Dear Trader,

CoreWeave walked into the bar Tuesday night and bought a round for the whole room.

The AI cloud company reported $3.66 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 168% from a year ago and ahead of what analysts wanted. It raised its full-year outlook to between $13 billion and $13.3 billion. CEO Michael Intrator also canceled his own plan to sell stock, which is about as close as a CEO gets to standing on the bar and announcing he’s not leaving.

The stock closed Wednesday up about 24%, with the chip names piling in right behind it. The Nasdaq finished up 1.6% at 25,466, and the S&P 500 gained 1.3% to sit within 2.6% of its October record.

I don’t blame anybody for celebrating. Last Thursday, CoreWeave touched $40.58, right around where it went public, and the credit market was treating the whole neocloud crowd like the guy who keeps asking to borrow twenty bucks.

One good quarter flipped the mood in a hurry.

Then I pulled up the Nasdaq chart, and my mood switched.

The index has spent the past week crossing its 200-day moving average (in red).

Wednesday, it gapped back above that line, printed a doji, and couldn’t get past the 20-day moving average (in green) overhead.

A doji means the open and the close landed in about the same spot. The buyers came in hot on the gap and had nothing left to push it any higher. It also meant that neither buyers or sellers could take control. Not exactly what you want to see when a big moving average gets crossed.

CoreWeave or not, nothing’s changed on that chart.

The Nasdaq still sits nearly 8% below its October 6th record. As of last Friday, only 43% of Nasdaq 100 stocks traded above their own 200-day averages, against a long-term norm of about 68%. A handful of big names are carrying the index while most of the room hangs back by the door.

Now look at the calendar.

Anthropic prices its IPO next Wednesday, November 18th, and starts trading Thursday the 19th.

The week after that is Thanksgiving. Half the Street will be out, and on thin volume it doesn’t take much of a shove to move prices a long way. I’d rather not have the biggest supply event of the year land right before everybody leaves for the airport.

So I went back to see what happened after SpaceX.

It priced at $135 on June 11th and opened the next morning. On its third day of trading, it hit almost $226 intraday. By mid-July, it was right back at $135. The Nasdaq didn’t top on that one, though. It kept running and set new records in September and October. SpaceX marked the top for the folks who chased SpaceX, and the index climbed for almost four more months.

But the timing for Anthropic is way different.

Rivian’s the closest comparison. It priced on November 9th, 2021, raised $11.9 billion in the biggest U.S. IPO since Alibaba, and was briefly worth more than Ford and GM while it had built a few hundred trucks. The Nasdaq set a record close on Friday, November 19th, 2021, nine days after Rivian’s debut. That was the Friday before Thanksgiving week. By March, the index was down more than 20%.

Anthropic starts trading on November 19th, the Thursday before Thanksgiving week. I’ll let you sit with that one for a minute.

The pattern shows up in other corners too. Coinbase hit the Nasdaq through a direct listing on April 14th, 2021, and bitcoin topped out near $64,800 that same day. Blackstone went public in June 2007 at the height of the private equity boom. Its stock peaked on day one, and the S&P made its record that October before the financial crisis tore it apart.

Hightower looked at the five biggest U.S. IPOs from every decade since the 1980s. Twelve months after those deals, half of the S&P 500’s returns landed in its “poor” bucket, double the normal rate.

Nobody rings a bell at the top, and I won’t pretend I know the day. The setup looks awfully familiar, though, and the chart hasn’t given me any reason to relax.

Olivia Voz lives for this kind of market.

She’s trading the Nasdaq’s swings with her 0DTE strategy on the QQQ, using options that expire the same day she buys them, and she’s been crushing it on returns.

When the index whips 2% in a session, she’s already got a plan for it.

See how Voz is trading it here.

Too many unprecedented things are happening at once, and too many of them look too familiar for me to look away.

Stay ready.

Charlie Delvalle

Editorial Director, Option Pit