from the unfolding financial crisis was spreading after the prior month’s collapse of Lehman Brothers and the VIX Index, Wall Street’s so-called “fear gauge,” was routinely above 50, making immense volatility par for the course.

Matt Phillips6h

Insurance against Oracle default becomes favorite AI-bust hedge, Bloomberg reports

Volume in the market for credit default swaps — essentially a kind of insurance against a company defaulting on its debts — on Oracle is surging as the company has supercharged its borrowing to finance its AI ambitions, Bloomberg’s Caleb Mutua reports:

“The price to protect against the company defaulting on its debt for five years tripled in recent months to as high as about 1.11 percentage point a year on Wednesday, or around $111,000 for every $10 million of principal protected, according to ICE Data Services.

As AI skeptics rushed in, trading volume on the company’s CDS ballooned to about $5 billion over the seven weeks ended Nov. 14, according to Barclays Plc credit strategist Jigar Patel. That’s up from a little more than $200 million in the same period last year.”

A Hedge Against AI Crash Emerges as Oracle CDS Market Explodes

“The price to protect against the company defaulting on its debt for five years tripled in recent months to as high as about 1.11 percentage point a year on Wednesday, or around $111,000 for every $10 million of principal protected, according to ICE Data Services.

As AI skeptics rushed in, trading volume on the company’s CDS ballooned to about $5 billion over the seven weeks ended Nov. 14, according to Barclays Plc credit strategist Jigar Patel. That’s up from a little more than $200 million in the same period last year.”

Nvidia dunks on the doubters

CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress dismantled most of the recent arguments and bear cases put forward by their naysayers.

Luke Kawa7h

Matt Phillips8h

Cipher Mining surges on additional AI hosting deal

Bitcoin miner turned AI compute power provider Cipher Mining jumped early Thursday after announcing a deal that fully leases its Barber Lake data center in Colorado City, Texas.

The deal — which is also giving a lift to IREN, another miner turned compute provider — is an expansion of a previous agreement with Fluidstack, a UK-based provider of GPU-based cloud networks. The new deal amounts to roughly $830 million in additional revenue over 10 years, Cipher says.

The market clearly loves it. But it’s worth pointing out that this agreement is a pretty good example of the byzantine financial structures that are increasingly accompanying plans for many billions of dollars of spending on the AI boom.

For example, Cipher also announced Thursday that it would be borrowing $333 million to finance an expansion of that Barber Lake data center through a private placement of debt.

That offering will be secured, in part, by the warrants Google received to purchase Cipher common stock worth roughly 5.4% of the company. (Those warrants, by the way, look a lot more valuable today, with Cipher mining up double digits.) Google is also backstopping Fluidstack’s borrowing plans to finance its build-out to the tune of $1.4 billion.

For now, this makes financial sense. Alphabet — one of the most successful companies on the planet — needs the computing power to compete in the AI race. And the quickest way to get that capacity is to essentially cosign leases for the smaller companies taking the lead in that build-out, thereby lowering development costs and helping to bring projects into existence.

But in this deal alone, things get awfully complicated awfully quickly, as Alphabet is essentially the prime customer of, an important debt guarantor for, and potentially a significant owner in Cipher Mining, once it transfers the warrants into an ownership stake of more than 5%.

This isn’t, on its face, a terrible thing. There are precedents for circular funding relationships in industries like aerospace, as it developed from the 1920s to the 1950s.

But financial complexity does have a history of essentially hiding the level and locus of financial risks a system is building up, essentially during periods of heady optimism.

Cipher Mining Signs Additional 56 MW, 10-Year AI Hosting Agreement with Fluidstack

This isn’t, on its face, a terrible thing. There are precedents for circular funding relationships in industries like aerospace, as it developed from the 1920s to the 1950s.

But financial complexity does have a history of essentially hiding the level and locus of financial risks a system is building up, essentially during periods of heady optimism.

Luke Kawa9h

Odds of December Fed cut creep higher after unemployment rate unexpectedly rises in September

The September jobs report was a mixed bag: much better job growth than anticipated, but the unemployment rate unexpectedly edged higher.

The release of this data, which was delayed by the government shutdown, showed that nonfarm payrolls grew 119,000 (compared to the expected 51,000), but the unemployment rate crept up to 4.4%, while economists thought it would remain steady at 4.3%.

Event contracts show that the likelihood of the US central bank standing pat in December moderated to about 65% from around 75% prior to the release.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

Job growth for the prior two months was revised lower by 33,000.

The market-implied odds of a Fed cut in December tanked on Wednesday after the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the updated employment statistics through November wouldn’t be published until December 16 — that is, the week after the US central bank’s last meeting of the year.

During the press conference that followed the October decision to lower rates by 25 basis points, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said that a dearth of fresh data “could be an argument in favor of caution about moving,” adding that a rate cut in December was “far from” a foregone conclusion.

Fedspeak since that October rate cut has generally tilted hawkish. Some voting members like Boston Fed President Susan Collins and Kansas City President Jeffrey Schmid (who dissented from the last cut) have signaled that they are unlikely to support an interest rate cut in December. Fed Governors Chris Waller and Stephen Miran have publicly endorsed another rate reduction, while other officials have yet to take a definitive stance. The minutes from the October meeting said that “many participants” thought “it would likely be appropriate to keep the target rate unchanged for the rest of the year.”

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