Markets
Nvidia Fell 4.3% as AMD Jumped 13% and the S&P 500 Rallied
Nvidia closed down 4.27% at $178.67 on November 9, a day when the S&P 500 had its best session since April. Investors sold the CEO probe and bought other chipmakers.
It is rare for the market's largest AI stock to fall on a day when chip stocks rally hard. On Monday, November 9, the S&P 500 rose 2.35% to 7,549.94, its best session since April 8, the Nasdaq Composite gained 2.74% to 25,253.14 and the Dow added 2.15% to 52,389.75. Nvidia went the other way: it opened at $173.07, recovered part of the drop and closed at $178.67, down $7.97 or 4.27%, after its board said on Sunday that independent directors would investigate reports that chief executive Jensen Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort.
The selling was heavy. About 462.7 million Nvidia shares changed hands, roughly four times the 30-day average of 115.6 million, and the day's fall removed about $192 billion of market value, according to StockTitan. The shares traded between $170.24 and $179.92 and never got back to Friday's $186.64 close. Most analysts quoted by Reuters did not expect Huang to step down, and Bernstein's Stacy Rasgon noted that Huang "pulls most of the company's strings himself", which is exactly why the market discounts the uncertainty.
The rest of the sector had a very different day. AMD jumped 13.26% to $508.58 after Oppenheimer upgraded it to outperform from market perform with a $600 price target, arguing that data-centre sales could make up about 85% of revenue by 2027 on demand from OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. Broadcom rose 8.78% to $319.48, Applied Materials 11.37% and Teradyne 12.73%. In Taipei, where a NT$500 billion stabilisation fund and new short-sale curbs took effect, the main index closed up 4.94%, its biggest one-day gain since July 31.
Lower oil helped the broader rebound: Brent settled 5.85% lower as Washington played down new strikes on Iran, and the Russell 2000 gained 3.23%. The rally did not change the rate picture, though. The 10-year Treasury yield edged up to 4.88% and futures priced an 84.2% chance of a December Fed hike, up from 78% on Friday, ahead of Tuesday's October CPI.
For Nvidia, the gap with its peers is now the number to watch. A stock that lags on a day like Monday is being priced for something specific to it rather than for the AI trade as a whole. The company reports third-quarter results on November 17; until then, any news from the board's investigation is likely to move the shares more than anything said about chip demand.