Dear Trader,
Tim Colby and Licia Leslie don’t see eye to eye on gold this week. Tim wants a basket of gold miners, and Licia wants nothing to do with the biggest gold producer on the planet.
That split comes from the ten trades the Option Pit trading team handed Mark for today’s State of the Market. Each trader brought one stock they love and one they’d leave.
Hans loves a company that controls who gets to log into what at thousands of businesses, and he’s leaving a data center builder that rents its space to AI. Andrew loves the world’s biggest animal health company and wants out of America’s largest homebuilder.
Mark’s leave is an AI cloud provider coming off a rough October. Tim’s other leave runs freight trains across the eastern US. And Mark and Licia both landed on the same love: a tech company that’s been around since 1911.
Mark goes live today to walk through all ten and explain why each one made the cut. He’ll also dig into the three stories below, from Anthropic’s IPO filing to Brazil’s market getting flattened overnight.
Then the team narrows those ten down to one: the single best option play of the week. That happens on Ticker Highlight Show at 10:30 AM ET.
Tap here to join the Ticker Highlight Show before the pick drops.
Click this link to jump to the State of the Market live room.
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The Daily News Breakdown
SIGN: Anthropic’s IPO prospectus is finally out, and one early backer figures $2 trillion might be the opening bid. Jared Carmel of Manhattan Venture Partners, an early investor in both Anthropic and SpaceX, told Yahoo’s Brian Sozzi ahead of the filing that a $2 trillion price tag isn’t crazy.
The S-1 backs up the growth story: revenue hit $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. It also shows an $80.7 billion first-half net loss, which is a lot of zeros to park next to a minus sign.
Bankers reportedly want $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, but Carmel wants it priced to sell so buyers stick around. The debut could land before the end of November.
SIREN: Brazilian stocks got thrown down the stairs before Monday’s open after Lula pulled out a runoff win the market never priced in. Earlier this month, Flávio Bolsonaro grabbed a surprise first-round lead, and investors piled into Brazil. Polls had Bolsonaro narrowly ahead, and Kalshi bettors had him as a heavy favorite.
Sunday’s result torched that whole trade. The iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ) traded down roughly 25% premarket, which would beat its worst day ever (a 23% drop in March 2020) if it holds. Petrobras (PBR) sank 20% and Nu Holdings (NU) dropped 26%.
Jubarte Capital’s Benjamin Mandel warned Friday that a Lula win likely means higher rates and a stalled rate-cutting cycle until the budget math gets more credible.
SNEAKER: Bond traders keep paying more to insure Big Tech against default, and tech stock buyers don’t seem to care. BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky notes that investment-grade tech credit default swaps (insurance contracts that pay out if a company stiffs its lenders) now sit at their widest since 2022. The S&P tech sector, meanwhile, sits a few percent off its highs.
CoreWeave (CRWV) has lost 35% this month as investors dumped its bonds. Then Meta (META) posted negative free cash flow for the first time since 2012, thanks to an AI spending habit with no visible brakes.
TS Lombard’s Dario Perkins modeled an AI crash and came back with a 30%-plus drop in US stocks and roughly $20 trillion in market cap up in smoke.