The countdown is on. This is The Close. AI rebounds even as questions remain unanswered. I am Romaine Bostick.
We are kicking you out to the closing bells in the U.S. Let's have a look at the markets. We have recovered all of our post-election losses on that particular index.
Equities-wise, particularly since the bond market closed for the observance of Veterans Day, not quite at session highs but getting there again. The S&P 500 up 1.4%.
Brent crude up about a percent today but still at $92. Not a problem for equities at this level. The dollar index continues to strengthen.
We will see what the bond market does tomorrow as Fed rate hike bets continue to gain steam.
The big story is about Wall Street trying to put the pieces of the AI trade back together. That grind higher we are seeing in semis that at one point pushed that Nasdaq 100 past.
Though, we should point out it is being accomplished at the expense of Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, which are getting sold potentially as a source of funding to pile back into some of those chip stocks and cloud names like Sandisk, CoreWeave and Intel. Intel up 8% on the day.
It is a little less convincing with market leadership still concentrated. The Dow Jones Industrial Average still lagging, and five of the 11 S&P sectors not quite pulling their weight. Make no mention of the fact that this rebound comes the day after that hotter inflation print drove the yield back to 5%.
With the cash session closed today, well, that has left the market to its own devices. The bond buyers will be back at their desks tomorrow, and you can be sure equity investors will be paying close attention to what they have to say.
After all, this AI trade is about the cost of financing, the cost of capital, right now as it is about the technology itself. Most of the questions about how durable AI revenue growth is, how much capital must be spent, and how sustainable the financing will be — those questions are as unanswered as they were a week ago. Not to mention the circularity of it all, which keeps some folks on the sidelines.
AI is a phenomenal technology revolution. It is not a bubble. In the U.S., what worries me as an investor is whether the cyclical funding — company A gives to B, C back to A — the cyclical funding is the valuation created by that kind of somewhat inappropriate mechanism justifiable.
We kick you off to the close on this Wednesday afternoon with the Deputy CIO of the Solutions and Multi-Asset Group at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Let's start with the elephant in the room, which is that the bond market, which has seemed to be the counterweight for the equity market, is off today for Veterans Day. I'm curious as to whether you pay more attention to what we are seeing in the equity market and the response to buying the dip in the AI trade, or pay more attention to what happened yesterday?
I think you need to look at both, but I would start with the equity market. What is really interesting is this correction is not an earnings-led correction. We started the year with S&P multiples at 22 times and earnings growth expectations that were much lower than the 20% quarter-on-quarter that we were printing.
I think despite the strong earnings growth, the market's down and only up by 10% for the year. It is a de-rating, which makes me more convinced this is not like an earnings-led or recession-led problem.
Having said that, that is clearly — the reason has been inflation and interest rates. A lot of it has to do with oil, and I think some of that settling in helps the year-on-year comps. A flat dollar, which impacts inflation, or assume flat oil prices because that goes into a lot of the headline, suggests some rollover in our models for the second half of next year. Yes, the short-term interim could be volatile, but I am not really worried about a sustained downturn.
At the start of the year, you guys put up your forecast and put out this idea of real rates being capped a little bit this year. I know they have been very volatile. Probably back down below the cap. What does that tell you about what your call was at the start of the year and whether that carries over into next year?
I think it really holds because even then, rates above 5.2% always lead to something changing in the market. It is not an intentional real rate that the Fed is trying to target, but I think the market forces are interestingly bringing down rates to a more neutral level because in a highly indebted world like we are, with public debt having exponentially gone up like it has in past wars or during the Civil War and World Wars, you really need that real rate situation to be able to be normal to negative so you can grow out of your debt.
I don't see this differently. I think market forces do bring that down. Having said that, models for the 10-year are about 4.8%, 4.9%. I think every time they go up, market forces kind of pull them down.
The Anthropic IPO, which is set to take place next week, is that a risk catalyst potentially for asset classes beyond equities, or would it be confined to equities?
It will be interesting to see where the valuation stacks up because at the end of the day, it is a models company. We know there is a proliferation of models globally with Chinese models, open-weight, open-source models. I do think at some point there will be a commoditization in this model universe. You have to be discerning at what price you buy the IPO.
