Latest news with #NvidiaCorp
Economic Times
an hour ago
- Business
- Economic Times
Wall Street's macro traders get schooled in Trump-Era turbulence
For anyone on Wall Street still clinging to a time-honored macro-investing playbook, Trump 2.0 has been a source of endless punishment. ADVERTISEMENT Market narratives keep shifting faster than traders can adjust positions. Tariffs are on, tariffs are off — then they're on again. One minute it's 'Sell America,' the next 'buy the dip.' Old-school fiscal anxieties land, just as Nvidia Corp. sells a vision of AI-driven productivity nirvana. To cap it off, President Donald Trump's unpredictability — trade, foreign relations, taxes and so on — is making life brutal for institutional pros paid to predict the market cycle. And the numbers show it: macro hedge funds are off to their worst start to a year in at least two decades. That confusion was on full display this week. As the US commander-in-chief fumed over the 'Trump Always Chickens Out' jab, and again as a legal ruling threatened his signature tariff weapon, some on Wall Street braced for retaliation. Yet in the end — buoyed by signs of still-solid corporate earnings and bets on economic resilience — Trump's combative posture failed to scare off risk-loving S&P 500 closed up almost 2% this week, notching a 6% gain overall in May, its best monthly performance since late 2023. High-yield bonds also climbed in May, with an index posting its highest return in 10 months.'Macro trading, which has never been easy, has just taken on a whole other difficult dimension,' said Priya Misra, portfolio manager at JP Morgan Asset Management. 'You can still position for a macro trend but you have to absolutely prevent getting whipsawed.' ADVERTISEMENT Nothing this week inspires much confidence that the rally is built to last. Traders still see the economy sputtering enough to warrant two Federal Reserve rate cuts this year, while the inflation risk from tariffs remains as uncertain as the same time, policy flip-flops, data head-fakes, and the White House's reactive posture have made macro forecasting a bitter exercise. In just six months since Trump's re-election, markets have priced in everything from an economic boom and resurgent inflation to outright recession. ADVERTISEMENT These fast-moving narratives are confounding the macro set, including trend-following quants, futures speculators and managers trying to stay ahead of shifting data. The HFRX Macro/CTA Index is down 4.3% this year through Wednesday, the worst start since at least 2004.'It's been very hard to filter the noise and get to the signal,' said James Athey, a portfolio manager at Marlborough Investment Management Ltd. 'Many systematic strategies have probably struggled, forced to derisk into falling markets, only to find they had low net and gross risk levels when the market turned so they missed the recovery.' ADVERTISEMENT May will go down as a stretch when defensive strategies adopted in the April chaos backfired with rare force. Pain hit value stocks, bearish options, fixed-income havens, trades tied to stagflation — in short, anything premised on the idea that April's volatility would linger or fell as traders questioned the sustainability of US debt. An ETF tracking long-dated bonds (TLT) trailed the S&P 500 by the most since 2022. ADVERTISEMENT Playing it safe in equities proved costly, too. Defensive shares lagged their cyclical counterparts by 10 percentage points, the second-widest gap since the start of the 2009 bull run. Betting on stagflation-like outcomes — slowing growth and strong inflation — misfired. A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. stock basket wagering that scenario tumbled for the worst month in two defensiveness quickly turned into a liability. Two of the largest ETFs linked to the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX each slumped at least 25%, a moment of reckoning for those who have piled into these protective funds this popular buffer funds such as the FT Vest Laddered Buffer ETF (BUFR) — a darling trade of 2025 that limits downside risk while capping the upside — underperformed. So did derivative-powered ETFs like the JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI) — strategies favored by income-seeking investors that attracted billions this the twists and turns, retail investors who stayed the course are having a moment of quiet vindication. After a record pace of dip buying in April, $10 billion has since flooded the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO), a favored destination of retail many investors, the best strategy has been to do nothing, rather than venture into the almost impossible task of figuring out the next Trump turn. Since election day, the S&P 500 is up 2% overall — masking how vicious the whiplash has been, with stocks sinking to the brink of a bear market before a powerful comeback. Another way to frame the market-timing challenge: If you missed the worst five days, you're up over 20% now. If you missed the best five, you're down 16%.To Ed Al-Hussainy, a rates strategist at Columbia Threadneedle, the mistake traders keep making is underestimating the economy's natural resilience. Amid the turbulence, his team is pulling back from aggressive positions. 'There's a great quote that I think comes from the army: 'slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,'' he said. 'They use it to train military recruits. Applies to macro traders as well.' (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel)
