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Elevance Health dives on outlook for post-Big Beautiful Bill world
(Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

ACA insurers drop as “beautiful” GOP law hits

Insurers that provide ACA coverage are getting battered after Elevance Health warned on the outlook for the market.

Health insurers that supply coverage to Affordable Care Act marketplaces, where some 24 million Americans get their health insurance, posted the ugliest losses in the S&P 500 on Friday, after one such insurer, Elevance Health, reported disappointing Q2 earnings and said it was raising premiums for such policies.

Elevance was the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500 for most of the first half of the day, before it was overtaken by Molina Healthcare, a similar insurer. Centene, another provider of government-related insurance, also tumbled.

Elevance’s Q2 numbers, released after the close of trading Thursday, weren’t horrible. They only just fell shy of Wall Street’s consensus expectation ($8.84 vs. $8.91). Sales of $49.42 billion were a bit better than expected.

But the company signaled growing uncertainty about its future, in part due to the “big, beautiful bill that passed the GOP-controlled Congress on a party-line vote and that President Trump signed into law early this month.

That bill lets the “enhanced subsides” for ACA marketplace buyers that began during the Covid crisis die at the end of the year.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the loss of those enhanced subsidies is expected to knock roughly 4 million people off their ACA insurance in coming years.

This is a double whammy for insurers like Elevance. Obviously, it means fewer enrollees paying monthly premiums. But it also leaves insurers with a sicker client base and more expensive medical needs. (The people most likely to let their insurance lapse, even for reasons of affordability, tend to be those healthy enough to feel they can get away without coverage.)

“The biggest unknown for us right now is the policy uncertainties around the ultimate disposition of the enhanced subsidies in the individual ACA market,” Elevance CEO Gail Boudreaux told analysts after the company reported.

That said, the company is already raising the price of ACA individual insurance coverage to reflect the end of subsidies.

“Weve already repriced products for rising cost intensity,” Boudreaux said.

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Bitcoin-sensitive stocks hammered as crypto declines

Bitcoin-sensitive stocks tumbled Monday, enduring a much steeper drop than the keystone crypto asset itself, which was down nearly 4%, falling below $87,000, as of 12:20 p.m. ET.

Goldman Sachs’ themed basket of bitcoin-sensitive equities was down more than 8%. (It consists of companies tied to bitcoin, either through mining, digital payments, crypto investment, or blockchain technology.) It was one of the worst performers among Goldman’s thematically curated baskets of shares on Monday.

Among the basket’s constituents, miners Cipher Mining, CleanSpark, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and IREN were getting the worst of it.

At midday, the basket was on its way to its worst day since November 24, when bitcoin was also languishing below $90,000 and the broader tech sector was going through a brief downturn related to rising worries about durability of the AI boom.

Among the basket’s constituents, miners Cipher Mining, CleanSpark, Hut 8, TeraWulf, and IREN were getting the worst of it.

At midday, the basket was on its way to its worst day since November 24, when bitcoin was also languishing below $90,000 and the broader tech sector was going through a brief downturn related to rising worries about durability of the AI boom.

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Nvidia’s favorite stocks are getting shellacked as AI credit risk spreads

Nvidia’s “House of GPUs” is looking a little wobbly.

Shares of Applied Digital, CoreWeave, and Nebius — three of the four biggest equity positions held by the chip designer as of September 30 — are getting crushed on Monday.

Nvidia owned about $3.6 billion worth of these data center and neocloud stocks (with the overwhelming majority in CoreWeave) per its most recent 13F filing.

The AI credit risk that’s been most talked about in reference to Oracle’s widening credit default swaps spreads is also present in some of these firms, as well.

An Applied Digital bond due in 2030 is trading below $96 for the first time this month. That issuance was made to support data centers where CoreWeave will be the main tenant.

CoreWeave, which earlier this year received warrants enabling it to purchase a large chunk of Applied Digital shares as part of a data center leasing deal, sank last week after announcing a $2 billion convertible note offering that was later upsized.

Of course, it’s not just Nvidia-owned stocks, but the entire data center ecosystem that’s under pressure on Monday. Cipher Mining and IREN are also getting walloped — with Monday’s crypto tumble also likely weighing on these two bitcoin miners turned data center companies.

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GE Vernova up as Evercore ISI initiates shares with “outperform”

Analysts at Evercore ISI began coverage of AI energy play GE Vernova with an “outperform” rating and a price target of $860 on Monday, citing a number of reasons to be bullish about the maker of turbines used for power generation. Evercore’s price target implies gains of roughly 27% for the shares.

Analysts at the shop wrote of GE Vernova:

1) Growth is strong and well supported by backlog in both Power and Electrification… with visibility into the 2030s. Despite headwinds from a shrinking Wind business, we see 12% CAGR 2026-28E, the strongest growth ex-Siemens Energy in our coverage.

2) Margin is expanding with operating leverage, pricing & productivity in both Power & Electrification. Full ownership of Prolec should drive another step up in estimate revisions upon closing (mid-2026). The equipment dynamics (pricing, margin expansion) should repeat in the service business 2030+.

3) Shareholder returns are very well supported, with EBITDA margins rising from 7% in 2024 to 21% in 2028 and FCF of >$5bn pa on average — recent buyback upgrade to $10bn (vs. $6bn prior) and dividend increase amplify an already attractive growth algorithm.”

There are some risks to the rally for the shares, which have more than doubled this year. For instance, the company’s struggling wind power division could weigh on results. Also, the high valuations on the stock — its forward price-to-earnings ratio is roughly 55x — make it vulnerable to rapidly shifting investor vibes toward AI, analysts say.

“Investment sentiment is tied up in the AI/Data centre cycle, so any suggestion of delays or diminished energy demand would weigh on the stock as investors would fear over-capacity,” they noted.

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Nvidia gains after launching new suite of open models

Nvidia extended gains in early trading after announcing an updated edition of its open models, the Nemotron 3.

This family of models comes in three “sizes”: Nano (available today), Super, and Ultra (both expected to be launched in the first half of next year). These sizes reflect the different parameters of each model, which govern the complexity of a given request it can handle.

The company highlighted the flexibility benefits of these models, saying they can be integrated with proprietary counterparts to produce cost savings.

“As multi-agent AI systems expand, developers are increasingly relying on proprietary models for state-of-the-art reasoning while using more efficient and customizable open models to drive down costs,” per the press release. “Routing tasks between frontier-level models and Nemotron in a single workflow gives agents the most intelligence while optimizing tokenomics.”

This strong start to the week helps reverse a substantial run of underperformance from Nvidia versus its peers. It’s the only member of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF that’s declined since the S&P 500 closed at an intermediate bottom on November 20.

Last week, the chip designer closed at its lowest level compared to this fund of 2025, falling below the trough seen in the wake of the DeepSeek freak-out, where nearly $600 billion in market cap was obliterated in a single session.

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