I do think with $600 billion almost being raised in the debt market, at 400 of that this year being raised on the investment-grade side, the question of debt financing and what rates mean in the short term — all that financing will be very relevant.
This will probably be a dumb question, but is Anthropic the best barometer for the AI trade now, given so many investors have moved on or are trying to move on to just what the LLM companies themselves will do, and more with what the end users of a lot of these tools might actually get out of this technology and how it might impact their bottom lines?
I think in our portfolios, the way we are thinking about AI is: what is AI today? It is not just the stocks. It is proliferating in the economy. Even industries like health care are using AI, or freight companies that have a physical infrastructure and are using AI.
I think the trade really broadens from the enablers, which are the models and infrastructure, to the adopters, to software, to industry, whether it is financials, health care. I would say the AI trade is becoming like the internet trade in 2000, where what is internet is not something that you can segregate from the rest of the market.
Good point. Always great to have you. The Deputy CIO of the Solutions and Multi-Asset Group at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. Just a couple of weeks removed from the last Fed meeting, just about 3.5 weeks away from the next Fed meeting. Bets pointing to a hike even with the bond market shuttered. We will talk about the landscape with Nathan Sheets now over at Citi Research.
And we will drill down on the state of the global energy market. Woodside Energy CEO Liz Westcott will join us to talk catalysts and risks.
And as those bells ring, we will move beyond the glare of Wall Street and into the private market. The Nordstrom family, just a year and a half after taking their company private, well, they have a lot to say about some of the changes and some of the progress they have made since. That conversation and so much more coming up later in the program right here on Bloomberg.
It is another distressing report. Borderline disturbing. We have a real inflation issue on our hands that has been developing, and we have to deal with that.
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee on PBS, probably making one of the strongest cases for a hike. A reading that is triggering a repricing of the December meeting. More importantly, might actually mean a 50 basis point hike. Nathan Sheets joins us now, Global Chief Economist at Citi Research.
Bloomberg pricing on the terminal, basically 100% chance we will get a hike of some kind or another. The question is, do you think we will get the 25 basis point hike, or is a 50 basis point hike, as Christopher Waller alluded to, something that is warranted and even plausible they would agree to do?
My feeling is that is a valid concern about inflation. I very much agree with President Goolsbee. The Fed has to do more. But you also need to step back and think a little bit harder about what the inflation problem is.
And what we are seeing is sustained 3% or a little higher core PCE inflation, which is the Fed's preferred measure. We are not so much seeing inflation shoot off to the upside like we saw in 2021 and 2022, and typically those larger rate hikes of 50 or 75 are for periods when you are clearly out in front of the curve.
This feels like an episode where the Fed will move 25 basis points in December. That is a done deal. Then, see what more needs to be done. It looks at this stage, if oil prices stay high, we could see a couple more rate hikes even early next year.
We should point out the prices seem to reflect that, at least through the March meeting, pricing at about 60 basis points higher than today. It raises the question as to the Fed's standing pat at the last meeting at the end of October. There was a lot of talk by Chairman Kevin Warsh about being tough on inflation, though there was no action. I'm curious whether you think that was the proper decision, to wait and see.
At the time, I thought it made sense. They hiked in September. Again, this is a problem with inflation being stuck higher than they want it to be. It made sense to gather more information, to let that rate hike kind of play its way through the economy. So, I was comfortable with it.
Now, if I knew everything that I know today and we can go back and replay that meeting, I think there's a pretty strong case for an October rate hike in retrospect.
It did seem to take the Fed members by surprise more so than other CPI reports, which would beg the question: are they too late? And in that case, what do you do? Does a jumbo hike correct that, or do you have to make sure you are hiking at consecutive meetings?
I think what's imperative, and this is something I give Governor Waller credit for, is that the Fed needs to sound like it is taking the data seriously, and that the Fed is serious about getting inflation back down to 2%.
I don't think it is necessary to amp up the pace of hikes in terms of their size. They may need to hike more frequently than expected. It is natural to expect the October data would be a little off the boil after that hot September. For October to be broadly as hot and challenging as September, that definitely is a red flag that catches our attention.
