See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“Colonel Jessup! Did you order the Code Red?!” – Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, A Few Good Men
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Silicon Valley is abuzz this morning following reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared a ‘code red’ on Monday as competition from Google and Anthropic intensifies. To fight the threats, initiatives like an advertising model, AI agents, and a personalized “Pulse” service for individual users have been temporarily put on hold. This latest story is just another example of how quickly the currents can change in the AI space, and that no one’s lead is safe.
Going back to the internet era, remember the ‘browser wars’? Google Chrome now dominates the browser space with about 70% market share, but you may find it hard to believe that it wasn’t released until 2008, more than eight years after the Internet bubble burst! There’s still a lot of runway left in the battle for AI supremacy.
US stocks started off December with broad-based declines as the S&P 500 fell 0.5%, but the Dow fared worse, falling nearly 1% as the Nasdaq outperformed, falling just 0.38 as Nvidia’s 2% gain propped that index up. The real area of weakness, though, was in the small-cap Russell 2000, which fell 1.25%. So much for the broadening trade.
Bulls started off the overnight session looking to put up a fight as S&P 500 futures rally 0.25% while the Nasdaq looks to open 0.38% higher. Crude oil is down fractionally as it wasn’t able to trade back above $60 in yesterday’s rally, while gold falls 1%, silver plunges 2%, and platinum falls even more (-2.38%). Crypto had a rough start to December, but has bounced back over 2% this morning, trading back above $87K.
Asian stocks saw mostly muted moves overnight. The one exception was South Korea, as the Kospi rallied nearly 2% following confirmation from US officials that tariffs on exports to the US would be cut to 15%. In Europe, the tone is also positive as the STOXX 600 bounces 0.3% with Germany rallying 0.60%.
In last night’s Closer, we looked at the performance of the Nasdaq over the three years since the release of ChatGPT and compared that performance to other major tech releases of the last 50 years. Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the Nasdaq has rallied more than 100% ranking as the strongest three-year return since the period coming out of Covid and the massive tech investment to facilitate the work-from-home era. Outside of that period, the only other three-year period that was stronger was the one coming out of the Financial Crisis.
In addition to the massive rally of the last three years, what stood out in the chart was how long it has been since the Nasdaq had a negative rolling three-year return. The last time it was negative was in August 2011, just after S&P downgraded the AAA sovereign US credit rating more than 14 years ago! The chart below shows streaks of positive readings in the Nasdaq’s rolling three-year return, and at a length of 3,590 trading days, the current streak easily ranks as the longest. Besides that, three years ago the Nasdaq was under 11,500, or more than 50% below current levels. In other words, barring a large decline, the current streak of positive three-year returns isn’t going away soon.
