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Robinhood, new S&P 500 leader, the subject of favorable analyst chatter

Robinhood Markets briefly touched a new all-time intraday high in early trading after the newly minted — and now top-performing — member of the the S&P 500 received some favorable write-ups from Wall Street analysts.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. I own stock as part of my compensation.)

Piper Sandler analysts highlighted momentum in the company’s prediction markets business thanks to the rollout of contracts on college and profession football, noting that the event contracts business was running at a $200 million annualized rate so far in September. They raised their price target on the shares to $140 from $120.

“Prediction Markets (aka event contracts) present significant upside opportunity for Robinhood,” Piper Sandler’s Patrick Moley wrote.

Elsewhere, Citi analysts raised their Q3 and full-year 2025 estimates and upped their price target on the shares to $135, but kept a “neutral” rating on the stock.

“While HOOD continues to see solid momentum across the platform, we believe the stock is pricing in much of the growth potential in our view. Given current valuations and where we are in the retail cycle (closer to the highs than the lows from an activity perspective from our viewpoint), we prefer to wait for a more reasonable entry point at present.”

The stock has clearly had a heck of a run.

Through yesterday’s close, Robinhood was up nearly 240% in 2025. Since it was added to the S&P 500 on Monday, it’s now the top performer among the blue chips, trouncing previous leaders Seagate Technology Holdings and Palantir.

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Report: US Senators plan to introduce bill blocking Nvidia from selling advanced chips to China for 30 months

US Senators are on the verge of introducing a bill that would block Nvidia from selling its H200 or Blackwell chips to China for 30 months, the Financial Times reports. The H200 is Nvidia’s best chip from the Hopper generation, while the Blackwell line is its current flagship offering.

Shares of the chip designer are little changed in the wake of this report, still up more than 1% on the session. The reaction makes sense, seeing as previous positive indications on Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China failed to inspire much positive momentum in its shares.

The stock got a brief-lived jolt higher (that didn’t last the day!) on November 21 after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had discussed the possibility of selling its H200 chips to China.

Nvidia has effectively been shut out of China’s AI market in 2025. First, export restrictions meant it could no longer sell the H20, a nerfed version of its Hopper chip, to the world’s second-largest economy. After that export ban was lifted, demand from China “never materialized,” per Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Reports indicate that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them towards domestic alternatives.

President Donald Trump had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi in late October, but failed to do so. The two leaders did not discuss the topic at that time.

Per the FT, this upcoming bill would be a bipartisan effort, being co-sponsored by the leading Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations east Asia subcommittee.

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AI energy plays soar on an explosion of call buying

Like their quantum computing counterparts, AI-linked energy plays are benefiting from an explosion of bullish options activity on Thursday.

  • Oklo is up double digits with call volumes above 106,000 as of 2:46 p.m. ET, more than double its 20-day average for a full session, with a put/call ratio of about 0.6. Call options with a strike price of $110 that expire this Friday (which are now in-the-money thanks to today’s surge) are seeing the most activity.

  • Nuscale, another nuclear energy play, seen nearly 140,000 call options change hands versus a 20-day average of 51,073.

  • And fuel cell company Bloom Energy has traded nearly 80,000 calls, roughly twice its 20-day average, with a put/call ratio of about 0.3.

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up the potential for nuclear energy, saying, “In the next 6-7 years I think you are going to see a whole bunch of small nuclear reactors.”

This adds to the evidence that the speculative bid is back in a big way after smaller stocks tied to the AI boom and quantum computing cratered from mid-October through most of November as credit risk began to seep into the AI trade.

Old electronic items tossed on ground for disposal, Hudson

Technology giants don’t look like they used to, as the asset-light era fades

Oracle and Meta are now some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the S&P 500, spending more than energy giants. I guess data really is the new oil?

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Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

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Intel sinks on news it will hang on to networking unit

Intel dropped in early trading Thursday after it disclosed plans to retain ownership of its networking unit following a strategic review of operations.

The unit, known as NEX, makes products like infrastructure processors, which do needed “housekeeping” tasks like running security checks, thereby freeing core Intel CPUs to do the higher-value operations. It also produces switches and controllers that manage and direct the flow of data to CPUs.

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