Luke Kawa6/21/24

US stocks fall with semis slammed again

US stocks slipped on Friday, but still managed to post their third straight weekly gain.

The price action, which has seen stocks fall in back-to-back sessions, is not yet outright worrisome. But it’s semi-concerning.

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF has given back 4.3% since Juneteenth in its worst two-day strength since the calendar was turning from April to May.

Broadcom was the worst-performing S&P 500 constituent, down 4.4%, with Nvidia not too far ahead of it on the leaderboard with a decline of 3.2%. The two-day decline of 6.6% for the GPU maker is its worst such stretch in about two months.

The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF, meanwhile, posted a small gain to end the week. This year, it’s been out-of-touch with Nvidia’s moves to a record degree.

Consumer discretionary was the best-performing US sector ETF with a gain of 0.8%, with communication services not too far behind. Utilities and energy trailed, with each sector ETF down 0.6%.

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Max Knoblauch2m

JetBlue takes off on bullish options activity

Low-cost airline JetBlue is up more than 8% on Tuesday, on pace for its biggest daily gain since August. If the price momentum holds, Tuesday will mark JetBlue’s sixth-best trading day of the past 52 weeks.

The carrier is being propelled by bullish options activity, with more than 53,000 call options changing hands as of 12:14 p.m. ET, nearly 4x the 20-day average for a full session.

JetBlue closed up 4.6% on Monday, as traders appeared to price in medium-term oil supply relief due to the possibility of Venezuela’s reserves getting more developed amid tensions with the US.

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J. Edward Moreno58m

Moderna rallies after BofA raises its price target to $24 from $21

Moderna rose on Tuesday after Bank of America analysts raised their price target for the ailing biotech behind the COVID-19 vaccine, painting a rosy picture of the products in its pipeline.

BofA kept Moderna’s “underperform” rating but raised its price target to $24 from $21, which now accounts for “refreshed revenue builds for lead assets.” Analysts said the company’s cost-cutting measures, paired with potential new revenue from its investigatory oncology vaccines, could bring it back to profitability in the coming years.

Moderna is best known for being tapped by the US government to quickly develop a vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020, a product that remains its single source of revenue. The company has yet to bring new products to market and is now faced with a second Trump administration hostile to that product.

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Max Knoblauch1h

Roblox drops following overnight outages and a lowered price target from TD Cowen

Gaming platform Roblox fell as much as 7% on Tuesday, following reports of widespread outages overnight and a lowered price target from TD Cowen.

Downdetector, a monitoring service that uses “signals from its own websites, social media platforms and other sources” to analyze outages, tracked roughly 22 outage reports per second at peak overnight Monday into Tuesday.

Meanwhile, TD Cowen issued a new research note on Roblox Tuesday, lowering its price target on the stock to $70 from $77. Analyst Doug Creutz wrote that user engagement with the platform’s biggest hits, including “Grow a Garden” and “Steal a Brainrot,” declined 52% between mid-September and mid-December. The firm lowered its fiscal year bookings estimate from $8.48 billion to $8.09 billion.

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Matt Phillips2h

Data storage stocks surge as Nvidia CEO calls the market “completely unserved”

Sandisk soared in early trading, leading the pack of data storage stocks that topped the market last year — including Western Digital, Micron, and Seagate Technology Holdings — sharply higher Tuesday.

Despite little news on Sandisk itself, its shares were trading at a furious rate. Shortly before 10 a.m. ET, roughly 4.1 million had changed hands, more than 3x as much as normal for that stage of the session.

Besides benefiting from a broad upswing in AI-related trades on Tuesday, memory chip and data storage makers have soared, alongside prices for their products, in an rally that started late last year.

Closely watched comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the Consumer Electronics Show underscored the strong outlook for demand from the AI industry for data storage.

“This market will likely be the largest storage market in the world, basically holding the working memory of the world’s AIs,” he told analysts at the trade show Monday, who called storage “a completely unserved market today.”

That demand seems set to continue to push prices up in early 2026, according to Morgan Stanley analysts.

In a note published Tuesday, tech hardware analysts at the bank wrote that prices for DRAM memory, which Micron makes, are expected to increase 40% to 70% quarter over quarter in Q1.

Similarly prices for NAND flash memory — a crucial form of memory for long-term storage and the heart of Sandisk’s products — are expected to increase 30% to 35% in Q1 2026, Morgan Stanley analysts said, citing industry estimates.

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Nvidia’s partners really want you to know they’re involved with Vera Rubin, too

Everybody’s trying to get on the Vera Rubin rocket ship.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s confirmation that its new flagship AI chips are in “full production” sparked a flurry of announcements from partners reminding us that they’ll also be involved in this rollout, sending their stocks meaningfully higher on Tuesday, before most pared gains.

Nvidia-backed Nebius “will deploy the NVIDIA Rubin platform through Nebius AI Cloud and Nebius Token Factory, unlocking next-generation reasoning and agentic AI capabilities for customers starting H2 2026.”
Also Nvidia-backed CoreWeave said it expects “to be among the first cloud providers to deploy the NVIDIA Rubin platform in the second half of 2026, offering its customers greater flexibility and choice as AI systems scale.”
Server company Super Micro Computer announced “expansions in manufacturing capacity and liquid-cooling capabilities, in collaboration with NVIDIA, to enable first-to-market delivery of data center-scale solutions optimized for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin and Rubin platforms.”

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