Tech bounce stalls

With its quarterly results due out next week, the world's most valuable company Nvidia bounced 6% on Tuesday as the U.S. Senate passed a key bill to fund government through the end of January - moving the procedure to the House this week. 

The tech sector and megacaps led the S&P500's 1.5% surge while the Nasdaq rallied more than 2%. AI data analytics firm Palantir jumped 9% and Tesla climbed 4%.

Still, the moves only reclaimed about two thirds of the 6% Nasdaq drop and 15% Nvidia swoon seen over the past two weeks.     

And futures have stalled into today's open.

Nvidia-backed CoreWeave's shares dropped more than 7% overnight after it trimmed its annual revenue forecast, taking the shine off a strong September quarter driven by demand for AI cloud services.

And as Japan's SoftBank reported more than a doubling of quarterly profits to 2.5 trillion yen ($16.6 billion), driven by valuation gains in its OpenAI holdings, it said it sold the remainder of its shares in Nvidia for almost $6 billion.

SoftBank has been a repeat investor in Nvidia, selling its investment before the AI boom took off and then buying the chip giant's shares again before divesting in October.

More broadly, Japanese government data showed domestic investors sold significant amounts of foreign stocks last month to lock in profits from the AI-fuelled rally.

With Treasury markets closed today, the dollar was firmer - probing six-month highs against the yen after Monday's broadside from new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi against Bank of Japan tightening as she loosened fiscal policy rules more broadly.

In Britain, UK government bond yields and the pound fell sharply on news that the unemployment rate there jumped to four-year highs and wage growth slowed - bolstering speculation that the Bank of England will cut interest rates again next month.

A torrent of delayed U.S. economic data is set to hit over the next month as the government reopens following its longest shutdown on record, but a growing number of Federal Reserve officials doubt the numbers will show the sort of weakness required to cut rates again this year.

After more than 40 days without official economic data, Fed officials seem to be leaning toward the view that the labor market has held up reasonably well, financial conditions remain loose and above-target inflation is going in the wrong direction.

So unless there is a major surprise in the delayed data about to be released, the case for the third interest rate cut of the year is weakening fast. Even though futures still price roughly a two-thirds chance of another cut in December, that may well prove overly optimistic.  

Graphics are produced by Reuters.

Japanese investors sold significant amounts of foreign stocks last month to lock in profits from an AI-fuelled rally amid concerns over stretched valuations and the U.S. government shutdown. According to data from Japan's Ministry of Finance on Tuesday, domestic investors withdrew about 1.84 trillion yen ($12.20 billion) from foreign stock markets in October - the largest net sales for a month since June.

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