Amazon Rallies as Morgan Stanley Sees Major AI Upside | Closing Bell

And right now we are two minutes away from the end of the trading day. Romaine Bostick here with Bailey, Lippe, Schultz taking you through to that closing bell. It's a global simulcast. We're joined now by Carol Massar. Normal end to end today for Tim Sandvik. Welcome to our audiences across all of our Bloomberg platforms, television and radio, our partnership with YouTube Carol Massar last week. Last Friday, we were talking about this selloff that we saw in tech stocks and some attempts to buy into that dip. We're seeing a little bit of that activity today. I guess the question is does it hold. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And I keep going to today's trade. We're well off our highs of the session. Even semiconductors which were up as much as a whole, uh, 3.7%. They've had quite a haircut since then, still up about 1.9% or so, but definitely off their highs of the session. So I think people are waiting to see some of these big tech results. Absolutely. And this is the third busiest week of earnings season. So we've got about 14% of the S&P 500 set to report. And as Carol just called out a lot of focus right now on those big tech names that have really been a large part of market leadership so far this year. And if we want to keep an eye on kind of across index level Dow Jones S&P 500 Nasdaq Composite trading volume between 12 and 18% below average on the last 100 days remain. So kind of positioning, maybe holding our breath, getting ready for these earnings to actually maybe shake out this market to the upper downside. Mason is the question though too. I mean, what do you think the response is going to be? You know, you have these high expectations. You still have some of these tech companies potentially going to, uh, post, uh, double digit percentage in some cases, triple percentage growth in both earnings, uh, as well as revenue. And yet there are a lot of people to kind of feel. Well, all the good news is priced in. So is this a situation where somebody comes out and says revenue grew to 60%? You know, the stock either goes nowhere or even sells off. Just asking these are questions. I'll answer them myself. Carl, keep quiet for one second here as we get the closing bell in New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average looks like it's going to sit this one out basically flat on the day, down by about 36 points. The S&P adds about 32 points on the day or about 4/10 of 1%. The Nasdaq Composite and the Nasdaq 100 each higher by about 1.1% and the Russell 2000 adding about seven points, or 2/10 of 1%. All right. So what's interesting is the S&P 500. Yeah. As a remain just mentioned ending higher uh the index trade. But you dig inside and once again you've got 323 names, some more names barely in the S&P that are lower today 177 to the upside three unchanged. And looking at it on the index level, we did see strong outperformance relatively in consumer discretionary tech and communication services to an extent. But again Amazon is that big driver as it relates to consumer discretionary. So call it all tech to the upside. Your main laggards. Utilities down almost 2%. Real estate down more than 1%. Financials uh bottom three down almost 8/10 of 1%. All right guys let's get to some of the individual gainers if I may. And so let's take a look at the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. Um semiconductor stocks did snap a losing streak ending today with the chip benchmark snapping its longest losing streak in 18 years. That wiped out about $2.3 trillion in market value. We've talked about that a lot, certainly as we wrapped up last week, but, uh, the Sox today up about 1.6%, well off its high. I want to highlight a couple of numbers, though. Um, Marvell technology. It was a top gainer uh, earlier out number one, in fact in the S&P and Nasdaq 100 and moved off of that. But we did see an intraday high of about 8% finishing the day with a 4% gain. SanDisk. Uh it was up. Uh number two gainer in both the S&P and the Nasdaq 100 up about 5.5%. Basically you saw the eye trade come back. Shares in data centers NIO clouds optical firms rising amid a broad based rally in AI related firms. I will say core weave was higher also. But it finished the day um, down. So uh, a big move once again in that name. I also want to bring up Amazon, if I may. We saw this one rallying as Morgan Stanley named it its top pick, an AI tailwind stock up just shy of 5%, so naming it its top pick, citing a number of strong growth drivers, they say they would continue to think AWS growth and Profit Runway is underappreciated, referring, of course, to Amazon Web Services. Uh, Morgan Stanley also sees Amazon as a winner of agent AI, writing that we expect Amazon to leverage its leading e-commerce infrastructure and loyal user base to continue to monetize. Price target up to 350 from 335 with that overweight rating, that new target implying about an 40% upside on Amazon's uh, Friday close. So some movement to the upside. And then I just want to mention Datadog only because you know Romain, I know you always like to hear about that name. Uh, top gainer in the S&P and Nasdaq 100 Bernstein upgrading the software company to outperform from market perform citing AI tailwinds. The theme price