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Market Finds an Appetite to Buy

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Market participants look to have gotten their appetite back to start a new trading week, following a week of mostly selling off high positions from the August run-up. Not that we’re seeing particularly intriguing valuations; mostly, this feels like investors getting back to the business of buying stocks.

The Nasdaq led the way, +1.87% in the regular session Monday, crossing back up over the 11K threshold again. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones also performed well, up 1.27% and 1.18%, respectively.

What we’re seeing now is a growing inevitability that rip-roaring social media company TikTok will indeed find an American suitor before the U.S. government unilaterally pulls the plug on the format domestically, which President Trump had originally said would be September 15th — tomorrow — but is now stated as the 20th, this coming Sunday. That suitor looks to be not Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) or Walmart (WMT - Free Report) , as had been bandied about earlier, but Silicon Valley database and software giant Oracle (ORCL - Free Report) .

It’s a strange fit, to say the least. Not only has Oracle never before expressed interest of “front end” technology like social media platforms, but neither co-founder Larry Ellison nor CEO Safra Catz have yet publicly stated how they intend to utilize the forum so popular with young people.

There is already some talk about Oracle simply becoming TikTok’s updated cloud source, and that the data-mining objectives associated with the platform would still reside under the domain of the Chinese government. But this would clearly not be what the mandate for selling TikTok to an American company was supposed to be about.

Easier to understand is NVIDIA’s (NVDA - Free Report) $40 billion price tag for Arm, the chip-making company formerly owned by Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group. Arm supplies processors and other chip devices to companies like Apple (AAPL - Free Report) and Qualcomm (QCOM - Free Report) , and as such would provide a big addition to NVIDIA’s market cap. This deal has been considered in the works for a while, and sent SoftBank ADRs up 7% in regular trading, with NVIDIA gaining nearly 6% on the day.

There is also news that ESPN will now be supporting content provided by DraftKings (DKNG - Free Report) and Caesars Entertainment (CZR - Free Report) on both TV and digital formats. DraftKings will now also be the sanctioned ESPN supplier of fantasy sports content, giving the company an enormous platform it could have only dreamed of a year ago.

Less than two weeks ago, Michael Jordan was named to the DraftKings board. This move may have opened up additional doors for the sports betting platform. The return of NFL football is also another major catalyst for the stock, up 17% in regular trading. Caesar’s gained more than 10%.

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