We get plenty of Fed speakers tomorrow. Williams is at 6:30. What will John Williams tell us?
If we think of where various members of the committee tend to fall, Williams tends to fall on the more dovish side. Williams will say we need higher rates. We are watching the inflation data. We are not happy with them. He will underscore he is prepared to hike in December and do more as the data dictate as we move into 2027.
I'm curious about this idea of where the economy is right now. We have talked about inflation prints. There have been a few wrinkles in the data, but still relatively strong. We had a GDP report showing the U.S. tracking at 3%. Citi's official call is 2.7%. Are we underestimating the strength and resiliency of the economy? How much rate increases can this economy take?
You are highlighting the question I am agonizing over in real time. It was thought of as an economy that was running off an underlying growth of roughly 2%. We were seeing a period of somewhat higher GDP growth, but it would come back down. Right now, I'm not so sure.
The AI trade, from a macro standpoint, we can think about on the financial side about the winners and losers, but the macro investment driving AI looks pretty robust. It could be a little slower because of headwinds, as we thought of the election shifting policies, but it is not going anywhere. The U.S. consumer over the last couple quarters has been gangbusters.
Maybe we are in a place where, as you say, the economy is stronger than we thought. That additional strength is starting to pass through into more underlying inflationary pressures. That is where the debate at the Fed really needs to be, I think.
Why have we not heard more discussion about that side? It does not seem like it is publicly central to the debate.
I think that particular argument and angle really, in my mind, is a pretty fresh one that was highlighted particularly by the recent GDP data and then reinforced by the surprising strength of the inflation data. I think as we thought about inflation, we have focused more on pass-throughs, higher energy prices, tariff-induced inflation, AI-induced inflation. Maybe we have some good old-fashioned demand-driven inflation as well.
Thank you so much for your thoughts, Nathan Sheets, Chief Economist at Citi. We will turn to energy markets and sit down with the CEO of Woodside Energy. This is The Close on Bloomberg.
Let's take a look at Woodside Energy, Australia's largest natural gas company, holding its market day tomorrow. Ahead of a big day today, where the CEO will be ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. I am pleased to say she joins us right now. Liz Westcott, CEO of Woodside Energy. Great to have you on the program. Congratulations on getting the chance to ring the closing bell. I have to ask, what exactly are you looking for from U.S. investors, given you have a lot of investors yourself back home in Australia?
Woodside is a global energy company. We have material investments in the U.S. We have had a long history of investing offshore, and we have a Louisiana LNG project we are doing in Louisiana. We are very keen to have the U.S. investors understand Woodside and what we offer to investors. We have world-class assets. We have 35 years of operating experience on LNG. We are set to create additional value for shareholders moving forward as our new projects come online.
Can you update me on the Louisiana LNG project? We are talking about an extraordinary amount of potential capacity. How far along is it? How much will be baked into the numbers you will present to investors tomorrow here in the U.S.? Numbers you already presented in Sydney last week.
Our Louisiana investment, it really is a strategic move for Woodside. We have material LNG assets in Australia, and now we will have a U.S. base as well. The project is 32% complete, absolutely underway, on target for first LNG in 2029. It is a three-train development.
It will cement Woodside being a global LNG player. We will have a portfolio that allows us to optimize and support customers both in the Atlantic and Europe.
Real quickly on that point, the 13% return number and the seven-year cycle out, those numbers are still intact?
Absolutely. The investment decision we made nearly two years ago, we are delivering. The project is a lump-sum turnkey. We have strong customer interest. We signed a 20-year commitment. A lot of customer interest and a really solid project.
Germany as well, buying one million annually, Qatar, three million. Who are you targeting with the other barrels of LNG? Do you have customers lined up?
Of the offtake, about 8 million tons are going to Woodside's portfolio, which will join in with the Australian volume. We lay our contracts into the market. We have that 4 million you spoke about that has already been committed to QatarEnergy. The remaining 4 million are for participants. Williams is a 10% equity owner of the project. They have 1.5 million tons. The rest is available for new equity participants.
We have a big spike in European natural gas prices, not so much in the U.S. We are moving into the Northern Hemisphere winter. What do you imagine in terms of assumptions for LNG prices, given storage levels in Europe in particular?
