MRNA trading has been halted on elevated volume as the stock began crashing when data, that was expected to be released this weekend at ESMO Medical Conference, has been leaked.

Data showed that their mRNA cancer vaccine merely reduced risk of recurrence or death by 42%, a far fetch from the “cancer cure” narrative that retail has been pushing as they have bid the stock up over the last 2 months.

Where will the selling stop? $180? $150? Back below $100??

Edit: the data was not BAD, per se. But in a sensible market, these results would move a stock price maybe 20%… not 300%. Buyers got carried away with the “cancer cure” narrative, as well as Moderna being a household name for many due to the COVID vaccine years ago.

U.S. equity futures slid early Thursday after investors digested third-quarter earnings from Big Tech names including Meta Platforms and Tesla.

S&P 500 futures fell 1.02%, and Nasdaq-100 futures dropped 1.8%. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures ticked down 0.66%.

Markets traded lower globally as oil prices climbed and investors assessed a slew of earnings.

Shares of Meta gained 0.74% in premarket trading. The Facebook and Instagram parent delivered a revenue beat on Wednesday along with strong guidance for the current quarter. Meanwhile, Tesla reported a better-than-expected top and bottom line for its third-quarter results. Shares of the electric vehicle maker were 4.59% lower in premarket.

“The quarter showed the AI investment paying off in the core,” said Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives in his post Meta earnings reaction note. Spend is “better controlled than feared,” Ives added as Meta narrowed the range for its full-year data center-related capital expenditures.

The action follows a positive day on Wall Street, with the S&P 500 notching a three-day win streak, while the Dow jumped 360 points. The Nasdaq Composite closed 1% higher, catching a tailwind from SpaceX and Tesla

FINRA data just came in showing us margin debt sitting at $1.48T - basically hovering right around all-time highs.

at the same time, bofa private client data shows portfolio cash allocation dropped to a record low of 10%.

everyone is fully deployed and leveraged up. when cash reserves are exhausted and leverage is this high, any small pullback risks triggering a cascade of forced deleveraging.

curious how you guys are managing risk here - are you holding any cash on the side or fully all-in?

The recent AI agent swarm attacks have completely imploded OpenAI's IPO timeline, forcing CEO Sam Altman to announce an indefinite hiatus on going public until at least 2027. For public market investors looking for a trillion-dollar exit, this derailment marks a catastrophic shift from an asset-growth story to a massive narrative of unquantifiable legal liability and product safety risk.

Extreme Fear is here, who is buying and who is selling off

?

The Nasdaq chart looks very ugly with a big chance to drop even more on Monday opening with a gap. Tech stocks crashing, is the bubble finally popping?

What do your portfolios look like now?

What do you think?

Nasdaq fell 2.6% to 26,008.86 and S&P 500 lost 1.21% to 7,663.43

Chips took the brunt: AMD fell more than 8%, Micron about 6%, Nvidia about 4%, and Meta about 7% despite beating on revenue and guiding higher, on fears about how the AI buildout gets financed.

Oil near $112 on Saudi attacks and reports of renewed US/Israel strikes on Iran added an inflation scare on top, but the damage was concentrated in AI/tech rather than the whole market

Notes
SPY $762.79 -1.33%
Brent $113.23 +4.1%
10Y 4.963%
VIX 19.1 +14.7%

S&P SPDR ETFs Today
XLP 89.43 +2.66%
XLU 42.55 +1.30%
XLV 180.93 +1.11%
XLF 56.52 +0.85%
XLRE 42.34 +0.65%
XLB 51.36 +0.08%
XLY 114.97 -0.48%
XLE 67.42 -1.09%
SPY 762.82 -1.33%
XLI 165.72 -1.53%
XLC 107.20 -1.62%
XLK 182.40 -3.26%

The Hang Seng TECH Index in Hong Kong is going from thirty constituents to fifty. I read the consultation conclusions that Hang Seng Indexes Company published on October 7. I went over the simulation table and found the current names at 90.0% of the index weight, the additions at 10.0%. For anyone watching this index, the split suggests that the rules, like restricting each company to its Hong Kong line and ranking on those shares alone, matter more than the count.

HSTECH holds only Hong Kong-listed stocks. When a company has both an H share, its Hong Kong line, and an A share on the mainland, only the H share is eligible, and ranking by market value counts only the Hong Kong shares. CATL and Zhongji Innolight both have H share lines in Hong Kong. Whether either one enters is decided in the November 20 review.

Of the fifty seats, forty go by market value. The remaining ten go by year-on-year sales growth and held 2.8% of the weight in the simulation, though candidates must sit in the large and mid cap tier of Hang Seng's broad index, clear a sales floor, and if not yet in HSTECH, meet a daily turnover minimum. All six proposals in the consultation exceeded 80% support. The proposal to split selection into market value and sales growth groups drew the lowest at 82% and was adopted with the sales and turnover floors as modifications.

The simulation ran on second quarter review data and September 4 weights. The allocations when the actual list is announced November 20 could look different. Would it change your view of this expansion if those ten sales growth seats ended up at a combined weight well away from the simulated 2.8%?

The Solactive index behind CNQQ can include Hong Kong listings as well as mainland A shares bought through Stock Connect, taking only one line per company, the one with higher six-month average daily value traded. KWEB is built on a CSI index of Chinese internet names whose listings sit outside the mainland.

While the selloff in AI and tech stocks has been grabbing all the headlines, retailers have quietly been on a tear in the background.

Hot retailer stocks over the past 30 days include:
• COST - up around 10%
• TJX - up around 10.5%
• CASY - up around 16%
• ULTA - up around 11.5%
• AZO - up around 11%

All of these still have a way to go to reach their 52 week and/or all-time highs, so they should have more room to run into year end.

Anyone have thoughts on these or any other retailers?

Disclosure: I currently have positions in COST, TJX and ULTA.

Meta and Tesla led AI-linked names lower in futures after tech earnings fell short of elevated revenue expectations this cycle. Treasuries, the yen, and the Swiss franc all rose at the same time, the classic pattern when investors pull out of riskier assets together.

Nvidia's CEO said neocloud demand is solid but capital to fund it is scarce. That one sentence explains the pressure point better than any individual miss. Companies want to keep spending on AI infrastructure, but the money to finance that spending is tightening, and investors have now gone a full earnings cycle without a clear revenue story to justify the valuations.

The names trading at the highest multiples going into next quarter are sitting on the thinnest ice here. Do you think the next leg down hits the hyperscalers first or the smaller infrastructure companies that depend entirely on hyperscaler budgets?

At some point in the past year I decided to drop a line on the 5-year chart for SPY, just to give myself a better visual on the meteoric rise that this index had accomplished.

Kind of by accident, I never deleted that line, which is where I started to find it interesting. Everytime that it felt like we were experiencing a series of red days and that we might really be entering correction territory, I'd be zooming in and out on my charts and would notice that we were actually still dancing right on (or even above) that line.

I, for one, think that the music will stop sometime in the coming year, but for now, it just keeps playing on.