The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) found some room on the high side on Monday, kicking off a holiday-shortened trading week with a 300-point jump to reclaim the 46,500 region. Equity indexes are broadly in a recovery stance following a shaky week at the tail-end of quarterly earnings season, but US major indexes still remain in the red for the month of November.
Hopes for a December rate cut remain elevated
Broad market hopes for the Federal Reserve (Fed) to deliver a third straight interest rate cut in December are holding on the high side on Monday. According to the CME’s FedWatch Tool, rate traders are pricing in nearly 80% odds of a 25-basis-point rate trim on December 10. There’s still plenty of wiggle room, however, with over 98% odds that the Fed will deliver another rate cut by January 28 if a December cut fails to materialize.
Thanks to the longest US government shutdown in history, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has delayed the release of October and November labor and employment data until after the Fed’s interest rate decision. It will hold the key figures back until December 16. This leaves the Fed with little meaningful data to gauge interest rate moves, and it could vex hopes of a rate cut in the coming weeks.
US Producer Price Index (PPI) data due Tuesday could attract more market attention than usual. Still, the well-defined inflation category specifically excludes foreign-made or imported goods. It will provide little direct information on how the Trump administration’s scattershot tariff policies are affecting business costs beyond indirect price impacts.
AI rally continues to drive the broader market
The AI-fueled tech trade is back on the front burner after a defensive drop last week, sparked by ongoing concerns that all of the demand for LLM-powering microchips isn’t generating actual front-end revenue for the AI industry at large. Fears are growing that double-digit quarterly revenue growth for silicon-punching AI darling Nvidia (NVDA) may run out of roadway sooner rather than later.
Circular lending strategies that largely reinvent structured financial vehicles with no actual money involved have struck the tech sector as AI giants, and the shovel-sellers that supply them with compute power, have become the rule rather than the exception. Investors are growing fearful that the music may stop without enough chairs for everyone to sit.
Despite the ongoing funding fears, Nvidia is back on the rise on Monday, gaining around 2.25% at the time of writing and climbing back above $180 per share.
Dow Jones daily chart
AI stocks FAQs
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.
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