The European winter is an important milestone for LNG, in particular this year. You mentioned storage levels not at the same levels that would help. There is a lot of hope for a mild winter, and that will allow markets to respond naturally. But customers are interested to see how the winter plays out.
Importantly for the U.S., it has been relatively disconnected from LNG pricing through 2026. Europe is a big part of LNG, and Asia is keenly watching.
Do you think Henry Hub will stay structurally cheap? More importantly, on the Louisiana buildout.
There is such deep supply available in the U.S. When you think of the Louisiana project, it is ideally situated near key pipeline infrastructure. It is able to draw from multiple sources. That is part of the LNG industry. That is partly why we were comfortable with the decision to invest here.
You are not worried about an LNG glut coming out of the U.S.?
The macros for LNG demand remain strong. Energy demand through the world is growing, particularly in Asia. You see customers today taking long contracts. Customers are responding. They are still interested in committing today. There is a lot of variability into what will happen with supply and demand. The key is to be resilient through that cycle.
Liz Westcott, CEO of Woodside Energy. This is Bloomberg. 3:30 p.m. in New York. This is the countdown to the close.
We are watching Anthropic, right?
I think that has been the elephant in the room all year long. Waiting on what is going to be physically the first full frontier model AI company to make it to the public markets. It's widely expected to be the second biggest IPO ever. It could potentially be the biggest, depending how investors warm up to the formal marketing.
A lot of conflicting reports. We are hearing in some cases it is being oversubscribed. In some cases, investors are asking for the valuation to be lower. The bankers don't want it.
It is increasing the potential valuation to $5.5 trillion. Yesterday, we heard $5.4 trillion. Now, it is $5.5 trillion. It is also the idea it is coming to market with a range, unlike SpaceX, which came with a price. There will be some price discovery. Maybe that can be good for an AI market that has been trying to put a price on everything on the straight trade.
Anthropic will be a barometer for a lot of the hopes and dreams and a lot of the haters out there when it comes to AI. Let's break it down with Gary Marcus, professor over at NYU. Great to see you in person. I want to start off with the basic fundamentals of Anthropic because the numbers overall are not bad. $33 billion of revenue in the first nine months of the year. A lot of other great numbers. You had a post on Substack saying — is that about the fundamentals?
There's only one quarter they ever made a profit, as far as I know, and that was the second quarter when everyone was wild with token maxing. This crazy idea you can spend as much money on a model as possible without regard to results. I think this guy at Uber said we are spending our whole year's token budget and it is only April and we are not getting returns.
A lot of other people said that, and then suddenly token maxing failed. Anthropic's second quarter was amazing, but things have flattened out a little bit. The whole story rests on the growth continuing because they have $900 billion in future liabilities against the one quarter with a profit, which also had a subsidy from Elon.
The $900 billion number has been one a lot of the naysayers have focused on. It raises the question about scale, what it means for a company that is already large, and whether this slate of new products we hear them either introduce or tease could provide more reason.
There is a possible world in which they do really well. I have fantasies that they are the only company in the world, but the reality is they are in a competitive market. They have a narrow niche, which is having leading frontier models, which they don't always have. Sometimes other people have hopped in front of them.
If we are talking about cheaper stuff, there is competition, lower quality stuff, and then competition from China and Google and so forth. Google came out with Gemini, which is pretty good. At any moment, that can change.
Does that make Anthropic and Claude a commodity?
They look like a commodity to me, and I don't know how they can maintain prices. Prices keep going down. Their costs are pretty high. It is not like regular software. You have to run it on their cloud, and that costs them money, and they have to build a new model every couple months to stay competitive. They are costing more and more.
An amazing result the other day. Somebody analyzed progress on the ARC benchmark, and the cost of making progress — like doing four points better on that benchmark — is going up exponentially. People got $10 million for four points, and then $100 million that get four points, $1 billion. If it is getting really expensive to stay there, that is a problem.
Is there a first-mover advantage when it comes to going public? Does this potential IPO change the market at all for OpenAI?
It depends on what happens from there. If Anthropic rises like a bullet after the IPO, that is good for OpenAI.
As far as total addressable market, does it mean anything that either will have more pricing power, or will it depend on how fast they can update their models and how fast China comes to market?
