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The three technical charts raising jitters over the AI trade

Semis head and shoulders, Nvidia below the 50-day average, and September seasonality.

Luke Kawa

A soft start to September after a poor end to August has left the most important part of the stock market — everything related to AI — in a shakier state.

A Morgan Stanley basket of AI tech beneficiaries fell 5.5% over the past two sessions, its worst two-day drubbing since the sessions immediately following “Liberation Day” on April 2, when the extent of President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariff regime was unveiled.

With Google and Apple roaring on Wednesday, the picture is a little brighter for the AI trade. But in the background, there are still three technical spots of bother with the complex that’s been critical to the US stock market’s gains for the past two years and counting.

Semiconductors are in a precarious position, with the VanEck Semiconductor ETF not too far away from completing a bearish head-and-shoulders top pattern recently flagged by Bank of America head of technical research Paul Ciana.

BofA SMH H&S

Zooming in on the most important semiconductor stock: Nvidia, the heart, soul, and many other body parts of the AI trade, closed below its 50-day moving average on Tuesday for the first time since May, when it was repairing damage done in the wake of the momentum meltdown and tariff angst that roiled markets.

Since the AI boom unofficially kicked off in May 2023, there have been only four previous instances where Nvidia had a fresh break below its 50-day moving average (that is, closing below that level for the first time in at least 21 sessions):

  • August 9, 2023

  • April 19, 2024

  • July 24, 2024

  • December 10, 2024

And now, yesterday. The good news is that breaching that technical threshold hasn’t been a big deal for Nvidia. One-month forward returns from the above dates have been strongly positive (up at least 7%) on three of four occasions, and the one loss was less than 2%.

But oh yeah, it’s September, a seasonally bad time for the stock market. Returns have varied widely for the Nasdaq 100 over the past 20 years, from up as much as 13% to down nearly 15%, but on average it’s been the only month with negative returns for the tech-heavy gauge.

“One needs to be pragmatic while at these levels, namely because the tape is not only following the Fed Cut script closely of buying the rumor to then sell the news, but also because divergences in momentum and breadth as well elevated levels of complacency, all of which leaves the market open to a violent, yet buyable dip opportunity,” wrote John Kolovos, chief technical market strategist at Macro Risk Advisors.

That being said, he’s still constructive on the medium-term technical picture for stocks through year-end and early into 2026.

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CoreWeave slumps after filings show top shareholder Magnetar Financial sold over $500 million in stock last week

CoreWeave is sinking after one of its earliest backers and top shareholders, Magnetar Financial, sold over $500 million in stock last week.

Filings released after the close on Friday showed the Illinois-based investment firm, its subsidiaries, and executives dumped $486 million from Wednesday through Friday, while separate statements released last Wednesday revealed $60 million in sales from earlier in the week.

After these divestments, Magnetar and its affiliated parties still own north of 72 million shares of the neocloud company.

Magnetar previously put on what looked to be a massive collar trade that protected the value of its CoreWeave position through mid-March of next year by selling calls with strike prices of $160 and $175 and buying put options with a strike price of $70. There were no derivative transactions reported along with any of last week’s sales.

In late March, Magnetar senior managing partner David Snyderman called CoreWeave “the gold standard now for AI infrastructure” and told Bloomberg that the firm had not used the IPO as an opportunity to reduce its stake. Synderman was among the Magnetar-affiliated parties that reduced their positions last week.

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Bloom Energy rises after analyst updates

Fuel-cell-based power provider Bloom Energy jumped Monday after analysts at Bank of America and RBC Capital published somewhat contradictory commentary on the shares.

In its note, BofA said the company’s “new Brookfield partnership adds a blue-chip counterparty and reinforces its position at the center of the AI-driven power-resiliency build-out.”

But BofA analysts still rate the stock an “underperform,” citing “aggressive market assumptions” about the rate at which its recent announcements of partnerships and memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with potential data center clients, including Oracle, can be converted into actual revenue that justify the market’s assumptions about the coming years. They wrote:

“Bloom Energy would need to convert nearly all announced MOUs, accelerate project execution, and sustain 20%+ incremental margins, a steep execution curve for a company that has only recently achieved low-double-digit EBITDA margins. To reach 2030 levels, the company would need to achieve nearly double those deployments annually. The current valuation, in our view, already reflects this ‘blue sky’ scenario.”

And while BofA did raise its price target for the shares to $26 from $24, that’s roughly 80% below where the stock now trades.

Analysts at RBC, however, were much more sanguine about the prospects for the company. In a note published over the weekend, they raised their price target to $123 from $75, suggesting that the market seems to be pricing only a relatively modest part of the potential opportunity for Bloom represented by so-called behind-the-meter (BTM) data centers. (Those are data centers that have their own dedicated on-site power generation.) They wrote:

“We believe the upside opportunity continues to skew favorably on a growing BTM datacenter opportunity that we believe is still in the early stages. We acknowledge the competitive dynamics, but point to the recent partnership announcement with Brookfield as another proof point for the competitiveness of BE’s solution. We believe shares are priced for an incremental capacity increase which we think is supported by a large and growing TAM [total addressable market] opportunity.”

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Grail rises after announcing $325 million raise from Hims, others

Grail, a cancer detection biotech, rose more than 20% after it announced that it raised $325 million from a slate of investors including Hims & Hers.

Grail sells a blood test that detects cancerous tumors early on. The company also announced encouraging trial results for its flagship test, Galleri, on Friday.

Grail sold 4,639,543 shares at $70.05, a discount from the $78 closing price on Friday, to a group of more than six investors. Hims did not immediately respond to questions from Sherwood News, including how much of the $325 million fundraise it contributed. Grail announced last week that it received a $110 million investment from Samsung.

Grail reported $67.4 million in revenue in the first half of this year, up from $58.6 million in the same period in 2024. Galleri is available commercially but is pending approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which could position it to be covered by major insurers.

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AppLovin sinks amid report that multiple state regulators are looking into its data collection practices

Shares of adtech company AppLovin are on their back foot to open the week on the heels of a report from the New York Post that “state regulators, including staff from the attorneys general from Delaware, Oregon and Connecticut, have reached out to multiple short sellers, seemingly as part of a preliminary investigation.”

AppLovin told the Post that it is “not engaged in any investigations with any state attorneys general regarding its business; nor has the Company been contacted by any state attorneys general regarding any such alleged investigation.”

AppLovin got whacked earlier this month after Bloomberg reported that its data collection practices are the subject of an SEC probe. While they initially bounced after Wall Street suggested selling in response to the news was overdone, they’ve since proceeded to hit fresh lows even after AppLovin said that it had shut down software that short sellers alleged was responsible for installing apps on users’ phones without their permission.

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