Brazil's EWZ plunged nearly 20% in overnight trading after Lula won a fourth term; Nvidia lowered its HBM4 pin speed to 9.6 Gbps as BofA says Micron reads de-specs as a memory shortage; SK hynix is reportedly preparing $38 billion to $45 billion in extra shareholder returns
Lula won a fourth term after beating Flávio Bolsonaro, and Brazil's EWZ ETF plunged nearly 20% in overnight trading. SocGen sees the real falling 8% to 10%, per Zero Hedge. On Bloomberg, Paul Dobson said real futures imply a possible 10% drop and warned of contagion into emerging-market funds. Chicago soybean futures fell to a two-month low on expectations of closer Brazil-China ties, per Bloomberg.
Jukan reported that Nvidia officially lowered its HBM4 pin speed from 11.7 Gbps, later correcting the new figure to 9.6 Gbps. Zephyr said Nvidia also cut NVLink bandwidth per GPU from 1.8 TB/s to 1.5 TB/s, leaving AMD ahead on HBM and scale-up bandwidth. BofA reports that Micron's management views reduced memory specs as evidence of memory shortages, not of power, real estate or compute constraints.
Korean media report that SK hynix is preparing to announce $38 billion to $45 billion in additional shareholder returns, mostly through special dividends, and is reportedly also considering more buybacks and cancellations. Seeking Alpha says the company is said to plan a $12 billion special dividend from its Kioxia investment. Goldman lowered its KOSPI target from 12,000 to 9,000, per Zero Hedge.
On Lam Research's October 21 earnings call, CEO Tim Archer said growing adoption of SLC NAND for AI could raise the wafer capacity needed for the same storage, per Jukan. Moving from TLC to SLC-class products cuts bits per cell to roughly one-third, so each 1-point rise in SLC's share of NAND bits would require about 2% more wafer capacity. Jukan adds that Nvidia and hyperscalers are developing SLC-based products.
A r/smallstreetbets author holds October and January call options on a QUBT short-squeeze thesis into November earnings and the Dirac-3S hardware rollout.
A r/AMD_Stock user moved fully into AMD shares from calls and plans to hold through volatility, calling Q4 guidance the key catalyst.
On Bloomberg, Uday Vikram sees a post-washout opportunity in Brazil but says to wait.
Paul Dobson said on Bloomberg that Korea looks cheap to bargain hunters.
Paradis Labs sees consolidation as likely and names SPCX, NBIS and CRWV as the three standout neoclouds.
Alexander Good said he is out of every stock he owns and is short the S&P 500 while holding BTC, XMR and some ZEC.
Bloomberg's Paul Dobson warned of a steep selloff in the real and Brazilian stocks after Lula's win, and a r/smallstreetbets author expects EWZ puts to pay off.
Bloomberg's Ben Sills warns the pace of French bond-spread widening is alarming and may become critical before April.