to target up to 350 from 237 and the stock closing at 260 or so. And change. All right. That's a look at some of the winners. While let's look at some of the losers. Whirlpool having a really tough day. The stock actually hitting its lowest level since 2009. Longbow research cutting its recommendation on the stock to neutral from buy. And they're essentially saying that they're taking a more cautious view on 2027 fundamentals for this company, given the weakness that they're seeing in North America and Latin America, the consumer outlook there and the prospect prospect for a more stagflation era macro environment. And this is a stock that's really been pressured this year. Shares down about 63% year to date. And from there let's take a look at Ameriprise Financial. This stock falling by about 4% on the day. This is a double downgrade that the company got at Bank of America to underperform from buy in. The issue here really comes down to retention there saying the fact that more advisor teams are starting to start, uh, leaving to start or join independent firms where they can potentially earn more money, and then big Wall Street firms are doing better at keeping their own advisors. So it's essentially causing this company, Ameriprise Financial, to have to pay their employees more to really, uh, entice them to stay. So we did see, uh, the Bank of America having its price target cut to, uh, on the stock to $445 from $570. And lastly, let's take a look at Mattel. The stock falling by about 1.9% on the day. And there's a bit of a shakeup here in some leadership which we know we've been seeing from this company. So its new CFO Peter Griffith will be replacing Paul Ruh. Uh, this is all effective tomorrow. And we do know, uh, just recently, the former CEO Ian cries, just leaving for Paramount on October 2nd. So maybe just a bit of uncertainty here from investors about what's going on when we think about these leadership shifts. But the stock is down about 15% on a year to day basis. Uh, let's take a quick look at yields. We did actually see that selloff in Treasury markets or zoom. Remember we got a taste of this on Friday. Uh as we saw yields start to rise. It crept up even further today a 16 basis point drop last week on the ten year yield giving back about seven basis points today a similar move to what we saw higher on Friday. Here is a lot of people again uh sort of turn back to the longer term structural issues going on right now in the Treasury space. A little less focus on the short term. All right, folks, it's going to be a busy week. But here's a couple of interesting stories that caught our attention. Romaine, you look a little bit older. Oh, and so do you remember learning to like, write cursive. Do I remember. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember how to do it still? Yes, I still do it every day. Did you proud of me? Yeah. I'm not. I'm. I'm in my 30s. I feel like this is more of a, like, last four years thing you learn. Absolutely. It's my favorite thing to do, actually. All right. So we've got you know, schools have gotten away from this with the increase in technology. And now you've got more than a dozen states are basically reintroducing cursive mandates. Uh, in recent years, new Jersey, Pennsylvania, the latest to do they want kids to learn. And there's some studies that say cursive, uh, lead to, um, spelling, writing fluency. There's some debate, I don't know. So so I saw this this apparently this is an op ed written by the editors. Yeah, I know you want your name, by the way, because there are too, you know, I guess they don't want to show it just how we do it. Well, what I mean, just to play devil's advocate here for a second, though, what is the purpose? Well, there's one thing I do with my with cursive Carol, and that is signatures. That's exact. That's all I got. That's all you see? That's all you do. But nobody pays attention to those things. I was just looking on X, and there was, uh, there's essentially this trend about the fact that Angelina Jolie, she actually left a note for her housekeepers, uh, in the hotel that she left and the photos on AXN. No one can read it. That's how concerning it is the fact that people don't understand English language a different language? What about reading? I'm sorry you still have not answered my question. What about reading the Declaration of Independence or reading stuff like. Have you seen our political discourse? I don't think anybody is reading that anymore. I don't know. I know some people in Washington. I would love to read it out to I. I think I think I need every single night and ad nauseum, I think writing letters and notes, you know, there are some people that you can still print if you want to. Carol Massar. Yeah, I know, um, but it's good. I mean, you know, I don't know, you know, why not focus our kids on writing cursive instead of, you know, the things that will actually get them jobs? Okay, well, can we talk? Who are the editors? Who wrote that? I would like to know. I just think it's. I think it's kind of interesting. I don't know. I also think it teaches kids to be like, yeah, spoken for in focus on a specific item, I don't know. All right. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. All right, old timer, I'm out there with you. I'm right there with you, old timer.