The Open Bell

Today on The Open Bell: Nvidia's board reportedly met Wednesday night to remove Jensen Huang, the co-founder who built the company from a gaming chipmaker into the backbone of the AI economy, after reports of two affairs, one of them with a person U.S. intelligence agencies suspect of foreign influence operations, and the stock shed 8.6% on a company that has no obvious successor waiting. The...

Today on The Open Bell: October's inflation data came in hotter than expected, and now the bond market is pricing something nobody wanted to say out loud a week ago: the Fed raising rates again in December. Anthropic is touring Wall Street this week trying to raise $64.4 billion in a single stock sale, at a valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion, during an AI selloff, which tells you something ab...

Today on The Open Bell: China and the US technically have a trade truce, but hundreds of product exemptions just quietly expired today, a 10% tariff stays in place throughout, and January is already the next cliff-edge, so "peace" might be doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Wall Street recovered most of its election-week losses in a single Monday session, which sounds reassuring until y...

Today on The Open Bell: Nvidia's board has opened an independent spy probe after CEO Jensen Huang admitted to an affair with a business executive US intelligence agencies believe was funneling information to Beijing and helping smuggle advanced AI chips into China, and the man is still running the world's most valuable chip company nine days before earnings. Friday's jobs report sho...

Today on The Open Bell: Democrats swept the midterms and within hours nearly three trillion dollars had been erased from AI stocks, because it turns out voters furious about electricity bills and construction noise are, apparently, the most consequential force in the technology industry right now. The Bank of England raised interest rates for the first time since 2023, blaming Middle East conflict...

Today on The Open Bell: Democrats swept Congress on Tuesday night, and Wall Street had its best day in 15 months on Wednesday, which tells you something about what markets have actually been afraid of. Oil dropped more than 8% to $93.50 a barrel overnight, because traders are betting a Democratic Congress will push the White House toward a ceasefire with Iran, and that's the kind of thing tha...

Today on The Open Bell: Democrats took back both chambers of Congress overnight and the market's first instinct was to sell: S&P 500 futures dropped as much as 1.40% before steadying, the dollar weakened, and the whole "Trump trade" playbook that's been running since 2024 started getting quietly unwound, while bond investors, oddly enough, seemed relieved. Novo Nordisk just...

Today on The Open Bell: Oil had its worst day since July because Washington and Tehran are, apparently, talking, and a draft peace proposal circulating through Qatari and Pakistani mediators is enough to rattle a market that had priced in a much longer conflict. The Nasdaq is now officially in correction territory, down more than ten percent from its October high in just three days, and the chip s...

Today on The Open Bell: The FBI has formally named North Korea as the group behind the $6.3 billion Binance hack, the largest crypto theft ever recorded, and the question nobody's asking loudly enough is what it means that a nuclear-armed state is now funding itself through your exchange's hot wallet. Beijing called an emergency weekend meeting between its central bank and stock market r...

Today on The Open Bell: Binance froze $6.3 billion worth of customer funds overnight after what looks like the largest crypto theft in history, and the company's reassurance that everyone will be made whole is doing a lot of heavy lifting right now. The US economy grew at 3.4% last quarter, which is genuinely strong, but inflation is still running hot enough that the Federal Reserve's li...

Today on The Open Bell: The Fed held rates steady, but two of its own members voted to raise them, and if you think that makes December's meeting a done deal, the Fed's own internal math would like a word. Alphabet reported $128 billion in quarterly revenue, beat almost every number on the sheet, and still watched its stock tumble roughly 9% after hours, because Google's search busi...

Today on The Open Bell: The Fed held rates steady today but Kevin Warsh spent every word of his statement pointing at December, which means the "pause" everyone wanted to celebrate is really just a warning in a nicer font. A Houthi missile hit Saudi Arabia's biggest refinery yesterday and oil climbed past $115 a barrel, but it's still $5 below last week's high, which tells...