Time of India
an hour ago
- Business
- Time of India
Wall Street's macro traders get schooled in Trump-Era turbulence
Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads For anyone on Wall Street still clinging to a time-honored macro-investing playbook, Trump 2.0 has been a source of endless narratives keep shifting faster than traders can adjust positions. Tariffs are on, tariffs are off — then they're on again. One minute it's 'Sell America,' the next 'buy the dip.' Old-school fiscal anxieties land, just as Nvidia Corp. sells a vision of AI-driven productivity cap it off, President Donald Trump's unpredictability — trade taxes and so on — is making life brutal for institutional pros paid to predict the market cycle. And the numbers show it: macro hedge funds are off to their worst start to a year in at least two confusion was on full display this week. As the US commander-in-chief fumed over the 'Trump Always Chickens Out' jab, and again as a legal ruling threatened his signature tariff weapon, some on Wall Street braced for retaliation. Yet in the end — buoyed by signs of still-solid corporate earnings and bets on economic resilience — Trump's combative posture failed to scare off risk-loving S&P 500 closed up almost 2% this week, notching a 6% gain overall in May, its best monthly performance since late 2023. High-yield bonds also climbed in May, with an index posting its highest return in 10 months.'Macro trading, which has never been easy, has just taken on a whole other difficult dimension,' said Priya Misra, portfolio manager at JP Morgan Asset Management. 'You can still position for a macro trend but you have to absolutely prevent getting whipsawed.'Nothing this week inspires much confidence that the rally is built to last. Traders still see the economy sputtering enough to warrant two Federal Reserve rate cuts this year, while the inflation risk from tariffs remains as uncertain as the same time, policy flip-flops, data head-fakes, and the White House's reactive posture have made macro forecasting a bitter exercise. In just six months since Trump's re-election, markets have priced in everything from an economic boom and resurgent inflation to outright fast-moving narratives are confounding the macro set, including trend-following quants, futures speculators and managers trying to stay ahead of shifting data. The HFRX Macro/CTA Index is down 4.3% this year through Wednesday, the worst start since at least 2004.'It's been very hard to filter the noise and get to the signal,' said James Athey, a portfolio manager at Marlborough Investment Management Ltd. 'Many systematic strategies have probably struggled, forced to derisk into falling markets, only to find they had low net and gross risk levels when the market turned so they missed the recovery.'May will go down as a stretch when defensive strategies adopted in the April chaos backfired with rare force. Pain hit value stocks, bearish options, fixed-income havens, trades tied to stagflation — in short, anything premised on the idea that April's volatility would linger or fell as traders questioned the sustainability of US debt. An ETF tracking long-dated bonds (TLT) trailed the S&P 500 by the most since it safe in equities proved costly, too. Defensive shares lagged their cyclical counterparts by 10 percentage points, the second-widest gap since the start of the 2009 bull run. Betting on stagflation-like outcomes — slowing growth and strong inflation — misfired. A Goldman Sachs Group Inc. stock basket wagering that scenario tumbled for the worst month in two defensiveness quickly turned into a liability. Two of the largest ETFs linked to the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX each slumped at least 25%, a moment of reckoning for those who have piled into these protective funds this popular buffer funds such as the FT Vest Laddered Buffer ETF (BUFR) — a darling trade of 2025 that limits downside risk while capping the upside — underperformed. So did derivative-powered ETFs like the JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI) — strategies favored by income-seeking investors that attracted billions this the twists and turns, retail investors who stayed the course are having a moment of quiet vindication. After a record pace of dip buying in April, $10 billion has since flooded the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO), a favored destination of retail many investors, the best strategy has been to do nothing, rather than venture into the almost impossible task of figuring out the next Trump turn. Since election day, the S&P 500 is up 2% overall — masking how vicious the whiplash has been, with stocks sinking to the brink of a bear market before a powerful comeback. Another way to frame the market-timing challenge: If you missed the worst five days, you're up over 20% now. If you missed the best five, you're down 16%.To Ed Al-Hussainy, a rates strategist at Columbia Threadneedle, the mistake traders keep making is underestimating the economy's natural resilience. Amid the turbulence, his team is pulling back from aggressive positions.'There's a great quote that I think comes from the army: 'slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,'' he said. 'They use it to train military recruits. Applies to macro traders as well.'
