Hey Snackers,
Before the pandemic, I was a typical parent, limiting screen time at home and glad my kid’s school was nearly screen-free. Now it seems that screen-free schooling is never to return: an October report found that 8 in 10 middle and high school students had devices assigned to them, and if you’re not a parent, the time the kids are spending on those devices might surprise you.
Stocks wiped out early gains from post-Nvidia earnings euphoria, as the chip designer’s blowout earnings weren’t enough to ease investors’ concerns of bloated valuations and an AI bubble.
It was a wild session, with US stocks suffering one of their most stunning reversals in decades. Only four times in the more than 32-year history of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF has the fund opened at least 1.5% higher only to end the session down 1.5% or more.
One of those days was April 8 of this year, when the White House said tariffs on China were going up to above 100%. Two of those days occurred in October 2008 (on the 7th and the 9th), as the fallout from the unfolding financial crisis was spreading after the prior month’s collapse of Lehman Brothers and the VIX Index — Wall Street’s so-called “fear gauge” — was routinely above 50.
The fourth time was yesterday. Ouch!
🧠 Test your business and news trivia chops with our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s a sample question:
What is the only top podcast genre where female hosts outweigh their male counterparts?
The battle between Tesla and Waymo is heating up
This week has seen the nascent fight between the two flagship robotaxi plays — Google’s Waymo and Tesla’s Robotaxi — escalate to a new level.
Right on the heels of announcing this week that its driverless cars would be available to the public next year in five more markets — Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando — Waymo said Thursday that it’s also planning to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans. It will begin manual testing there in the “coming days.”
Tesla also made some big progress this week: it got approval to launch its robotaxi service in Phoenix, one of the markets it said it was expanding to in addition to Las Vegas, Houston, and Miami.
Currently, Tesla operates a ride-hailing service in Austin, with a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and in the Bay Area, with a driver using supervised Full Self-Driving tech. Let’s put a pin in that and come back to it, because that FSD tech is arguably the real play.
Waymo currently operates its autonomous service with more than 2,500 vehicles in five markets, and has plans to expand to more than 20. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has said he expects Tesla to operate 1,500 cars in its two markets, Austin and the Bay Area, by the end of the year, when he says the service will be available in a total of 8 to 10 markets.
The Takeaway
More about that self-driving tech: Thursday, Piper Sandler analyst Alexander Potter wrote that Tesla’s latest Full Self-Driving software “is a truly impressive product that is (probably) already better at driving than the average American.” Investors are hoping that Tesla can turn its consumer vehicles into autonomous cars faster than Waymo can roll out its robotaxis.
“There are millions of cars out there that, with a software update, become Full Self-Driving cars,” Musk said on the company’s recent earnings call.
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Nvidia dunks on the doubters
Nvidia’s Q3 results and Q4 outlook provided an emphatic statement that speaks for itself: it’s still boom times for the company at the heart of AI.
Nvidia putting up massive sales numbers is not, in and of itself, proof in favor of or against an AI bubble. A bubble needs irrationality, whether that be in valuations or earnings.
Nvidia came into this report trading at its lowest valuation relative to the S&P 500 since June (a forward price-to-earnings premium of less than 13%). Of greater concern is the potential for an “earnings bubble” — that is, Nvidia is benefiting from spending that ultimately won’t make much sense from the perspective of its customers, and is poised to retrench sharply once they figure that out.
CEO Jensen Huang also highlighted ways that people were already making a fortune off of early implementations. Talking about Meta’s GEM, he said, “In Q2, Meta reported over a 5% increase in ad conversions on Instagram and 3% gain on Facebook feed, driven by generative AI-based GEM.”
His underlying message: everyone’s AI spending pays dividends, even if the market isn’t rewarding it at this moment.
Heck, they even had a response to concerns about whether Nvidia’s customers are understating depreciation. Sure, the idea that Nvidia’s chips remain very useful for a long time is something that, on the surface, seems much better for Nvidia’s customers than its sales outlook, but it’s really hard to nitpick that given how much demand is in the pipeline.
The Takeaway
Huang spoke not only as the CEO of the world’s largest company, but also as an ambassador for AI, justifying the immense spending that benefits his firm by pointing to the rewards he believes his customers will reap.
This is the kind of conference call that will either have people revisiting some of these quotes and going, “I should have known this would be the first $6 trillion company,” or, “All this hubris was such a big tell that the AI trade was doomed.”
Or, depending on how much of a sense of humor the market gods have, both!
The Best Thing We Read Today
Retail traders’ success is thanks to doubling down on two things that have worked
This year, we’ve seen evidence that the increased presence of retail traders is changing how stocks behave around earnings announcements, and even forcing institutional investors to buy what they’re buying. And for these traders, it’s also been a successful stretch because of a continued willingness to double down on a theme that’s been the biggest driver of market success in recent years (AI) and a tactic that hasn’t yet let them down.
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Snacks Shots
🪙 Crypto: The second-largest crypto, ethereum, has fallen below the critical level of $3,000 for the first time since July as the asset class generally has turned red. Investors have turned bearish on ethereum, giving it an 85% chance it drops to $2,750 this year.
🏎️ F1: Saturday night is the hotly awaited Las Vegas Grand Prix, which will be run on the Vegas Strip. The market* is pricing in a Max Verstappen win at 37% and an appearance on the podium at 77%, with Lando Norris having a 27% chance of winning and a 69% chance of making the podium, and George Russell with 17% chance of winning and a 57% chance of hitting the podium.
🏈 NFL: Midday Sunday, the sliding Kansas City Chiefs will face the ascendant Indianapolis Colts, and despite their record, the dynastic Chiefs are still favored with a 62% chance of victory in a game with major implications for the AFC champion market. Sunday night, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will take on the Los Angeles Rams, and LA is the strong favorite, with the market pricing in a 74% chance of victory.
*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
What Else We're Snackin'
Bloomberg reports that insurance against Oracle defaulting on its debts has become the favorite AI-bust hedge
Bitcoin is well on its way to its worst Q4 since 2018 as analysts spot a key signal for a “bitcoin bear market”
Consumer shopping slowdown? Not for us, said Walmart with its blockbuster earnings report
Nintendo’s Switch 2 is outrunning the original’s US sales pace by 68%
Snack Fact Of The Day
Clean energy investment across the US reached a record-breaking $75 billion last quarter.
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