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Stock Market Today: Nasdaq Composite Up Big as NVIDIA and AI Stocks Rally
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Nasdaq Composite Off Its Daily Highs
The Nasdaq Composite has fallen from its highs today but is still up about 1% as of 2:10 p.m. ET.
Information Technology stocks are up 1.42%. Other sectors gaining include Materials, Healthcare, and Consumer Discretionary.
6 out of 11 market sectors are down today, however. Utilities are down .84%, Real Estate down .76%, and Consumer Staples down .67%.
NVIDIA To Overtake Apple?
NVIDIA briefly claimed the crown of the most valuable company in the world last summer, but fell behind Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Microsoft for most of the second half of 2024.
The race for the world’s most valuable company is once again heating up with NVIDIA shares surging. Apple and NVIDIA both currently trade for $3.7 trillion, with NVIDIA slightly back in the lead in late trading today.
Microsoft is now a distant third with a valuation of $3.18 trillion.
Nasdaq Posting Huge Gains
As of 10:55 a.m. ET, the Nasdaq has taken another sharp turn up from early trading.
- Nasdaq: Up 1.88%
- S&P 500: Up 1.21%
- Dow Jones: Up .61%
- Russell 2000: Up .64%
Tech stocks are leading the market today. The strongest segment of technology is semiconductor stocks, but Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOGL) is up 2.74%, Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) up 1.74%, and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) up 2%.
Stocks Seeing Massive Moves Today
Let’s take a look at some stocks making absolutely massive moves today:
- FUBO (NYSE: FUBO): Up 169% today after announcing a merger with Disney‘s (NYSE: DIS) Hulu Live service. FUBO will own 30% of the combined entity. While this is a huge one-day move for FUBO, the stock is still down dramatically from its peak in 2021.
- Arbe Robotics (Nasdaq: ARBE): Is another stock seeing big moves today. Shares are up about 50% after the announcement of an NVIDIA partnership. Investors have been bidding up the share price of many companies NVIDIA partners with. Cerance (Nasdaq: CRNC) is up more than 150% in the past week after a similar announcement and SoundHound (Nasdaq: SOUN) jumped 873% in the past year after NVIDIA invested in the company and announced a partnership with the company.
Blog Post May Be Contributing to AI Gains
A blog post from Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, may be helping drive AI stocks higher today. In the post, he says:
“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.”
Agents are seen as a key theme for 2025 that could help keep momentum in AI stocks running red-hot. In addition, the post is more ‘evidence’ that new AI models like OpenAI’s o3 that use ‘reasoning’ are a genuine breakthrough that are still in their infancy.
Stocks are running in premarket trading on Monday. Here’s a look at major indexes as of 8:50 a.m. ET:
- Nasdaq Futures: Up 205.25 (+.95%)
- S&P 500 Futures: Up 45.25 (+.76%)
- Dow Jones Futures: Up 184 (+.43%)
The big story in premarket trading is that NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) and chip stocks are up big. NVIDIA jumped 4.45% on Friday, and is currently up 2.6% in premarket trading to $148.25 per share.
NVIDIA ended 2024 trading at $134.29, which means that the stock is already up more than 10% as we begin the third trading day of the new year. Let’s check in on today’s major stories.
NVIDIA and AI Chip Stocks are Soaring
On Friday chip stocks soared as the media obsessed over a new blog post from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) which detailed $80 billion on spend around data centers this year. The financial community debated how meaningful the $80 billion number was, but most felt it pointed to more upside in AI spending this year relative to expectations.
Another major contributor to AI enthusiasm is the release of OpenAI’s o3 Model. In our ‘AI Investor Podcast’ we broke down the implications of this new model (you can listen to the most recent episode here), but the bottom line is the AI community believes 03 is a genuine breakthrough that could start a new wave of AI spending. As crazy as 2023 and 2024 were in the AI space, you may want to buckle up. 2025 may top them!
Other AI stocks are generally seeing strong gains premarket. Broadcom (Nasdaq: AVGO) is up .85%, AMD (Nasdaq: AMD) is up 2.97%, Marvell (Nasdaq: MRVL) is up 4.18.%. We’ll continue watching their progress throughout the day.
Upgrades and Downgrades
Here are a few notable analyst calls that could be moving stocks today.
- Hims & Hers Upgrade: Needham raised Hims & Hers (NYSE: HIMS) to a $31 price target. In addition, the researcher added it to their Conviction List and named it their top pick in digital health. Hims & Hers stock is up 2.44% premarket.
- Citi Upgrade: Barclays moved Citigroup (NYSE: C) to overweight and took the stock’s price target up to $95 from a prior price target of $70.
- Semiconductor Equipment Stocks Get a Stamp of Approval: Another call that deserves some attention is Citi saying the time to buy semiconductor stocks is now after a major correction in the second half of 2024. Citi says the time to go ‘all in’ is now, with a trough in the industry across the first half of the year.
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