The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) took a sharp step back on Thursday, declining around 850 points at its lowest and falling away from record highs posted during the midweek market session. US President Donald Trump signed off his formal presidential approval of a short-term funding solution to get the federal government reopened. The temporary funding bill will see federal operations restart until the end of January, and brings an end to what has become the longest US government shutdown in American history.
Healthcare stocks and energies saw scattered gains on Thursday, but an ongoing tilt back into more traditional investment segments is doing little to stave off a spreading decline in the tech sector. The AI and tech trades continue to bleed on the floor, with Tesla (TSLA) declining 6.6% and ambiguously AI-connected Palantir (PLTR) shedding over 5% on Thursday.
Disney also fell over 9% on Thursday, slipping to $106.00 per share after missing on overall revenue expectations despite beating earnings estimates. Mixed segment results combined to generate overall revenue of $94.4 billion for the fiscal year, up 3% from 2024’s $91.4 billion.
Lack of data almost fixed?
With the US government set to reopen, at least temporarily, markets are now looking ahead to the resumption of critical economic dataset releases. US White House officials toyed with the idea of declaring entire batches of inflation and growth data as “lost” during the government closure, specifically the October inflation and employment figures, which could never be released. A critical gap in key inflation and labor information is a prospect that is likely sitting poorly with investors who are eager to try and draw a bead on the chances of a third straight interest rate cut from the Federal Reserve (Fed) on December 10.
Despite a potential gap in the October data, September’s Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) jobs report is rumored to be getting prepared for a late release next week, and will serve as one of the last chances for the Fed to take a dipstick measurement of the US economy before its next interest rate decision. According to the CME’s FedWatch Tool, rate traders are pricing in slightly less than 50% odds of a quarter-point rate cut in December, with around 90% odds that the Fed will blink and wait until January 28, 2026, before giving a third 25 basis point cut.
Dow Jones daily chart
AI stocks FAQs
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.