Stocks and bitcoin slide as investors’ appetite for risk wanes

The story within the AI trade lately has been: Google’s a winner, and OpenAI is a... well, to be kind, non-winner.

Companies closely tied to the former, like Broadcom, which codesigns the TPUs that Gemini 3 was trained on, have benefited from their relationship with the hyperscaling search giant. Conversely, Nvidia, which sells to both Google and OpenAI but is besieged with worries about how custom chips might impact its AI market share (and profitability), has been selling off.

“NVDA stock is now trading at its widest ever ~40% discount to AVGO’s current 42x forward PE versus historical -10%/+7% discount/premium over the past 1/2 yrs, respectively,” Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya wrote. “In other words, consensus has already implicitly shifted at least 10+ points of (2H26E/27E) AI market share towards AVGO, conceptually.”

The abrupt shift in valuation amid this divergent price action is reversing course on Monday: Nvidia’s up about 1.5% as of 10:55 a.m. ET, while Broadcom is off 2.6%.

Crypto-adjacent shares slid in early trading along with unprofitable tech company shares, as animal spirits ebbed to start the US trading week.

Goldman Sachs’ basket of bitcoin-sensitive stocks — heavily weighted toward Coinbase and treasury companies like MARA Holdings and Strategy — was down more than 3% early, reflecting another tumble in bitcoin overnight, though bitcoin prices stabilized a bit in early US trading. Robinhood Markets — shares of which have at times taken cues from the price of crypto, which is traded on the brokerage app — was also down.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)

It would take a talented druid and a flock’s worth of bird entrails to the divine precisely what’s driving the downdraft. But S&P’s recent assessment of the vulnerability of Tether’s stablecoin, USDT — the world’s largest of these supposedly safer forms of crypto — to the bitcoin sell-off might be playing a role.

Bank of America analysts clambered aboard the bandwagon expecting a rate cut at the conclusion of the Fed’s two-day meeting next Wednesday. In a note published Monday, they wrote:

“Several factors drive our new call: (1) the jump in the u-rate to 4.44% in the Sep jobs report; (2) Williams’ endorsement of a cut after the data release, until which time markets were leaning toward a hold; (3) weakness in the ADP data and the Beige Book’s labor market assessment; and (4) the fact that Chair Powell hasn’t pushed back — either directly or via the press — against market pricing of an 80%+ chance of a cut going into the blackout period, which began on Saturday.”

Just for the record, the market — and most of Wall Street’s Fed watching class — has largely already come to the same conclusion.

The Fed funds futures market is pricing in a nearly 88% probability of such a snip at the meeting, according to the CME’s FedWatch tool, up from 63% a month ago. That’s also essentially where event contracts are trading.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. Event contracts trading is offered by Robinhood Derivatives, LLC, a registered futures commission merchant with the CFTC.)