S&P 500 finishes flat on December rate cut doubts, but tech bolsters Nasdaq 100

Shares of luxury EV maker Lucid are being dragged down by bearish options trading on Thursday morning, with a put/call ratio of 5.8 as of 11:10 a.m. ET, versus the 1.05 it’s averaged over the prior 20 days.

If sustained, this would be the most bearishly tilted options activity for a single session for Lucid since June 21, 2024.

More than 32,000 put options have changed hands as of 11:10 a.m. ET, already above Lucid’s 30,794 20-day average for a full session. Lucid shares were down about 3% on Thursday morning.

On Wednesday, Lucid and Uber announced that their planned 20,000-robotaxi fleet would begin operations in the autonomously crowded streets of San Francisco starting next year. Earlier this week, Lucid also said it’s partnering with Nvidia to build autonomous vehicles for personal use.

Blackwell chips weren’t the only thing that US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t talk about that was supposed to be on the agenda.

Andrew Bishop, global head of policy research at Signum Global Advisors, flagged that “multiple previously-mentioned items were seemingly left out of the deal,” including purchases of Boeing aircraft by China.

Shares of Boeing are selling off amid the lack of a purchase agreement for the American company’s planes in the one-year deal and a downgrade by Deutsche Bank. Analyst Scott Deuschle lowered the stock to “hold” from “buy,” cutting his free cash flow estimates and writing that the company remains “constrained by the burdens of the past.” He also reduced his price target to $240 from $255.

The plane maker recently reported quarterly results, in which it booked its first quarter of positive free cash flow since its door plug blowout in January 2024.

CoreWeave’s latest attempt to purchase Core Scientific has failed.

Core Scientific announced that at its special meeting held earlier today, “the Company did not receive the requisite number of votes to approve the previously announced merger agreement with CoreWeave.”

This outcome was expected by markets, given that Core Scientific’s share price was trading well in excess of the deal price heading into this meeting, and major shareholders and proxy advisory firms had voiced their opposition to the tie-up.

Shares of Core Scientific initially popped on this news before quickly erasing all of that advance (and then some), while CoreWeave retreated deeper into the red.

CoreWeave’s acquisition would have represented meaningful vertical integration for the neocloud, providing it with ownership over existing data centers and a pipeline of more to come.

CoreWeave and Core Scientific still have an ongoing business relationship, however: the latter is the former’s landlord, and CoreWeave remains on the hook for $10 billion in overhead over the next 12 years that would have been eliminated by this deal.

What US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping talked about in South Korea obviously matters for financial market participants. What they agreed to? Even more so.

But what they didn’t talk about is also newsworthy.

Like Nvidia’s Blackwell offerings.

Ahead of his chat with Xi, Trump said, “We’ll be speaking about Blackwell, it’s the super duper chip.”

After the meeting, Trump said that while Nvidia and semiconductors were a topic of discussion, “We’re not talking about the Blackwell.”

Shares of Nvidia are down about 2% in early trading.

The most likely explanation is that it’s simply a bridge too far to conceive of sending America’s most advanced AI chips to China in the current geopolitical climate.

It took months of haggling, through public persuasion campaigns and private cajoling, for Nvidia (and AMD) to regain the ability to send nerfed versions of their AI chips to China. And, depending on which reports you believe, demand for those processors is either white-hot or companies aren’t even allowed to buy them (note: both these things could be true!).

Getting effectively locked out of the Chinese market was a major headache for Nvidia earlier this year. In late May, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said, “With half of the world’s AI researchers based there, the platform that wins China is positioned to lead globally.”

It’s hard not to view Huang’s recent presentation in DC as draping Nvidia in the American flag, which may suggest that he believes Beijing’s active push for a made-in-China AI boom has staying power.

Nvidia’s upcoming earnings report, slated for November 11, will be closely watched for how much (or if) its China business is recovering. Its outlook for $54 billion in sales does not assume any H20 shipments for the three months ending in October.

Zooming out, uncertainty around China isn’t standing in the way of Nvidia’s eye-popping success: Huang said that orders for Blackwell and Rubin chips have already exceeded $500 billion through 2026.