The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) stumbled out of the blocks in December, falling 200 points and chalking in a soft technical barrier at the 47,600 level. December is historically a strong month for equity markets, but traders are facing a collection of sentiment headwinds as they wrap up the 2025 trading year following a volatile November.
Seasonality favors equity markets, with December often a strong month for stocks. However, the Dow Jones is coming off a strong seven-month winning streak, including an almost-flat 0.2% gain in November. The rubber band may be too stretched to allow another leg higher without gassing off some pressure.
AI trade faces fresh headwinds
AI names continue to grapple with market concerns of over-stretched valuations. Tech rally darling Nvidia (NVDA) and silicon-design firm Synopsis (SNPS) both popped around 1% on Monday after Nvidia announced another supply-side circular investment scheme into Synopsis. Other names in the AI game, including Broadcom (AVGO) and Super Micro Computer (SMCI), both stumbled around 2% as profit-taking flows grip the outer edges of the AI scene.
Bitcoin catches another broadside
Crypto markets caught a fresh hit on Monday, with Bitcoin (BTC) declining by over 5%. Bitcoin has once again fallen below 90,000, stumbling into the 85,000 region and putting the marquee cryptocurrency on pace for a third straight month of inflationary declines in December. BTC tumbled 17.5% in November after falling nearly 4% in October.
Fed rate cuts are coming… eventually?
Federal Reserve (Fed) interest rate cut expectations are spreading into a messy pool heading into the tail end of the year. Rate markets are still pricing in nearly 90% odds of a third straight interest rate cut on December 10. However, rate traders are also pricing in 88% odds that the Fed will hold off in December and deliver a quarter-point rate trim in January.
Dow Jones daily chart
AI stocks FAQs
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.