Dear Trader,
Somebody new has the keys to this market, and Tim Colby’s hosting the live room today to show you who.
He’s bringing Hans Albrecht along for the ride.
Tim’s answer starts in the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield trades above 5% right now, and he says bonds are doing the driving again. Even this morning’s softer PPI report (the wholesale inflation number) feeds into that conversation.
Meanwhile, the old driver just walked out. Traders have leaned on the “Nvidia put” (the habit of Nvidia rallying hard enough to drag the whole market off the mat) for a long time.
With Jensen Huang gone, Tim’s asking whether that safety net left with him. He’s got a line ready for it: one man does not a company make.
He’ll also get into oil and Iran, including the one energy hedge he thinks you have to own. And a week after the position wipeout, Tim will explain why he doesn’t read it as a growth scare.
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The Daily News Breakdown
SIGN: Wholesale prices rose 0.3% in October, a tenth below what Wall Street expected. Before anyone pops champagne, the year-over-year rate climbed to 6.5%, the hottest since November 2022.
September got revised up to a 1.4% jump, so October mostly looks calm standing next to it. Energy slipped 0.1% after a 10% surge the month before, and that did most of the cooling. The stickier gauge that strips out food, energy and trade services rose 0.5% for the second straight month.
Markets already price a full quarter-point hike at the Fed’s December 8th and 9th meeting, with slim odds on a half point. A one-tenth miss won’t talk anyone out of that.
SIREN: Yahoo Finance argues Jensen Huang’s exit could end up helping the AI trade. For anyone who missed the soap opera: Huang resigned from Nvidia (NVDA) after reports surfaced of multiple affairs, including ones with employees and one with a woman US intelligence calls a Chinese spy.
He had 60 people reporting straight to him and never built a succession plan, so CFO Colette Kress got the interim job. The bull case says that if Nvidia keeps delivering without its leather-jacketed frontman, investors start trusting the numbers over the founder myth.
The piece leans on Apple surviving Steve Jobs. President Trump even floated pulling Tim Cook out of retirement to run Nvidia, which tells you how normal this week has gone.
SNEAKER: Saudi Arabia sat down with China’s Middle East envoy in Riyadh to talk about the Houthis, who can’t stop aiming drones at Aramco. The group claimed fresh strikes Thursday on Aramco in Riyadh, a pumping station on the East-West pipeline and an oil facility at Yanbu.
That pipeline lets Saudi crude dodge the Strait of Hormuz, so hitting it gets attention. Both sides talked up stable energy markets and safe shipping through Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab. Beijing makes a funny referee here, since it reportedly cut its own safe-passage deal with the Houthis back in July.
Meanwhile, Trump says Gulf allies asked him to hold off on more Iran strikes, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says it targeted a US radar in Bahrain.