markets

Luke Kawa12/10/25

It’s cyclicals over speculation ahead of the Fed meeting

“Sell your high-flying winners and speculative stocks ahead of the Fed, but the US economy is fine” seems to be the market narrative du jour.

The likes of Bloom Energy, IREN, Opendoor Technologies, Rigetti Computing, IonQ, and Oklo all fell at least 2.5% in early trading. Meanwhile, a Goldman Sachs basket that tracks the performance of cyclical stocks relative to more defensive companies is working on its ninth straight day of gains, which would be its longest winning streak since 2017. The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF, another very economically relevant part of the market, is also trading to the upside.

Goldman Sachs’ index of high-beta momentum longs (that is, stocks that have been trending higher) is down about 1.5% in early trading, while the opposite group, high-beta momentum shorts, is enjoying a nice bounce.

In other words, it looks like traders are taking down some risk in volatile long/short trades ahead of the US central bank’s final meeting of the year amid fears of a so-called “hawkish cut.” Speculative stocks, and in particular small-caps, had been buoyed by the resumption of rate cuts this year.

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Oracle’s underwhelming results are kneecapping the AI trade

The nasty reception to Oracle’s quarterly results, which included a small revenue miss along with much more capex and cash burn than analysts had anticipated, is cascading through the rest of the AI trade.

Among the names getting hit hard:

AI chip behemoths Nvidia, Broadcom, and Advanced Micro Devices.
Neoclouds CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, and Cipher Mining.
Infrastructure providers GE Vernova and Vertiv Holdings.
Server companies Super Micro Computer, Dell, and HP Enterprise.
Robinhood Markets, the place where people go to get long AI stocks, is also deep in the red.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

While stocks have recovered strongly since their November 20 intermediate low, that’s been more about bullishness on Google and its partners as well as global growth than the AI trade broadly.

Only one member of the VanEck Semiconductor ETF is negative during this time: Nvidia. The second-worst performer of the bunch over this stretch is AMD, another AI GPU provider.

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J. Edward Moreno51m

PetMed soars after disclosing $4-per-share buyout offer from investment firm

PetMed Express soared after disclosing that it had received a take-private buyout offer from Singapore investment firm SilverCape Investments, valuing the company at a significant premium.

SilverCape would pay $4 per share, a 125% premium from the $1.77 the stock closed at on Wednesday. Shares soared 50% in early trading to $2.65.

PetMed said its board would evaluate the offer.

The company, which has been public sine 1997, has reported stagnating sales and slipped into unprofitability in 2024. The online pet pharmacy is down 60% this year and down 96% since its peak in 2018.

Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI in deal that brings its characters to AI video platform Sora

Disney and OpenAI announced a major partnership on Thursday.

Walt Disney World

Oracle’s conference call exacerbated the two biggest reasons why investors are worried about its future

Shares are off double digits in early trading as capex is going up, debt is going up, and turning Oracle’s sales backlog into high-margin business is off to a slow start.

Screaming Man

markets

Jon Keegan & David Crowther18h

Oracle sinks as cloud division misses and company plans $15 billion more capex

Shares of Oracle fell in after-hours trading Wednesday — and remained under pressure in the premarket session Thursday morning, down more than 11% as of 5:20 a.m. ET — after a headline beat on earnings was overshadowed by softer revenue.

Adjusted earnings per share were $2.26, up 54% year on year, blowing past analyst expectations of $1.64 per share. However, this beat was primarily due to the disposal of its Ampere chip company to SoftBank, which boosted pretax earnings by $0.91 per diluted share, Barron’s reported.

Revenue for the quarter was $16.06 billion, up 14% year on year but missing estimates of $16.2 billion.

The big weakness weighing most heavily on the stock this morning seems to be Oracle’s cloud computing unit, where sales came in at $8 billion for the quarter, up 34% year on year. Analysts had been expecting $8.8 billion.

The other major talking point heading into the print — how much Oracle was investing in capex for new data centers — has proven to be another sticking point again. On the earnings call, Doug Kehring, the company’s principal financial officer, said:

“...given the added RPO this quarter that can be monetized quickly starting next year, we now expect fiscal 2026 CapEx will be about $15 billion higher than we forecasted after Q1.”

That will do little to alleviate concerns around Oracle’s diverging free cash flow and net income, though the company’s execs did also say that they expect total cloud revenue to grow 40% to 44% in the coming quarter. Leadership also said they believe they can convert some of the added backlog to revenue sooner than expected, adding $4 billion of “additional revenue in FY27.”

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