Stock Market Today: Asia Surges and Oil Slides Into CPI Day — While an Anthropic IPO Filing Goes Out, and Comes Back
Tuesday's world markets have a split personality. Oil is down near 10-week lows and Asian stocks are surging — the KOSPI up 4%, the Nikkei 2.5% — yet the AI trade that drove last week's rout produced the morning's strangest headline: Anthropic's nearly $70 billion IPO filing, circulated to banks on Monday and then retracted.
Begin with the mood, because it has genuinely lifted. Brent crude was last down 1% at $91.45 a barrel, loitering near 10-week lows after President Trump indicated he may not attack Iran 'at this point,' and the cheaper oil perked up risk appetite across Asia: South Korea's KOSPI rose 4%, Japan's Nikkei gained 2.5%, and the broad Asia-Pacific index pushed 1.5% higher — a two-day surge Reuters calls the region's biggest in three months, following Monday's session in New York when the S&P 500 jumped 2.35%, its biggest one-day rise since April, and the Nasdaq added 2.7%.
The AI trade, though, is carrying two separate headaches into Tuesday. Nvidia's shares closed down 4% on Monday after its board launched an internal investigation into whether CEO Jensen Huang had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort — a matter President Trump said the FBI was looking into — and the rest of the market mostly shrugged it off. Anthropic's was clumsier: details of a blockbuster IPO, including plans to raise nearly $70 billion, were briefly circulated to banks before being retracted late Monday, according to emails seen by Reuters. The Claude maker is expected to formally launch its roadshow later Tuesday, with pricing the following week — a debut Reuters notes is seen as critical for an AI boom already rattled by last week's rout.
None of it outranks 8:30 a.m. The October consumer price report is expected to show inflation up 0.3% on the month, cooling from September's 0.6%, in a Reuters survey — stubbornly high enough, traders judge, to keep the Federal Reserve on course for December: the CME FedWatch tool prices an 84% chance of a rate hike next month, up from 74% a week earlier, after Friday's blowout October jobs report.
So Tuesday's sequence is set: overseas markets have voted for calm, the AI giants have given the day its drama, and at 8:30 a.m. Eastern the inflation print decides which story Wall Street believes by the close.
