Markets
Luke Kawa

S&P 500 caps a perfect week of gains

The recovery train keeps on chugging.

The S&P 500 rose all five sessions this week with a 0.7% gain on Friday, while the Nasdaq 100 advanced 0.4% and the Russell 2000 outperformed with a 0.9% rise.

The Financial Times said that the US and Europe have exchanged negotiating documents on trade, helping buoy hopes that the recent trend toward dialing down tariffs will continue.

Friday had the best parts of Wednesday and Thursday combined: the S&P 500’s advance-decline line was sharply positive, with risers outnumbering fallers by 391, and megacap tech stocks largely participated in these widespread gains.

Every S&P 500 sector ETF aside from energy moved higher, with healthcare stocks outperforming and utilities, real estate, industrials, consumer staples, and materials all up more than 1%.

Beaten-down shares of UnitedHealth bounced on Friday, with that stock and Moderna (another company that’s been trending lower) topping the S&P 500’s leaderboard.

Outside of the benchmark index, shares of CoreWeave popped more than 20% after an SEC filing revealed Nvidia had accumulated a $900 million stake in the company as of March. Though we already knew the chip designer anchored in the recent IPO, the magnitude of its stake seemingly encouraged the traders who’ve been flocking to buy call options in the cloud computing company.

That same filing also showed Nvidia continued to hold Applied Digital, sending those shares skyward.

Charter Communications rose after announcing a deal to acquire Cox Communications, a pact that would create the largest cable and broadband provider by subscribers upon its successful completion.

From mergers to breakups: Novo Nordisk announced that it’s replacing its CEO in light of the near halving of its stock price over the past year as competition in the weight-loss drug space heats up.

Take-Two fell after cutting its guidance to account for the delayed release of “GTA 6.”

Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital enjoyed its debut on the Nasdaq with a solid advance.

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markets
Matt Phillips

Intel sinks on news it will hang on to networking unit

Intel dropped in early trading Thursday after it disclosed plans to retain ownership of its networking unit following a strategic review of operations.

The unit, known as NEX, makes products like infrastructure processors, which do needed “housekeeping” tasks like running security checks, thereby freeing core Intel CPUs to do the higher-value operations. It also produces switches and controllers that manage and direct the flow of data to CPUs.

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Intel Shelves Plans to Sell Networking Division After Review

Intel Shelves Plans to Sell Networking Division After Review
markets
Luke Kawa

Quantum computing stocks soar on return of bullish options bets

The calendar says December, but the price action is starting to look a lot more like September to me:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are all up at least 7% as of 11:04 a.m. ET, buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.

  • Nearly 50,000 calls in IonQ have already changed hands, well above the 20-day average for a full session, with activity concentrated in strikes from $50 to $55 in contracts that expire between Friday and mid-January. Its put/call ratio is near 0.2, versus an average of over 1 for the past 20 sessions.

  • More than 65,000 calls have traded in Rigetti, a hair shy of its full 20-day average. Like IonQ, options activity has a bullish tilt, with a put/call ratio of about 0.7 versus a 20-day average of roughly 1.2.

  • D-Wave, which received positive commentary from Evercore ISI on Wednesday, isn’t seeing call activity as elevated as its peers, but the options action is also very skewed toward the bull side, with a put/call ratio of less than 0.3 versus a 20-session average of 0.7.

Pure-play quantum computing stocks nearly doubled from late August to late September amid heavy options market activity thanks to reports on government support for the sector, M&A activity, tech breakthroughs, and a flurry of price target hikes by Wall Street.

Luke Kawa
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Retail traders are killing it this year because of both what they’re buying and when they bought it

Buy the dip. Buy AI. Buy gold.

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J. Edward Moreno

Hims announces acquisition of Canadian telehealth firm Livewell

Hims & Hers rose in early trading after it announced its acquisition of Livewell, a Canadian telehealth company, marking its official entrance to that market.

The company announced in July that it would expand into Canada by 2026, taking advantage of the patent expiry for semaglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s blockbuster GLP-1s, Ozempic and Wegovy. Hims said Thursday that it would do that through an all-cash acquisition of Livewell.

Novo’s patent on semaglutide is set to expire in Canada in January. It would be the first time generics for the blockbuster GLP-1 drugs are available anywhere, and generic drugmaker Sandoz International has already announced plans to make copies of the drug. In the US, Hims sells copycat versions of Novo’s drugs, which has led to conflict between the companies.

On Wednesday, Hims announced that it would purchase YourBio, a device that uses “bladeless microneedles thinner than an eyelash” to collect blood samples, in another all-cash deal. According to its latest quarterly filing, the company had $345.8 million in cash and cash equivalents.

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markets
Luke Kawa

Symbiotic tanks as company and SoftBank, its largest shareholder, announce offering of 10 million shares

Symbiotic was among the robotics companies that popped on Wednesday, gaining nearly 10% on the news that the Trump administration was on the precipice of a major push to support the industry.

So naturally, management thinks it’s a good time to sell shares — and its largest shareholder, SoftBank, agrees.

After the close on Wednesday, management announced an offering of 10 million shares, with 6.5 million of that as a primary offering from the company to raise money for general corporate purposes, and 3.5 million from a secondary sale by SoftBank, which owns over one-third of its shares.

The stock cratered on the announcement, giving back all of its one-day gains and then some.

Symbiotic went public in 2022 through a SPAC merger with a SoftBank-backed affiliate.

In October, SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia to meet an upcoming payment to OpenAI to finance its equity position in the company. Since SoftBank is slated to pay the ChatGPT maker more than $20 billion this month, it would appear that this is another step toward raising the needed cash for that position.

We’ll see if this divestment makes SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son cry.

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