Satellite stocks moon on elevated call options activity

Stocks fell on Tuesday as the market’s tech titans took a breather after a hot run. The S&P 500 fell 0.6%, the Nasdaq 100 lagged with a 0.7% decline, and the Russell 2000 outperformed, albeit with a 0.2% drop.

The Magnificent 7 had their worst day in over a month, down 1.5%, with every constituent falling.

Consumer discretionary and tech were the two worst-performing S&P sector ETFs, while energy fared the best.

Bright spots on the day were Halliburton and Paramount Skydance, which rose 7.5% and about 6%, respectively. Generac and Vistra were among the biggest decliners, falling more than 10% and 6%, respectively. Elsewhere…

Nvidia fell 2.8% even as Wedbush Securities analysts called its recent $100 billion deal with OpenAI a “watershed moment” for the AI revolution. Separately, Bank of America analysts said the chip designer is poised to generate hundreds of billions in free cash flow.

Shares of Opendoor sank more than 15% after its third-biggest shareholder, Access Industries, sold 11.36 million shares of the online real estate company through its AI LiquidRE arm.

Firefly Aerospace also dove more than 15% after the Texas-based space launch startup missed Wall Street’s estimates for the company’s first quarterly report since its August IPO.

Plug Power had a wild ride, up double digits in premarket trading before ending down 4.6%, snapping a nine-day winning streak that was close to becoming the longest on record for the hydrogen fuel cell company.

Boeing ticked up another 2% after announcing on Monday that Uzbekistan Airways will order up to 22 of its 787 Dreamliner jets.

Satellite stocks like AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab climbed on elevated activity, especially in the options market.

IonQ jumped more than 4% after the company announced “a significant technological advancement in its pursuit of scalable quantum networks.”

Shares of Sinclair Inc. rose more than 3% after the self-proclaimed “largest ABC affiliate group” said it will continue to keep “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off its ABC stations.

Palantir rose 1.8% after Bank of America analysts hiked their price target on the stock to $215 — the highest among the published price targets tracked by FactSet.

Kenvue, the company behind Tylenol, gained 1.6% as doctors pushed back against President Trump’s claims about a link between the drug and autism, per Reuters.

Micron is moving higher in postmarket trading after reporting blowout fiscal Q4 2025 results.

For the three months ended August 28, the memory chip specialist reported:

• Revenues: $11.32 billion (estimate $11.15 billion)

• Adjusted diluted earnings per share: $3.03 (estimate $2.84)

• Adjusted gross margin: 45.7% (estimate 44.3%)

Guidance for its fiscal Q1 2026 is similarly stellar, as management expects:

• Revenues: $12.5 billion, plus or minus $300 million (estimate $11.9 billion)

• Adjusted diluted EPS: $3.75, plus or minus $0.15 (estimate $3.05)

• Adjusted gross margin: 51.5%, plus or minus 1 percentage point (estimate 45.7%)

The midpoint of Micron’s adjusted diluted EPS and margin outlooks are above the highest estimates among analysts polled by Bloomberg.

“As the only US-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said.

Micron is the best-performing member of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF year to date, as the stock has nearly doubled in 2025 heading into this report. Shares have been on a tear in September, rising for a record 12 consecutive sessions before that winning streak ended on Friday.

Micron has fallen the session after releasing its last three quarterly reports.

Palantir was less than 3% from its all-time closing high price in early trading Tuesday, with shares continuing a run that has carried them up nearly 20% since a recent low on September 5.

There’s no major news on the stock, but the defense and AI software company did collect a price target hike from Bank of America’s analysts. They slapped a $215 price objective on the shares, a roughly 18% premium to where the stock currently trades and the highest among the published price targets tracked by FactSet.

Nvidia is in the business of giving tech bigwigs the tools to try to create God, and in the process, the chip designer has made more money than God.

Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya believes the company is poised to generate hundreds of billions in free cash flow over the next few years as it benefits from the AI boom. Management has to do something with all that money, which helps explain recent investments in OpenAI and Intel, in his view.

“Unlike the old days, investing in other public assets has become difficult given lack of strategic fit and the burdensome regulatory process,” he wrote. “Hence the only other alternative (beyond returning to investors) is to invest in the ecosystem to expand the size of the addressable opportunity that could multiply future benefits, or accelerate time to market for new products, and/or for geopolitical benefits (such as recent INTC investment).”

Investing in its customers is just another way of investing in its own success. And investing in the likes of Intel is a way to add some depth to its product shelf, and perhaps curry some political favor in the process.

Nvidia has been doing this up and down the supply chain, with investments in Applied Digital, Arm Holdings, CoreWeave (which is acquiring Core Scientific), and Nebius Group.

To re-up my previous thoughts on Nvidia’s “House of GPUs,” this degree of implicit vertical integration and platform deepening can be best understood as CEO Jensen Huang trying to ensure that all the possible near-term demand for AI that can be met is met through Nvidia, one way or another.

And accelerating time to market may not be the most desired outcome; as long as Nvidia’s offerings continue to be considered market-leading, advancing too quickly may effectively short-circuit the length of product cycles.