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Juniper to Be Bought by HPE; Fake News on Bitcoin ETFs

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Pivoting from yesterday’s surprise robust trading day, seemingly bringing a reprise to the strong final two months of trading in calendar 2023. Other than a fluffing-up of the A.I. narrative, however — including NVIDIA’s (NVDA - Free Report) new desktop graphics chips with A.I. usage being introduced — we didn’t see a whole lot sustaining those highs going forward, especially without any major economic catalysts. As such, the Dow slipped -157 points (it had been twice as low earlier in the session) or -0.42%, the S&P 500 was -0.15% and the small-cap Russell 2000 fell a full -1.06%. Only the Nasdaq eked out a gain for the day, +0.09%.

We saw the 10-year bond yield go back up over 4% for the first time in almost a month. In and of itself, this is not necessarily problematic, at least on a relative basis: we were hitting 5% on the 10-year as recently as mid-October. But this does represent a repositioning of market sentiment for bond traders — not falling immediately, or indeed any time soon. The emerging expected timeline had been for Fed cuts to begin at its March meeting, but current inflation metrics in economic data do not suggest such a move is imminent on that timetable.

One big winner today was Juniper Networks (JNPR - Free Report) , on reports that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE - Free Report) was looking to buy out the company for $13 billion. Reports were that HPE saw in Juniper a good way to advance its A.I. offerings, including Juniper’s Mist AI. Shares of the networks provider jumped +21% on the news, while shares of the larger purchasing company have fallen nearly -9% today.

Aside from Thursday’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Friday’s Producer Price Index (PPI) prints, we also see the unofficial start to Q4 earnings season this week. Although some of the biggest Wall Street banks report Friday, tomorrow after the close we’ll get the first major homebuilder reporting: KB Home (KBH - Free Report) . The company is expected to demonstrate how strenuous the housing market has been over the past quarter: earnings are estimated to come down -32% year over year and revenues -17%. Therefore, we may see room for an upside surprise — and KB Home is riding a three-quarter earnings winning streak.

A hacked X account (formerly Twitter) brought to headlines the notion that the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) had already approved multiple accepted Bitcoin ETFs on all major securities exchanges. It has not. This is a decision that has been waiting not an insignificant length of time for resolution; apparently, someone got tired of waiting. But the news is not true, at least not yet.

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