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Joining me for the hour, Joe Teranova, Steve Weiss, Jim Labenthal, and Bin Talkington. So, we do begin with green on the screen, NASDAQ around a 3-month low. And it is the question I think on everyone's mind whether the AI trade is in trouble or not, whether something fundamentally has changed and the fundamentals have gotten worse.
Let's make that the backdrop for Deutsche Bank making a big call today. The spring is coiled again. They upgrade tech to overweight. 3 weeks ago, we downgraded tech tactically from overweight to neutral as the riskreward seemed unfavorable with performance positioning and the perception of growth all asymmetric.
Well, tech underperformed sharply since then, taking it to the bottom of its decadel long relative trend channel. And investor positioning in tech has also dropped sharply in line with a significant deceleration in earnings growth. riskreward now in favor of tech again and we upgrade it back to overweight.
So that's where we're starting with a new month. What do you think? I think it's on its heels for sure. We saw that at the end of last week. I don't think you have any confirmation today that you have an allcle signal just because you have a bounce in the market. Let's be clear today is about the price of oil being 7% lower, yields falling further to levels we haven't seen in the last 45 days.
disagree with this call and therefore it's a cyclical consumer discretionary trade. You know that I don't disagree with it because I've said over and over for the last several weeks that I think we get a return of optimism that is catalyzed by the momentum factor and by the AI trade. However, at this moment sitting here today on November 2nd, I don't have the evidence in front of me to suggest that I'm correct in what my expectations.
What's the catalyst for for being as positive as this says? You need to see a a universal allcle signal on a day like today. I don't like that. If you could show Micron, Micron's down, AMD's down, Oracle's down. Yes, it's on the 20 billion deal. Intel is down AC. You need to see broadbase universal recovery in the AI and the tech adjacent trade.
But I mean to get the Okay, but the hardest thing to do is to make the call before all that happens, not after it happens. No, you you see and there's a middle process, but that's what they're doing here. That's the that's what they're doing here. I'm looking at it from the perspective of allocating capital in the market.
I'm sitting here, I'm saying, okay, I want to put money in behind this trade. When am I doing it? Am I doing it before I have proper evidence or am I doing it as I begin to see the evidence drip slowly in my favor? That's what I'm ultimately going to do. I'm not going to look back on it, do it afterwards.
There are signals that I'm going to look for. they're going to say, "Okay, I'm going to step forward." Right now, I'm on my heels after last week for sure. I was exuberant about the market moving higher. And then I had Twilio smack me in the face down 20%. But if I told you that, and we've talked about this, that positioning's cleaner.
You had a lot of deleveraging. Yes. A lot of funds sold tech, mutual funds. Pretty rough October for hedge funds. I don't think anybody's shocked by that. A lot of concentration was in tech. A lot of wipeout was in tech. Jeffrey's trading desk today on flows. October, the largest net sell month for tech in more than 5 years.
As a result, the largest monthly outperformance for the equal weight S&P versus the market cap weighted S&P since April of09. So, positioning's cleaner. Uh, a lot of stocks got waxed. Um, you look at the chip since you went to the chips, um, you're talking about 25 plus% declines in the month of October alone for several of the chip names.
And in some respects it was much worse than that. So that's two things. Earnings were pretty good. Price action wasn't good. But if you had deleveraging, you had pretty good earnings and you had pretty big declines and you're positive. What more evidence do you need? Well, I mean, I'm positioned in the direction of this return of optimism, the AI trade, the momentum trade working.
But I'm acknowledging sitting here over the last several days something feels as though we are not getting the momentum signal that I want to carry us forward. We're just not twice. So if you're asking if shortterm tech is oversold, yeah, probably. However, how short term is that going to be? We've got the elections coming up, you know, pretty soon like tomorrow, right?
If we get a big socialist wave, that won't be good for the market because then you'll start worrying about 28 and what's going to be in the who's going to be in the White House. And then you've got the Iran war that's still going on and oil's trading down because supposedly there are diplomatic channels going on.
We've heard that probably a hundred times, right? So that sort of makes a good point. Yeah. Um All right. So we know all that. Do you think anything's fundamentally changed in the AI trade? Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. They used to be able to raise money whenever they wanted, whatever they wanted, at any valuation they wanted.
And now we're seeing that that you know some funds are saying and sovereign saying, you know what, we're full. We're too full. We don't need anymore. Number one. Number two. So we see open AI cut back by 10 10 billion, right? A third and 20 billion may be aspirational. They say 15 to 20 billion. I know funds that have cut back their orders.
I know others that have pulled out of orders and others that are coming to market. So there's picking and choosing as there should be at this point, right? So I think you'll see a lot of the names that we all talked about, of course they're going to survive, but without the private market valuation umbrella, without reading into that, I think it's going to be tough going for a lot of the others.
So when you see the others go by the wayside who can't raise capital at all that obviously informs valuation of all of them. So we see what Musk said about Groank about it's unsustainably high cost. So I think the AI trade is uh is definitely on pause and this is very typical at the peak of a cycle.
I think we saw the peak. He's channeling Ben Writes very much of Melius today who has an interesting note. AI, this is quote, AI trade facing its toughest moment. Funding capex is everything. And he's cut price targets on a number of names, Nvidia, Marll, AMD, Dell, Broadcom. Okay, he cuts the targets there.
And he says, quote, "We have at least $5 trillion plus companies, soon to be seven, obviously Anthropic and and Open AI that have to issue hundreds of billions in securities, stocks, bonds, etc. The amount of paper so large it has become the primary risk to the AI trade more than power chip supply memory and even political bottlenecks.
Multiples could remain under pressure as the buildout's going to feature more back stops throughout 2028. How about that? That this this is the game changer that Weiss identifies. That's what's fundamentally changed. I agree with Steve that financing is the challenge right now in the markets and financing is the reason that we're going back and forth with a negative tone here.
I mean, these numbers are pretty outstanding when we think about SpaceX a week and a half ago, $40 billion of debt. Microsoft a week ago, 25 billion. Last week, I think it was last week, 37.5 billion from Meta. Now we've got Oracle coming out with 20 billion. These are real numbers that when you add them up, the money has to come from somewhere.
Now, Scott, before we were talking about financing, you were talking about deleveraging and positioning. That's actually a positive. We've been doing that for weeks. But what I take away is the biggest positive of all of this, which will swap the funding, but I'll come back to that in a second, is the capex plans.
Last week, what we saw from Alphabet and Amazon was that they're not backing off on the capex. We saw a slight decrease from Microsoft basically based on supply chain. It was very slight. I'm not going to worry about that. The capex plans are still very much intact. And for those three companies that I mentioned, the capital markets are open.
Yes, pricing is a little bit more difficult and even for Oracle, the capital markets are open, albeit with a little bit more difficulty in the cost of capital. But the point being is that the biggest spenders out there still have access. I think the key tell here and what will keep the market going back and forth until this market clearing event happens is the Anthropic IPO.
One quick note on that. I don't think Anthropic or its bankers would have brought that unless their soft road show. And Scott, I think you were out there in San Francisco when they did that soft road show was pretty wellreceived and we got reports and so did you that it was very wellreceived. Obviously demand for it is going to be great.
You say obvious. I'm not sure it's obvious. I think there's pretty obvious that demand is going to be great.
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