• US stock-index futures are ticking higher as traders wait for the biggest earnings report of the quarter, from Nvidia, after the market closes. The dollar staged a recovery after a three-day drop and the 10-year US Treasury yield rose.
• Donald Trump will interview former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh and Apollo’s Marc Rowan as the president-elect seeks a Treasury secretary in a search process slowed by infighting. Trump picked Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick to run Commerce.
• Russia said it’s ready to talk with Trump about a potential cease-fire with Ukraine, drawing skepticism from Western officials. An escalation in the war yesterday had sent investors in search of havens in the bond market and gold.
• Comcast plans to spin off cable-TV channels including MSNBC, CNBC and USA, reducing its exposure to a business that’s losing viewers and advertisers. The NBC broadcast network and Peacock streaming business will remain with Comcast, according to a person familiar with the plans.
• The first day of trading in Bitcoin ETF options suggests traders see scope for the token to break more records.

It’s hard to overstate how big Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings are for the short-term direction of the stock market. The chipmaker is the world’s biggest company, with a $3.6 trillion market value after the stock tripled this year, and it’s the embodiment of investors’ fever dreams of riches tied to the growth of artificial intelligence.

The options-implied move for Nvidia shares the day after earnings is about 8% in either direction, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That would equate to close to a $300 billion swing in market value — bigger than all but 25 companies in the S&P 500 Index.

Strategists at Barclays point out that, based on the options market, the earnings report will be the most important market catalyst for the rest of the year, even bigger than the next readings on US inflation and jobs or the Fed’s December policy meeting. 

There’s more uncertainty than normal about how the results will play out, in part because there are varying views on Wall Street about what to expect from the company’s newest product line, Blackwell.

Despite proclamations by CEO Jensen Huang that demand for the chips is off the charts, production delays have made modeling supply — a notoriously difficult task — even harder.

“There’s a big unknown around Blackwell capacity,” said Dan Eye, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group. “The CEO has established a lot of credibility, but the bar is very high.”

This unknown has led to a wide spread in expectations for the fourth quarter, which ends in January. Consensus is at $37.1 billion — but the gap between the highest and lowest projections is more than $7 billion, according to estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Nvidia typically provides revenue guidance for the current quarter with its results.

Part of the reason analyst forecasts are so far apart is that some expect customers to delay purchases of Blackwell’s predecessor, called Hopper, in anticipation of the newer chips. That’s what Morgan Stanley analyst Joseph Moore is anticipating and why he’s calling this a “transitional” quarter.

Nvidia is likely to give a conservative forecast that is only slightly ahead of the average analyst estimate, he said, which should satisfy most investors as long as everything points to a very strong full-year Blackwell ramp. —Jeran Wittenstein and Ryan Vlastelica

Gold has been one of the strongest-performing commodities of 2024, setting successive records before a pullback following the US presidential election as the dollar spiked. The gold bulls aren’t giving up.

Gold will rally to $2,900 an ounce by the end of next year, according to UBS, echoing a call from Goldman Sachs for further gains as central banks expand their holdings. The Republican sweep in the US elections and global geopolitical drama adds to the metal’s appeal, the bank says.

Gold is down 0.4% to $2,622 today. --Jake Lloyd-Smith

A recurring theme in markets this year has been the US dominance. If you weren’t invested in American equities, and more specifically large-cap tech, you were leaving a lot of money on the table. Just look at the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, which has returned a paltry 9.7% including dividends versus 26% for the S&P 500.

Rob-Marshall Lee is among the few money managers who has generated US stock market-like returns with investments in developing countries. He does it by avoiding most of the stocks on offer.

His theory is classic active stockpicking, and a rebuke to the index investing that increasingly dominates developed markets: Most emerging-market companies destroy the returns generated by a select group of booming stocks, the London-based money manager says, so it’s better to own a portfolio concentrated in the 5% of stocks that add value.

“Within that, we try to identify just the top 25 or 30 companies with the best risk-reward,” he says. 

Companies like Taiwan Semiconductor, Indian watch retailer Titan and Sao Paulo-based NuBank tend to have consistent attributes such as good governance, strong potential for market share growth and high return on capital, he says. His Sector Global Emerging Markets Fund has returned 37% gain over the past year as of Sept. 30, beating the S&P 500 and 97% of peers. —Selcuk Gokoluk

• Chaos in Rio shows a world untethered even before Trump returns
• The clandestine oil-shipping funneling Iran’s crude to China
• Tesla chair sold $35 million of stock amid post-election surge

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