How other companies do depends on how cheaply they can deliver. There are some aggregations, which means you don't even need to know what model you are using. You send it to a system, and it chooses the best thing for you based on some criteria, including price. Consumers may not even know what model they are using at this point.
There's also the question of the efficacy. Your title understates the research you have done over the years in this broader space. I am curious, have the models progressed to the point where not only are they more reliable, but the fantastical superintelligence or whatever moniker we want to put on this is either here or within reach?
There has been some real progress, but most of the progress has been using neuro-symbolic AI, which involves using verification tools from classical AI. That is great for math and great for coding, where you can verify what you are doing meets some set of criteria, but it is not a general solution to the problem of artificial intelligence.
We still don't really have a reliable way to work on arbitrary questions. What is the best way to play the market? What's the best way to invade Taiwan? Or whatever. On those more open-ended questions where you cannot verify your answer is right, we still see hallucinations. I used to call them discomprehensions. That has not really gone away.
In the domains where it is verifiable, if the LLM says something stupid, then the verification system says that cannot be right. In domains where you cannot do that, you need more judgment, more discoveries. People like Richard Sutton have started saying the same thing. It is great what we are doing, but there are some major steps ahead of us.
Who is pursuing those steps from a research, academic level? Is that going on within these companies? Let me rephrase: do they have financial incentive to pursue what you just talked about?
It's complicated. They are doing that to some extent. They used to talk about pure scaling in all of their media. That is not really what they are doing anymore. That is something you tell investors so they give you a lot of money.
The reality is, since Claude Code and before, there is a lot of effort into things using tools and harnesses. That stuff is not as sexy, but it is driving the progress now. The big labs have gotten some notion about that, but they are still tied to doing things this way because that is their market. It is a question about how much they can move, and maybe someone else cuts in front of them.
After the midterms, there was the idea that everything will slow down. If that were to come to pass, and data centers might have to slow down anyway, would that be generally a good thing for artificial intelligence in the long term?
AI needs the data centers, but I think we will see the trend in AI over time is we need the data centers less. We are probably overbuilding them. You think about how much data it takes for a human to learn about things. You don't need to learn the entire internet to have an intelligent conversation. You use about 20 watts in your brain, not terawatts.
Every trend has shown people do get more efficient. The famous DeepSeek moment was doing existing things more efficiently. Things will move from the cloud to locally. When they move locally, we won't need so much cloud. I think we are probably building too much cloud, but also we need fundamental innovations, and I don't know when that will come.
From your lips to God's ears. Come a lot of hyperscalers to say we can never have too much cloud.
I think people will remember Cisco and stuff like that.
On the back of people wanting more cloud compute. Thank you so much for joining us today. Gary Marcus, NYU Emeritus Professor.
We will be watching that pricing next Wednesday and trading on Thursday, which is unusual because we are coming up to a Thanksgiving week. You would imagine it would be a little lighter on volume. Lululemon recovering from its earlier losses as one famed investor buys in. It is today's Stock of the Hour, next. This is The Close on Bloomberg.
The Stock of the Hour is Lululemon. Shares down more than 2%. It did spike earlier after Michael Burry said he bought into it, calling it a good bet. He said he has confidence in the power of their research and development. Joining us now is Norah Mulinda. What else did he say? Because the R&D in the past has not been so great, that we had all sorts of problems with leggings and so on.
Absolutely. We did hear that it was a valuable franchise that was poorly executed. This is a stock that has hammered, down about 76%. This is a stock that has been struggling for a number of reasons.
Brand execution, but also dealing with softer demand when it comes to North America. The products have not really been catching traction the way that they did in the past. A lot of criticism about the tightness of the leggings and the consumers wanting a bit of looser fits.
Management. We had the previous CEO just step down last year. A new one coming in now, a little over a year now. They are trying to get this reorganization when it comes to the company, and he is betting that perhaps there will be some change.
She just started a couple months ago. This will be her first earnings call since the start of December. It gets to the question: I know that Burry, we know him mostly for The Big Short. He has become this, more of a — I don't want to call him a bull, but he's doing a lot less shorting and more long stuff. He was in Lululemon before and then exited the position. How much stock do we want to put into somebody that seems to be in and out of the stock?
