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Stock Market News: Nasdaq Composite Rises & Wall St Upgrades MicroStrategy (MSTR) and Palantir (PLTR)
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NVIDIA Continues to Be Under Pressure Post-Earnings
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) stock is among the biggest losers in the S&P 500 today. It’s down 3% while other Magnificent 7 stocks are up today. Alphabet is up 1.7%, Amazon is up 1.4%, and Apple is up 1%.
What’s driving the sell-off? A couple of factors are likely in play. First of all, investors could simply be exiting after the stock rallied before earnings. While NVIDIA topped expectations, by standards set by recent earnings announcements, it wasn’t a “blowout” that gave much in the way of clues just how big demand for Blackwell could be next year.
Also, chatter continues to build that ‘scaling laws’ in pre-training could be hitting a wall. For a complete discussion around what scaling laws are and why this could add more uncertainty to NVIDIA’s stock, check out our most recent ‘AI Investor Podcast’ episode where we reviewed NVIDIA’s earnings and talked about how changes to scaling laws could be the biggest story in the market in 2025.
Rally Continues to Broaden
A key index to watch in the post-Trump market rally is the performance of the Russell 2000. The small cap-focused index has badly trailed the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite in recent years, but benefits as the market rally broadens out to sectors like financials, consumer plays, and industrials.
In early trading the Russell 2000 is up about 3%, significantly outpacing other indexes.
Palantir Receives Upgrade
Another stock seeing strong gains premarket is Palantir (Nasdaq: PLTR), which is up 4.4%. Once again, Wall Street upgrades are driving its price north.
Bank of America raised their price target on the company to $75 from $55. The researcher cites accelerated US growth, a widening competitive moat, and higher commercial sales growth forecasts (3-year CAGR of 34% vs prior expectations of 32%).
Another Palantir upgrade came from Wedbrush’s Daniel Ives, who also raised his price target to $75. The researcher broadly upgraded AI-adjacent software names with upgrades to Elastic, Snowflake, and Salesforce as well.
As of 9 a.m. ET, futures are predicting gains across the stock market today. Let’s look at some of the major indexes in premarket trading.
- Dow Jones Industrial Futures: Up 373 points (.84%)
- S&P 500 Futures: Up 42 points (+.71%)
- Nasdaq Futures: Up 166 points (+.80%)
The big storyline on Wall Street is the nomination of Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary. Bessent is a former hedge fund manager who was favored by Wall Street. He’s pitched a pro-growth agenda that prioritizes boosting GDP growth rates as a means of reducing the Federal deficit. In addition, he’s seen as someone who may push back against Donald Trump’s more egregious tariff policies that could harm economic growth.
Bessent will push a ‘3-3-3’ agenda. The goal is to cut budget deficits to 3% of GDP by 2028, reach 3% GDP growth through deregulation and pro-growth policies, and produce an additional 3 million barrels of oil per day. He has spoken recently of a coming economic reordering and the need for the United States to enact significant changes to be part of it.
Beyond stocks, debt markets seem pleased with Bessent’s nomination. The yield on 10-year Treasuries retreated back to 4.316% after hitting 4.43% on November 21st.
Wall Street Upgrades
MicroStrategy’s (Nasdaq: MSTR) stock is up 4.4% premarket after receiving several upgrades before market open. Barclays raised their target on the company to $515 from $275. In addition, Bernstein raised their price target to $600 from $290 on the prediction that the company will own 4% of the world’s Bitcoin over the next decade.
Another upgrade came from Canaccord, which raised their price target on Microstrategy to $510 from $300. The researcher believes that MicroStrategy can increase its Bitcoin holdings faster than its share count is being diluted.
MicroStrategy bought more Bitcoin this morning and now owns 386,700 Bitcoin, which is worth about $37.7 billion at today’s prices. Its stock is trading for a valuation of about $90 billion premarket.
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