Markets
The 7am Briefing: After the Dow's Best Day in 19 Months, Chips Crack
Seoul's Kospi falls 5.28%, Qualcomm slides after hours and the BoE decides at 7 a.m.
HedgeWeekly Video & Briefing Desk ·
Top line: South Korea's Kospi lost 5.28% on Thursday, as the chip selling that Wall Street shrugged off yesterday arrived in Seoul with force. Nasdaq futures are lower, Qualcomm is sliding after its results and the Bank of England decides at 7 a.m. Here is the four-minute version before the open.
Before the bell: US futures as of 3:03 a.m. ET; other prices between about 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. ET. S&P 500 futures −0.2% · Nasdaq 100 −1.0% · Dow +0.3%. 10-year Treasury about 4.88%, near its lowest since early September. WTI crude +0.6% to about $88.63 · Brent +0.4% to just above $95. Gold +1.5% to about $4,132 · Dollar index −0.05% to 101.38. Bitcoin +2.5% to about $80,240.
Markets and macro: 1. Wall Street rallied, but chips did not. The Dow jumped 3% on Wednesday, its best session in 19 months, and the S&P 500 rose 1.6%, Investing.com reported. Chipmakers went the other way. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 3.13%, Nvidia lost 3.17% and Micron 7%, according to Korea JoongAng Daily. Investors fear a Democratic Congress will slow new data-centre building, which would cut chip demand. Nasdaq 100 futures were down 1.0% by 3:03 a.m. ET, while Dow futures held a small gain.
Markets and macro: 2. Qualcomm's phone business disappoints again. Handset chip revenue fell 26% to $5.14 billion, short of the $5.25 billion analysts expected, Investing.com reported. Total adjusted revenue of $10.44 billion beat forecasts, and car chip sales jumped 89%. But the company warned that costs are rising across chipmaking, from wafers to memory. Its earnings guidance midpoint of $2.25 a share sits below the $2.32 expected. The shares fell more than 8% after hours.
Markets and macro: 3. Oil steadies after an 8.7% drop. Brent settled down 8.7% at $94.62 a barrel on Wednesday, and WTI fell 8.3% to $88.12, Investing.com reported. Both closed at their lowest since August 31. Traders are betting the election result makes a diplomatic end to the Iran war more likely. Yardeni Research noted that President Trump acknowledged the war contributed to his party's defeat.
Markets and macro: Also overnight: China's tech shares went the other way, with the Hang Seng Tech index up about 5% and Alibaba and Tencent each up 6.4%, XTB said. Toyota raised its full-year operating profit forecast to ¥3.90 trillion from ¥3.40 trillion.
Hedge fund moves: Citadel was the only big platform up in October. Its Wellington fund gained 1.7% last month, taking its 2026 return to 15.3%. Millennium's flagship and North Rock each fell 2.3%, ExodusPoint lost 2.4% and Dymon Asia's multistrategy fund 1.8%. Hedgeweek, citing Bloomberg, blamed the tech sell-off, bond swings and election-driven currency moves.
Hedge fund moves: The biggest multistrategy firms run about six times leverage. The ten largest held about $2.2 trillion of gross assets at the end of 2025, against $360 billion of investor capital, PivotalPath found. Six of them run at eight to 14 times. Their US stock holdings also overlap more with each other than with other funds. That matters on a day like today, when crowded chip trades are being cut. Hedgeweek reports funds cut leverage at the fastest pace since March.
Earnings to watch: AppLovin beat on revenue: $2.18 billion vs $2.08 billion expected. It guided fourth-quarter sales to $2.37 billion to $2.40 billion, above the $2.25 billion forecast. Shares rose more than 16% after hours. Arm grew revenue 27% to $1.44 billion, ahead of $1.38 billion expected, but royalties of $670 million missed. Current-quarter guidance fell short, and the shares slipped after hours. Toyota posted quarterly operating profit of ¥1.13 trillion, above the ¥965 billion expected, and expanded its buyback to ¥1.3 trillion. Before the open: ConocoPhillips, Kimberly-Clark and Tapestry. After the close: Airbnb, Akamai, Affirm and Lyft.
HedgeWeekly Stockwatch: QCOM Qualcomm: down more than 8% after hours as handset revenue missed forecasts and the company warned of rising chipmaking costs. APP AppLovin: up more than 16% after hours on a revenue beat and fourth-quarter guidance well above forecasts. ARM Arm Holdings: revenue beat, but royalties and current-quarter guidance came in below expectations. 000660 SK hynix: closed down 9.46% in Seoul on fears that US data-centre curbs will cut chip demand.
Today's calendar (ET): 7:00 a.m.: Bank of England decision. A quarter-point hike to 4% is widely expected. 8:30 a.m.: Weekly jobless claims, after 194,000 the prior week, and third-quarter productivity, forecast at +3% after +1.4%. After the close: Airbnb, Akamai, Affirm and Lyft results. Friday: the October jobs report.
Number of the day: 45%. That is how much of planned new US data-centre capacity could face temporary suspensions, according to a Goldman Sachs estimate cited by Korea JoongAng Daily. It explains why chip shares fell while the wider market rallied. For US investors, the size of any slowdown matters for every company selling into the AI build-out.
One thing to watch: Wednesday's rally was broad, but the chip sell-off has now spread across Asia. When regular trading opens, do Nvidia, Micron and other chip names steady, or does the gap with the rest of the market widen? The Bank of England's vote split is the other test before the bell.
Sources
- Investing.com
- Reuters via Investing.com
- Yahoo Finance
- The Korea Times
- Korea JoongAng Daily
- XTB
- Tickmill
- FinanceFeeds
- Hedgeweek
- Bloomberg via Hedgeweek
- PivotalPath
- Visible Alpha