He stepped out in October because of tax-loss harvesting and always intended to come back in 30 days later, so that is this moment. To your point about him being in and out, that is pretty contrary to what you are seeing on Wall Street. The stock only has one buy when we look at the terminal data. I'm still trying to find it. 31 holds on the stock and seven sells. The stock has been struggling.
The market is pricing them in as though they are permanent. He is looking toward management to see if they are actually able to execute. That is where he sees some issues when it comes to execution.
37 holds, which in Wall Street language —
It will be interesting to see what happens. If you are looking at it strictly from a fundamental standpoint with regard to the shares, an attractive opportunity if you think Heidi O'Neill might be able to turn things around. That earnings report coming up on December 11. Norah Mulinda counting us down to the closing bells on The Close.
The trade really broadens from the enablers, which are the models and infrastructure, to the adopters, to software, to industry, whether it is in financials or health care. I would say that the AI trade is becoming like the internet trade in 2000. Internet is not really something you can segregate from the rest of the market.
Over at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, kicking us off to The Close just about 50 minutes ago. It is off the highs of the session. The Nasdaq was up with a 3%, now up 2.3%.
Some of these names like Bloom Energy, Dell, they are up more than 10%. Even the software stocks that have really sold off, just barely negative, just four components lower. CoreWeave injecting optimism into the market. That stock is up 25% in one day.
It gets to this idea of exactly what is being repriced. We should point out, with all the big moves we have on the day, we are basically back to square one where we were last Wednesday before the big selloff that came the following Thursday. Tiffany McGhee joins us, CEO of Pivotal Advisors. The idea of what led to that massive selloff last week, and whether the rally we are seeing today is ignoring some of those questions, or maybe the market has gotten more comfortable with the answer.
Yes, I think when we think about last week, last Thursday was the worst day for stocks since April 2025. The Nasdaq will fall into correction. The big trigger was midterms, not fundamentals, which is important to know.
We fast-forward to today, we really think about the AI — I really want investors to think about AI not as a trade but as a portfolio. We think about these things, managing the issue. Funding is more of the issue. We are looking at hyperscalers still, demand exceeds supply, cloud growth is accelerating.
It is being funded with debt and equity. We went from 'how are they paying for it?' to 'will they be allowed to build?'
Let's talk about the financing side of it. Particularly when you look at the rally with CoreWeave, which was the poster child for concerns about financing. As an investor yourself, are you comfortable with the structure of some of these financing deals to the point where, as an investor, you feel like you are still relatively protected or will at least participate meaningfully in the upside?
I think it is definitely something that investors should be looking at. At the end of the day, we want to invest in strong companies with really strong balance sheets. We want to look at those characteristics. We do not want anyone who is overleveraged.
We are seeing some of these really large companies raise capital through these alternative methods — private equity, these joint partnerships or joint ventures. We want to look at that because we want to see if that is exposing us to additional risk. We want to be careful.
How have you been thinking about Nvidia in recent days, given everything that has come out about the company and potential roadblocks?
We will keep a little bit — here is where I will start with Nvidia. Here is what I want to get into next week's report. Business is intact, demand ahead of supply, and big buyback support.
The market's real concern here is key-person risk. First of all, there is no named successor. Let me just put that out there. On the call, we'll be looking for guidance, margin pressure from memory costs, and any word on succession or the board review.
I think the question again really is not demand. Nvidia has a sound business. It is leadership continuity, and also Washington as well.
With investors to get answers they are satisfied with, or any answers at all, with next week's call regarding the roadmap. Would that cause him to want to get out of other AI companies? Would there be a ripple effect?
There are a couple of problems with the scale that is going on. That is specific to Nvidia, and I hope they do figure it out before the call in terms of how they will respond. It is such a big company. When Nvidia moves, so does the industry. We are looking for these major themes that may potentially spill over into other AI and AI-adjacent companies.
I have to ask you about the elephant in the room. The bond market is closed because of the Veterans Day holiday in the U.S., but we saw the visceral reaction yesterday to the CPI report, and that directly ties into the cost of capital and issues with AI. What happens tomorrow and the days beyond if the market has to come to the fact that the Fed might be a bit more aggressive in raising rates, and that could eventually feed into lower returns in the equity market?
