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Kansas City Chiefs v Philadelphia Eagles, Super Bowl LIX
Jalen Hurts runs with the football vs. the Kansas City Chiefs (Erick W. Rasco/Getty Images)
Go Long! Or short.

Nobody agrees on whether Philadelphia’s Super Bowl win is good or bad for the stock market

The perils of low-n analysis.

Luke Kawa

Depending on which data set you choose — or which way you squint — the Philadelphia Eagles’ drubbing of the Kansas City Chiefs either portends a boom in the US stock market, or doom.

Whether the result of the Big Game is bullish or bearish is a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure activity, though, unlike Cooper DeJean, I’m not sure you can pick six here:

  • It’s bearish stocks because forward returns when the Chiefs win have been better than when the Eagles won:

  • It’s bullish because blowouts in the Super Bowl are good for stocks:

Blowouts are bullish
Source: Ryan Detrick/Carson Group
  • It’s bearish stocks because Philadelphia sports success is bearish stocks:

  • It’s bullish because the Eagles are from the NFC:

(Hat tip to Dave Lutz, equity sales trader and macro strategist at Jonestrading, for flagging some of these for us! And no offense to anyone above, unless you’re being serious about all this, in which case...)

Why does any of this matter? Well, the fun with numbers shown above is actually a shining example of a form of analysis that’s quite common across Wall Street, in which quasi-statistical analysis is used to give a veneer of sophistication to an otherwise flimsy thesis.

One of my big pet peeves when it comes to markets prognostication is the use of low-n analysis (n being the variable typically used to denote the number of observations in a sample). The worst offenders, of course, are the analog charts, but those are far from the only transgressors.

Simply, the world does not provide many opportunities for controlled experiments to be conducted when it comes to the intersection of catalysts, macroeconomic conditions, and asset price reactions.

There have only been a handful of business cycles since the US went off the gold standard. The changing composition of indexes over time — say, the emergence of biotech as a major industry in US small-gap gauges —  makes historical comparisons between what on the surface would appear to be the same thing into an apples-to-oranges scenario. We only seem to use the phrase “generationally high inflation” once every three generations. And don’t get me started on the use of overlapping datasets that were used to explain why a major second wave of price pressures was seemingly written in stone

Low-n analysis is more of a comfort blanket than it is part of any reasonable thesis.

When Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man,” he was offering a metaphysical lesson of particular relevance to financial market analysis.

Personally, all of my worst trades have come from using enough math to make myself feel more secure in a future that decidedly did not come to pass, because the world simply failed to behave the way it had in the past. Who among us didn’t double down into the quality factor amid its early 2022 retreat?

If history rhymes, it’s much in the same way that Eminem can make words rhyme with orange: it’s a function of an expert putting in serious time and effort to identify partial patterns that are pleasing to the ears.

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Data center trade deep in the red

The data center trade is seeing its steepest sell-off since the market rout that was ignited by President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcement back in April.

Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of AI data center shares was down more than 6% at around 12 p.m. ET, putting it on track for its worst day since the tariff announcement.

Losses hammered seemingly every form of input needed for the sprawling concrete server warehouses at the heart of the investment boom.

Hardware makers including data storage companies like Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings, as well as DRAM maker Micron — some of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year — were taking a licking, as were networking stocks Cisco and Arista Networks and data center builders such as Vertiv Holdings and electrical and mechanical contractor Emcor.

Optimism for all things AI has seemed to evaporate throughout the week, as the stock market greeted lackluster quarterly numbers from Oracle and Broadcom with jittery sell-offs and concern about growing debts that could crater cash flows.

Those worries seem to be spreading to ancillary beneficiaries of the AI boom on Friday, gouging a chunk out of charts that retail dip buyers have not — at least so far — stepped in to buy as we head into the weekend.

markets
Luke Kawa

Oracle denies Bloomberg report that it’s delaying some data centers for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027

Getting a multi-hundred-billion-dollar backlog for cloud computing revenues from data center projects is easy. Building them is hard.

Oracle extended declines to as much as -6.5% on the day on the heels of a Bloomberg report that the cloud giant has pushed back the completion dates for some of the data centers it’s building for OpenAI to 2028 from 2027, citing people familiar with the work. Oracle denied this report, telling Reuters that there have been no delays to any sites required to meet its contractual commitments and that all milestones remain on track.

Shares had fully pared their report-induced drop ahead of Oracle’s reply, but remain in the red for the day.

Bloomberg said the reported postponement was attributed to labor and material shortages.

Oracle has been spending more on capex than Wall Street had anticipated, leading to higher-than-expected cash burn. Management boosted its full-year capital spending plans by $15 billion after reporting Q2 results earlier this week.

Oracle’s cloud infrastructure sales came in short of estimates in its fiscal 2026 Q2, a signal that markets already had reason to doubt its ability to quickly turn its humungous RPO (that is, remaining purchase obligations) into revenues.

Traders also seem to be of the mind that potential delays to data center completions are going to limit sales for what goes into them.

Some of the bigger losers since the Bloomberg headline hit the wires include:

markets
Luke Kawa

Broadcom’s post-earnings tumble is weighing on Google’s entire AI ecosystem

Broadcom’s post-earnings plunge is prompting a sharp pullback in Google-linked AI stocks, which had been on fire thanks to the warm reception to Gemini 3.

The stocks getting hit hard:

A basket of these Google-linked AI stocks compiled by Morgan Stanley is suffering one of its worst losses of the year. This brisk retreat also follows the release of GPT-5.2 by OpenAI.

markets

Citi initiates coverage of Planet Labs with “buy” rating

Planet Labs was up after aerospace and defense analysts at Citi initiated coverage with a “buy/high risk” rating and $19 price target.

The stock is up more than 40% this week, after a strong earnings result that spotlighted the company’s growing opportunity in linking its core business of capturing daily images of the planet with AI technologies.

Citi analysts noted the potential for a positive flywheel effect for Planet Labs as it deepens its focus on integrating AI into its offerings:

“AI is accelerating the conversion of pixels to decisions, where Planet’s daily scan and deep archive offer a uniquely large training corpus and broad-area foundation for automation. AI-enabled solutions (MDA/GMS/AMS) are gaining traction with customers such as NATO and the U.S. DoW, validating the approach of integrating AI into broad-area monitoring products... These AI moves create a compounding advantage: more coverage generates more training data, which improves models, which in turn increases product utility and addressable demand.”

The stock has also caught the attention of some of the retail trading crowd, with call options activity spiking on Thursday as traders rode the market reaction to the results.

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