Stocks Had Their Best Day Since April And Nvidia Fell

Wall Street came back hard on Monday, and the biggest company in the market missed the party. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 1,100 points, or 2.15%, the S&P 500 had its best session since April 8, and Nvidia closed down 4.27% anyway. Underneath the rebound, something quieter changed: the price of oil and the cost of government borrowing have stopped moving together, and that is a clue about which worry now runs the market.

Fast Facts

• Nvidia has no identified internal successor to chief executive Jensen Huang, governance specialists told Axios, because dozens of executives report to him directly and no deputy holds a company-wide remit (Read More · our November 9 briefing on the board investigation)
• The share of Americans who expect national unemployment to be higher a year from now climbed to 45.3% in October, the highest reading since April 2020, in the New York Fed's monthly survey of consumer expectations (Read More)
• Anthropic is spending $3.4 billion on Caterpillar natural gas generators capable of producing up to 1.7 gigawatts of electricity for its own computing build-out (Read More)
• Record revenue was not enough for Rocket Lab, whose shares fell after the company reported a wider loss than analysts had expected (Read More)
• The New York Stock Exchange said its coming round-the-clock trading platform will settle tokenized stocks, meaning shares recorded on a blockchain rather than in a traditional ledger, exclusively on the Avalanche network (Read More)
• Truth Social's parent, Trump Media & Technology Group, reported a third-quarter profit of $409.7 million, helped by gains on the digital assets it holds (Read More)

Global News

• China's October trade surplus came in at $105.28 billion, well short of the $126.50 billion economists had forecast, as imports grew 41.6% from a year earlier against export growth of 35.2% (Read More)
• Honda raised its full-year operating profit forecast to 780 billion yen from 650 billion yen, even while booking 484.8 billion yen of charges in the July-to-September quarter to restructure its electric-vehicle business (Read More)
• Qantas said it will cut 850 jobs, about 3% of its Australian workforce, after a technology agreement with Accenture, with the first wave expected by the middle of 2027 (Read More)
• Dutch inflation rose to 3.7% in October from 3.4% in September, driven by household natural gas costing 11.7% more than a year earlier (Read More)

Why Nvidia Fell 4.27% While Several Hundred Other Stocks Rose

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks 30 large U.S. companies, rose 1,104.02 points, or 2.15%, on Monday, Nov. 9, to close at 52,389.75, after last week's selloff. The S&P 500, a broader index of 500 of the largest U.S. companies, gained 2.35% to 7,549.94, its strongest single session since April 8. The Nasdaq Composite added 2.74% to close at 25,253.14. The Wall Street Journal pointed to two things behind the bounce: U.S. oil futures, the contracts traders use to buy and sell crude for delivery later, settled at their lowest level since Aug. 31, and investors reassessed last week's midterm election results as less damaging to the economy than they had first priced in.

One name went the other way, and it was the biggest one. Nvidia closed down 4.27% at $178.67 on Monday, after its board announced over the weekend that it had opened an independent investigation into chief executive Jensen Huang. AMD and Broadcom, which sell chips into many of the same customers, both posted large gains in the same session, and the Nasdaq-100, a narrower index made up of the Nasdaq's biggest companies, rose about 3% on the day.

How does the heaviest company in an index fall while the index has its best day since April? Two things are going on, and the first is arithmetic. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100 are weighted by market value, so the largest members move the number far more than the smallest ones do. Being the heaviest weight is not the same as being a majority, though, and on Monday one very large company fell while several hundred others rose. The second thing is what each move was actually about. A board investigation into one chief executive is a company-specific problem, the kind of news that changes what investors think about that one business and nothing else; cheaper oil and a calmer reading of the election are market-wide, the kind of news that gets applied to every company's future at once.

None of this means the swinging has stopped. Monday's rally was the Dow's third 1,000-point swing in four sessions, which makes it a rebound inside a volatile stretch rather than the end of one. The October consumer price index report, the government's main measure of what households pay for goods and services, is expected Tuesday morning, and it lands in a market that has already proved how far it can move in a single session.

