(Stefan Jerrevang/Getty Images) |
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If you’re reading this at your desk, having just endured another mood-ruining commute that you swear never used to be this bad, you’re not alone: Americans sat in traffic for a whopping 63 hours on average last year, a new report found. And that’s just the average! If you’re among drivers in a major metropolis, it’s much worse, with two California cities suffering through the absolute most traffic trouble.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 notched all-time highs on Tuesday, while the Russell 2000 fell 0.6%. The rally was driven by tech, which was by far the best-performing sector ETF, while the S&P 500 Equal Weight Index fell.
The AI trade was back on, led by Nvidia, which made a chip-load of announcements at its GPU Technology Conference in Washington, DC. We’ll dive more into that below. |
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Shares of Nvidia finished the day up about 5% yesterday after CEO Jensen Huang touted the “exceptionally” strong demand for its flagship products, noting that orders for Blackwell and early Rubin chips were above $500 billion through 2026.
That’s a lot more money in a lot less time than its Hopper GPUs have generated to date. Nvidia also announced a few deals that lifted up some new partners. |
- Huang on CrowdStrike: “We are partnering with CrowdStrike to make cybersecurity speed of light, to create a system that has cybersecurity AI agents in the cloud but also incredibly good AI agents on prem.”
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Huang on Palantir: “We work with Palantir to accelerate everything Palantir does so that we can do data processing at a much much larger scale and more speed — whether it’s structured data of the past, human-recorded data, unstructured data — and process that data for our government, for national security, and for enterprises around the world, process that data at speed of light and find insight from it.”
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Nvidia on Uber: “Uber will bring together human riders and robot drivers in a worldwide ride-hailing network powered by DRIVE AGX Hyperion-ready vehicles. Stellantis, Lucid and Mercedes-Benz are collaborating on level 4-ready autonomous vehicles compatible with DRIVE AGX Hyperion 10 for passenger mobility, while Aurora, Volvo Autonomous Solutions and Waabi extend level 4 autonomy to long-haul freight.”
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Revenue estimates for Nvidia’s fiscal 2026 and 2027 (which loosely map to calendar years 2025 and 2026) currently sit at a combined $486 billion. |
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Nvidia — plus the hyperscalers it sells chips to and the tech companies it allies with and opposes — has defined the past year of trading for the stock market. When Nvidia wins, the market wins, and a rising tide lifts all chips, sending the markets to all-time highs. |
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Trading stocks and ETFs? It could be time for futures. |
According to CME Group, the past few years have seen a surge in futures trading volume. That’s likely due to more traders catching on to the potential benefits of futures: |
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Capital efficiency. With only 5-10% margin required, equity futures offer more margin savings compared to top S&P 500 ETFs.1
- Go short as easily as you go long. Easily take a long or short position on your favorite index, without the restrictions of locate requirements and borrow costs.2
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Trade around the clock. With stocks and ETFs, overnight opportunities may be missed as markets move outside of regular trading hours. You can trade futures nearly 24 hours a day and act on market volatility.
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CME Group offers micro- and standard-sized futures contracts for portfolios of every size. Here’s to the future of futures trading — learn more at CME Group. 1 Margin comes with increased risks. Losses as well as gains will be magnified with the greater amount borrowed.
2 Shorting increases the risk of investing. With short sales, the potential for loss is unlimited. |
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This week, we’ll get an update on how many billions the cloud giants pulled in last quarter. AI has created an insatiable hunger for more cloud computing, and Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are racing to serve up computing capacity as fast as they can build the massive new data centers needed to catch up with demand.
As a result, the tens of billions of revenue that these tech titans are pulling in keeps going up. |
- Last quarter, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy tried to explain his company’s AWS cloud unit’s relatively slow revenue growth of 17.5% to analysts, saying that a small number of huge customers tend to spend in bursts, which will result in uneven growth.
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Microsoft will update investors on Azure’s growth, its flagship cloud business and part of the “intelligent cloud” unit, which includes public, private, and hybrid server products and cloud services. Last quarter, Azure had revenue growth that was the envy of the industry, increasing 39% year on year.
- Google Cloud revenue grew a healthy 31.7% year on year.
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Their customers are struggling to figure out a viable business model for the AI services they’re developing, and chatter about a possible AI bubble is getting louder. That means as these tech giants report earnings this week, investors will be scrutinizing more closely how much money these cloud computing businesses are generating, and comparing the pace of growth.
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Overall, Amazon’s Jassy is bullish on the cost- and energy-efficient Trainium chips that Amazon is filling its data centers with. Over at Microsoft, demand is so high, the company has a backlog of $368 billion in signed contracts. Google Cloud, while smaller than Amazon or Microsoft, has some different ambitions: Google has recently been pitching its own custom chips to customers, putting it head-to-head with Nvidia.
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⚾️ MLB: With Game 5 of the World Series tonight in Los Angeles after an electric week of baseball, the Dodgers are still the big favorites to become the MLB champion over the Toronto Blue Jays, according to Robinhood’s* prediction markets.
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✨ AI: Polymarket’s traders have all but given up the chance of the hotly awaited Gemini 3.0 model dropping before October 31, with implied odds of 3% of that launching before the end of the month. They’re more bullish on a November drop of the model, with a 48% chance of release by November 15 and a 71% chance of release before December.
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