By Mike Dolan
Nov 10 (Reuters) – While Nvidia and its troubled CEO Jensen Huang had a tough Monday, Wall Street stormed higher, led largely by recently battered chip stocks and cosseted by a tumbling oil price.
Crude prices fell 6% on Monday and have continued to tumble today to their lowest level since August, as US President Donald Trump signalled that there would be no re-escalation of the Iran war while talks to end the eight-month conflict were ratcheting up.
With US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth potentially facing impeachment proceedings in Congress after last week’s Democratic win in the midterm elections, President Trump seems to have taken voters’ concerns on board while his Vice President JD Vance blames the war for the heavy Republican defeat.
Brent crude prices have now retreated 22% since the end of October. That’s buoying stock and bond markets alike, with market-based inflation expectations gauges retreating accordingly and the one-year US inflation swap back below 2.0%.
Monday’s tech rally continued through Asia markets today, even after chip giant Nvidia lost 4% by the close on Monday amid spying allegations surrounding an affair by boss Jensen Huang.
Nvidia is investigating the case and Trump says the FBI is looking into it but Huang insists he does not want to step down. Nvidia reports quarterly earnings next week.
Later on Tuesday, ailing data center firm CoreWeave will report earnings after the bell, providing a test of the market mood surrounding its debt load and the fallout from the midterms around data center pushback.
Otherwise, the day’s focus homes in on the expected start of AI leader Anthropic’s IPO roadshow – with a botched email on the sale of almost $70 billion worth of shares quickly retracted overnight with no clarity on what was supposedly incorrect.
Overall valuation estimates of the company have plummeted in just six weeks from about $2 trillion originally to indications of just over $1 trillion, according to some reports.
Elsewhere, markets will focus on today’s release of the October US consumer price report that should show a tick down in the monthly core inflation rate to 0.2%. China released another blockbuster trade report that saw its trade surplus well in excess of $1 trillion again this year.
CHART OF THE DAY
Monthly gains in US consumer prices are expected to have slowed in October even though estimates of headline annual inflation rates will remain buoyed by high energy costs.
The latest CPI report is released on Tuesday and is expected to show monthly CPI up 0.3% compared to 0.6% in September. There won’t be an official year-on-year number due to the absence of a CPI report in October 2025 because of the government shutdown back then.
However, estimates show the annual headline rate may tick up close to where Federal Reserve interest rates are now and, using that measure at least, it means current real Fed rates are effectively zero.
Core CPI inflation rates are much lower though – with the most recent measure at 2.6% and even October’s readout will miss the impact of the 22% crude oil price slide since then.
TODAY’S EVENTS TO WATCH
• US October CPI (8:30 a.m. EST), 10-year note auction (1 p.m. EST)
• Fed’s Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, Dallas Fed’s Lorie Logan, Kansas City Fed’s Jeffrey Schmid and Philadelphia Fed’s Anna Paulson speak
• US corporate earnings: CoreWeave
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