Sources: CNBC · WSJ · 24/7 Wall St. · MarketWatch on the chip rivals · MarketWatch on the Dow's swings · Seeking Alpha · Rapunzl on last week's selloff

Oil Stopped Telling You Which Way Treasury Yields Would Move

For most of 2026, a day's move in the price of crude told you which way the U.S. government's borrowing costs were heading. Axios, in its own analysis of FactSet data, measured how closely the daily change in West Texas Intermediate crude, the main U.S. oil benchmark, tracked the daily change in the 10-year Treasury yield over rolling 30-session windows. Across the 30 trading days ended Sept. 10, that reading hit 77%. Over the most recent 30 trading days it sits at about negative 10%. A figure of 77% means the two moved in the same direction on the large majority of days; a figure near zero means almost no connection at all. So on a day when crude rises now, the 10-year yield is a little more likely to slip than to follow it up.

Which way that relationship points is a read on which worry is in charge. A bond is a loan, and its yield is the annual return an investor earns for holding it. When markets fear an energy shock feeding inflation, costlier oil means higher yields, because traders expect central banks to hold interest rates high for longer to cool prices. When they fear an energy shock slowing growth instead, costlier oil means lower yields, because expensive fuel works like a tax on everyone who buys it, and a household spending more at the pump spends less everywhere else. U.S. oil futures settled Monday, Nov. 9, at their lowest level since Aug. 31 after President Trump played down renewed strikes on Iran, and Brent crude traded at $90 a barrel on Tuesday morning. Eurozone government bond yields fell sharply on Tuesday as oil retreated, while Treasury yields were little changed. Under the old relationship, cheaper oil would have pulled U.S. borrowing costs down with it.

Cheaper crude is the half of this a family feels straight away. The other half arrives quietly, through what it costs to borrow. The 10-year Treasury note stood at 4.88% as of Monday, Nov. 9. That was up two basis points on the day, meaning two hundredths of a percentage point. That one figure is the benchmark lenders lean on when they decide what a family pays to borrow for a house or a car. Tuesday morning's inflation reading is exactly the sort of release that settles which of those two worries holds the floor.

Sources: Axios · WSJ on oil · WSJ on bond yields · Economic Times · U.S. Treasury · Rapunzl on oil and borrowing costs moving together

SoftBank's $7 Billion Quarterly Loss Came From Power Equipment, Not Chips

SoftBank Group reported on Tuesday that it lost about 1.1 trillion yen, Japan's currency, roughly $7 billion, in the July-to-September quarter. That is a net loss, meaning that after every cost and write-down for those three months, the company finished behind. In the same quarter a year earlier SoftBank booked a profit of 2.5 trillion yen, and that profit came largely from a rise in the paper value of its stake in OpenAI rather than from cash arriving at the door. The largest single charge this time, about $3.7 billion, came from advance payments a subsidiary had made for power-generation equipment for U.S. data centers, paid before those purchase plans were changed. Financing costs, the interest and fees SoftBank owes on the money it borrows, roughly doubled to 462 billion yen, about $2.9 billion.

A data center needs electricity before it needs processors, and that order of operations is where this loss came from. Generators and turbines for a building that size get ordered years ahead of the day anybody plugs in a chip, and a buyer pays part of the money up front to hold its place in line. Change the plan after those payments are made and the cash is already gone, with no equipment and no building to show for it. Last year's 2.5 trillion yen profit could fall away without a single yen changing hands. This quarter's loss is money SoftBank already spent.

Sources: The Star carrying Reuters · WSJ

What To Watch

Reporting today:

• CoreWeave (CRWV) is expected to report after the close.

Later this week:

• Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Applied Materials (AMAT) are expected to report after the close on Thursday, November 12. They are the two largest U.S. companies on this week's calendar by market value.
• Nu Holdings (NU), Nebius (NBIS) and Cerebras Systems (CBRS) are also expected to report on Thursday, November 12.
• The October consumer price index report is expected Tuesday morning, and a heavy slate of Federal Reserve speakers is scheduled through the week. The September reading, the most recent one published, was a 0.6% rise.
• Russia and Ukraine are scheduled to hold talks in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and Wednesday, the first such meeting with United States mediators present since February.
• Senate Republicans are scheduled to hold leadership elections on Tuesday.

The Classroom Takeaway

Monday showed two things at once: a single company's problem is not the same as the market's mood, and the reason a rate decision matters is that it sits behind what everyone else pays to borrow. If your class wants to feel how that second part works, the simplest exercise is to set rates yourselves and see what breaks, which is exactly what Run the Fed is for.