I think you bring up a really good point. We are talking about AI, but this is as much of a rate story as it is an AI story. The fact of the matter is the Fed is hiking and not cutting. Markets price in an 80% chance of another hike in December.
We look at the hot CPI and Waller's comments about a possible 50 basis point hike. That is a lot to digest. One thing we will be looking for is if the 10-year gets near 5%, that line to watch. Above it, valuations get squeezed. One positive note is oil has come down sharply on the Iran de-escalation. I think that is a little bit positive. Rates are in the mix.
Tiffany McGhee, CEO of Pivotal Advisors. We keep an eye on the AI trade. CoreWeave up 25% on the day. Nvidia dropped 10% over the previous two days, up 2.5%.
The CoreWeave trade is fascinating. The results were good. At the same time, I would have thought — literally a quarter of its market cap.
Keep an eye on those other Mag 7 stocks. Some of the rallies are at the expense of names like Microsoft and Amazon. Meta down 2% with heavy selling into the closing bells. A full breakdown of all of today's market action starts now.
The closing bell, Bloomberg's comprehensive cross-platform coverage of the U.S. market close, starts right now.
Right now we are two minutes away from the end of the trading day. Romaine Bostick alongside Vonnie Quinn taking you into the closing bell. We are joined by Carol Massar and Tim Stenevek to our audiences across all Bloomberg platforms.
I had to check in with what was going on with Microsoft. Make sure it was OK. Shares down a little bit. They think they will be OK. They think they can fund the AI build themselves. That has been a big story. A big rebound on Monday. It looks like it is trying to extend.
Absolutely. The AI trade is back in a big way. Thank you very much, CoreWeave. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index — 5.6% higher. It was up almost 8% in the session. Everything is awesome again.
Unless you are still looking at how much oil costs.
I do not know if you are paying attention to this while you were on vacation, but we actually saw oil prices come down quite a bit over the last few days. Up ever so slightly right now, 1%.
After we got the first dip in oil, we stopped watching so closely. It must be having such an impact on the market. There is no doubt it is helping.
Equities. [BELL RINGS] Recouping most of the losses. We are getting a little bit into the closing bells. Green across the screen. The Dow Jones Industrial Average higher by 256 points or 0.5%. The S&P 500 adds 98 points, 1.3%. The Nasdaq Composite up 1.6%. The Russell 2000 getting in on the action, gaining about 0.9% on the day.
Across the board. Back to the S&P 500, most names higher, 332 names in the S&P 500 gaining ground on this Wednesday. 169 to the downside, two unchanged. Only one or two groups in the red, consumer discretionary one of them, down 0.3%. Just down fractionally, too. Many stocks there are actually higher. Look at all that green.
Okay. [LAUGHTER] Lucky you.
Let's go to some individual gainers. I will go to the obvious. The AI trade is back in a big way. Thank you, CoreWeave. Up almost 25%, shares soaring. The company easing fears about its... let's try that again. [LAUGHTER] 3, 2, 1, easing fears about all the debt on its balance sheet.
What time was the wine segment?
Oh, but I wish it was. Company projected revenue of 3 billion to 3.3 billion this year. They reported third-quarter sales of $3.66 billion. The CEO is pretty upbeat, say it positive. Look at all the neo-clouds of the judge, Shaw higher. CoreWeave was number one. Go over to some other AI-related names. Applied Digital was higher, up 7.4%. Almost a 10% gain in DigitalOcean. Just across the board, investors moved back in a big way.
In a related way, in terms of the AI trade, the AI build, one stock I want to highlight, the number two gainer in the S&P 500, Bloom Energy. It designs, makes and installs systems for on-site electricity for data centers. It is a company that could benefit if this AI data center and the growing power demand needed to power those data centers continues. Because there is more to the world than artificial intelligence, I am sure Romaine had this watch back in the 1990s, Fossil Group up almost 27%, shares up almost 34%.
The company reported better-than-expected third-quarter results, including a return to sales growth. Management pleased with annual guidance. A big trade to the upside.
