S&P 500 posts fresh closing high as cyclicals shine

SoFi Technologies is down more than 7% in early trading on Friday after the company revealed plans to raise $1.5 billion through a public stock offering, with shares to be priced at $27.50 each — a discount of roughly 7% from Thursday's closing price of $29.60.

The offering includes a 30-day option for the underwriters to purchase up to an additional 8,181,818 shares, equivalent to an additional 15% of the nominal offering, which is expected to close December 8th.

Proceeds from the offering will go toward "general corporate purposes," SoFi said, including "enhancing capital position, increasing optionality and enabling further efficiency of capital management, and funding incremental growth and business opportunities."

The sale comes as SoFi's stock has been on a tear this year — nearly doubling (up 97%) in 2025 before this morning's slump. The company also posted better-than-expected Q3 sales and profits back in October, driven by growth outside its original lending business, including trading, wealth management, mortgages, and credit cards.

CEO Anthony Noto has repeatedly emphasized SoFi's push beyond lending. In November, the company launched a priority waitlist for SoFi Crypto, enabling users to trade dozens of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

The stock is hovering around the offering price of $27.50 on Friday.

Warner Bros. Discovery climbed as much as 7.5% in premarket trading, though it has since pared much of those gains, on reports that Netflix has emerged victorious in the bidding war for the storied media giant, with the winning offer apparently around $28 per share.

According to Deadline reporting yesterday evening, the streamer will start exclusive deal talks for the WBD’s streaming division and its HBO Max streaming service, beating out competition from Comcast and Paramount, the latter of which had been crying foul about the sales process just yesterday, having looked to secure a deal for the Warner Bros. Discovery business in whole.

Despite a recent report that an HBO Max streaming tie in wouldn’t result in a significant market share boost for Netflix, news that sent shares in the streamer tumbling on Wednesday morning, the company has agreed to a $5 billion breakup fee should the deal get halted by regulators, per Bloomberg.

While it’s still far too early to say what impact the potential deal will have on the biggest streaming business in the world, and the wider world of entertainment in general, Netflix investors haven’t seemed hugely enthused by the prospect throughout the process, with shares off another 0.5% as of 5:00 a.m. ET.

US senators are on the verge of introducing a bill that would block Nvidia from selling its H200 or Blackwell chips to China for 30 months, the Financial Times reports. The H200 is Nvidia’s best chip from the Hopper generation, while the Blackwell line is its current flagship offering.

Shares of the chip designer are little changed in the wake of this report, still up more than 1% on the session. The reaction makes sense, seeing as previous positive indications on Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China failed to inspire much positive momentum in its shares.

The stock got a short-lived jolt higher (that didn’t last the day!) on November 21 after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had discussed the possibility of selling its H200 chips to China.

Nvidia has effectively been shut out of China’s AI market in 2025. First, export restrictions meant it could no longer sell the H20, a nerfed version of its Hopper chip, to the world’s second-largest economy. After that export ban was lifted, demand from China “never materialized,” per Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Reports indicate that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them toward domestic alternatives.

President Donald Trump had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi in late October, but failed to do so. The two leaders did not discuss the topic at that time.

Per the FT, this upcoming bill would be a bipartisan effort, being cosponsored by the leading Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia subcommittee.

Like their quantum computing counterparts, AI-linked energy plays are benefiting from an explosion of bullish options activity on Thursday.

• Oklo is up double digits with call volumes above 106,000 as of 2:46 p.m. ET, more than double its 20-day average for a full session, with a put/call ratio of about 0.6. Call options with a strike price of $110 that expire this Friday (which are now in-the-money thanks to today’s surge) are seeing the most activity.

• Nuscale, another nuclear energy play, has seen nearly 140,000 call options change hands versus a 20-day average of 51,073.

• And fuel cell company Bloom Energy has traded nearly 80,000 calls, roughly twice its 20-day average, with a put/call ratio of about 0.3.

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up the potential for nuclear energy, saying, “In the next six to seven years I think you are going to see a whole bunch of small nuclear reactors.”

This adds to the evidence that the speculative bid is back in a big way after smaller stocks tied to the AI boom and quantum computing cratered from mid-October through most of November as credit risk began to seep into the AI trade.