Globe and Mail
17 hours ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
The Nasdaq Bounces Back: These AI Stocks Could Be the Smartest Buys of the Year
The Nasdaq Composite is only at about breakeven for the year, as of this writing, but it's made a powerful comeback in recent weeks. The tech-heavy index is now down less than 1% year to date, a massive improvement from the drop of more than 20% it recorded in early April. That doesn't mean it's too late to own tech names that are thriving from the boom in artificial intelligence (AI) spending. Here are three names that are in a prime position to benefit from the expansion of generative and agentic AI in the enterprise, education, healthcare, and beyond. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Learn More » King of the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem The best way to profit from any growing field is to build an ecosystem around it. Think about how successful Apple has been with its app store, iPhone, Mac computers, and iCloud offerings. That's the approach Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) is taking with hardware, software, and architecture for AI. CEO Jensen Huang is a proven visionary, and the company even has growth triggers beyond the world of AI. AI is enabling change and improvement in every industry. Uses include generative AI and speech recognition, medical imaging and more efficient supply chain management. Nvidia is delivering enterprises the computing power, systems, tools, and algorithms needed. It's not just the powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) like Blackwell and the next-generation Rubin AI chips that Nvidia supplies, either. Nvidia's NeMo provides a full platform for developing custom generative AI -- including large language models (LLMs), video models, and conversational AI. Its CUDA (compute unified device architecture) software platform allows developers to leverage Nvidia's leading chips using parallel processing power for more intensive applications. Nvidia's CUDA-Q is a quantum development platform enabling the use of large-scale quantum computing applications. This is just a small sample of examples showing Nvidia's reach throughout the ecosystem. Nvidia is heavily involved even at the earliest stages of building AI factories where enterprises can deploy on-premises scalable, high-performance, AI platforms. Nvidia is also part of larger-scale projects like the recently announced United Arab Emirates Stargate global tech alliance. That will become a massive 1-gigawatt compute capacity data center. Look upstream and downstream of Nvidia, too These offerings and projects all create a flywheel effect that should only increase demand for Nvidia's products in the months and years ahead. It won't be the only beneficiary, though. Other obvious places to look next are Nvidia's direct upstream and downstream partners. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) (NYSE: TSM) fabricates many of the advanced chips that Nvidia and other major semiconductor companies design. So it shouldn't be surprising that the Nvidia supplier and partner saw revenue surge nearly 42% higher in the first quarter. Those are profitable sales, too. Net income soared 60% versus the prior-year period. TSMC is also well on its way to accomplishing the approximately 40% revenue growth guidance it provided for the current quarter. April net sales jumped 48.1% compared to 2024. One Nvidia customer that is also positioned to benefit from growth in data centers and AI compute capacity is Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL). Dell is also a partner, working closely with Nvidia. It recently announced the "Dell AI Factory with Nvidia," which it says is "designed to help enterprises accelerate AI adoption and achieve faster time to value." Dell is using its latest air- and liquid-cooled server solutions for AI servers and racks containing Nvidia hardware to deploy in data centers. The collaboration will help accelerate enterprises ramping up computing power. Dell is quickly gaining business in this area. Its server and networking revenue surged 37% in the fiscal fourth quarter ended Jan. 31. At that time, the company said its server business backlog more than tripled year over year to $9 billion. All three companies play an important role in the booming artificial intelligence field. Each has its own role and expertise. Investors would do well to own all three to participate in the growth over the course of 2025 and beyond. Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now? Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $651,761!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $826,263!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is978% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to170%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Nvidia Earnings Could Reignite Momentum in Top AI ETFs
The AI trade got a fresh boost on Thursday after semiconductor titan Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) reported strong first-quarter results that exceeded Wall Street expectations on both revenue and earnings, despite the loss of billions in China sales due to U.S. export restrictions. Revenue for the first quarter came in above forecasts, but guidance for the second quarter gave investors brief pause. The company said it expects sales of $45 billion, plus or minus 2%, which falls slightly short of the $45.4 billion consensus estimate. At first glance, that might seem like a significant miss for a company that investors have grown accustomed to beating and raising guidance. But Nvidia noted that the guidance includes an estimated $8 billion hit from chip export controls to China. Excluding that impact, the guide would have been closer to $53 billion, well above expectations. That realization likely fueled Thursday's rally, which saw Nvidia shares surge as much as 6.4% to $143.49, bringing the stock within striking distance of its all-time high of $149.43 set in January. The rebound marks a sharp turnaround from April, when shares fell below $87 intraday amid escalating trade tensions. Since then, Nvidia has helped lead the broader market recovery, as enthusiasm around artificial intelligence continues to dominate investor sentiment. While China restrictions are undoubtedly a headwind, the market is taking comfort in Nvidia's ability to grow elsewhere. Demand for its AI chips—used to power the supercomputers behind applications like ChatGPT—remains intense. Cloud giants like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Inc. (AMZN) and Oracle Corp. (ORCL) continue to clamor for Nvidia's chips to both run internal operations and offer AI infrastructure to customers. Nvidia is also expanding its footprint globally, striking sovereign AI deals with countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where governments are investing heavily in local AI infrastructure. For ETF investors, Nvidia remains a cornerstone of many AI-themed strategies. The largest AI-themed ETF by assets under management, the $3.2 billion Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF (AIQ), holds a 2.8% position in Nvidia—a modest weighting considering the company's outsized role in the AI ecosystem. But funds like the $2.6 billion Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF (BOTZ) offer more concentrated exposure. Nvidia currently has a 9.7% weighting in the fund. The $1.6 billion iShares AI and Innovation Tech Active ETF (BAI) is another major holder, currently allocating 9% of its portfolio to the company. As Nvidia continues to deliver, it's likely to remain a key driver of AI-related | © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Nvidia Faces Bipartisan Concern on China Research Facility Plans
Republican Senator Jim Banks and Democrat Elizabeth Warren are demanding answers from Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang on his firm's reported plans to open a research facility in Shanghai, saying the decision 'raises significant national security and economic security concerns.' Banks and Warren were reacting to a Financial Times report that Nvidia is opening a research and development center in the Chinese city. The news organization, citing people with knowledge of the matter, said the facility would be used for a potential expansion as well as existing employees and that the company is advertising to hire artificial intelligence talent in China.