Today on The Open Bell: Anthropic just filed for what could be the largest tech IPO in history, $2 trillion valuation, $16 billion in revenue for the first half of this year alone, and buried inside the prospectus is an $80 billion accounting loss that the company is essentially asking investors to look past. China's central bank pumped $151 billion into its financial system in a single day,...

Today on The Open Bell: Oil pulled back from six-month highs overnight after Qatari mediators flew to Tehran to try to cool the US-Iran conflict, but Brent crude is still sitting above $114 a barrel, which means the "relief" is relative: prices are still roughly double what they were before the war started, and your petrol bill isn't going anywhere interesting for a while. American...

Today on The Open Bell: Meta just reported its best revenue quarter in years, $64.6 billion, up 26%, and the Nasdaq still tumbled 2.6% on Friday because buried in the regulatory filings was an $825 billion commitment to AI infrastructure, up from $700 billion just three months ago, and the company that's supposed to be printing money ran out of free cash doing it. Houthi drone strikes on Saud...

Today on The Open Bell: A drone strike on Saudi Aramco's Shaybah oilfield sent Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, above $110 a barrel this morning, and with the U.S. government now ordering non-emergency staff and families out of Saudi Arabia, the question isn't whether this is a supply shock, it's how long it lasts and who absorbs the cost at the pump. Tesla beat Wall St...

Today on The Open Bell: A Korean AI company just had the worst opening-day performance in modern Korean stock market history, and within hours that single Seoul trading floor was enough to drag US futures into the red, which tells you everything about how thin the confidence underneath the AI trade actually is right now. The US housing market's September numbers came out and they weren't...

Today on The Open Bell: The US government's borrowing rate just hit 5.15%, and if you're carrying a mortgage, shopping for a car loan, or running a business on credit, that number is not abstract. Oil crossed $110 a barrel overnight, and the last time it got there the pain showed up everywhere: at the pump, in your grocery delivery fee, on your next flight booking. South Korea's sto...

Today on The Open Bell: Indonesia's stock market just had its worst two days since the 1998 Asian financial crisis, because a single American index firm floated the idea of kicking the country out of the global benchmarks that trillions of dollars in passive funds track automatically, and that's not a rumor sending prices down, that's the mechanism working exactly as designed. Congr...

Today on The Open Bell: Wholesale prices just posted their second-biggest monthly jump on record, a full 1.3% in a single month against forecasts of 0.5%, and the weird part is that bond markets responded by falling in yield, meaning traders think the economy breaks before inflation does. Iran confirmed it sank a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz, oil jumped 3% toward $98, and the only reason...

Today on The Open Bell: U.S. inflation came in hotter than expected for September, and the ugly part is that almost half of it is gasoline, which means the Fed is being asked to cool a fire it didn't start and can't really put out with higher interest rates. Australia shed 39,300 jobs last month when everyone was forecasting a gain, and the market's confidence in a November rate hik...

Today on The Open Bell: A Houthi ballistic missile hit the Dhahran headquarters of Saudi Aramco yesterday, set fire to an administrative tower that effectively runs one-eighth of the world's entire oil supply, and oil prices surged toward $95 a barrel before markets had time to blink. The head of the New York Fed told the world on Tuesday that rate hikes are basically done after one more this...

Today on The Open Bell: The IMF nudged its global growth forecast up to 3.1% this week, which sounds reassuring until you read what the fund actually said: the world economy is holding together, but only barely, and there's not much runway left if something else goes wrong. Oil is sitting at $105 a barrel, up roughly 70% from a year ago, and reports that the Trump administration is weighing m...

Today on The Open Bell: Trump announced an "energy ceasefire" between Russia and Ukraine on Sunday, oil dropped below $104 a barrel on the news, and Ukraine said Russian strikes on its power grid had already resumed by Monday morning. A Chinese state-backed chipmaker just disclosed a next-generation memory chip design that sent Samsung shares down more than 3%, and if you think the chip...

Today on The Open Bell: Oil is back above $100 a barrel because ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world's crude, are under threat, and the knock-on is already showing up in grocery prices from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur and in government budgets that were not built for $102 oil. Samsung just told its suppliers to cut shipments by u...