Nasdaq Futures Surge 1.1% as AI Stocks Bounce
Nasdaq 100 futures jump 1.1% Monday as AI and chip stocks rebound from last week's brutal 4.48% selloff. VIX drops to 18.68. Here's what traders need now.
Key Points
- Nasdaq 100 futures are up 1.11% to 29,719 Monday morning, clawing back a portion of last week's 4.48% index collapse driven by AI and semiconductor selling.
- Easing Treasury yields and a VIX pullback from above 22 to 18.68 are providing the mechanical fuel for the bounce, with a chip ETF set for its first daily gain in 10 sessions.
- Traders should watch whether the Nasdaq 100 can reclaim 29,400 intraday — that level represents roughly the midpoint of last week's damage and will signal whether this is a genuine reversal or a dead-cat fade ahead of Meta and Tesla earnings.
Nasdaq 100 futures are up 1.11% to 29,719 as of 6:01 AM ET Monday, fading Friday's wreckage in AI and semiconductor shares with the most conviction the bulls have shown in over a week. The move comes after the Nasdaq Composite shed 2.1% Friday alone and dropped 4.48% for the week — its worst weekly performance in months — while the S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,659.44 after losing 1.09% on the session. This morning, S&P 500 futures have added 38.75 points, or 0.50%, to 7,743. The Dow, characteristically, is not invited to the party: Dow futures sit at 52,185, down 29 points, a -0.06% drag that underscores just how concentrated Friday's pain — and Monday's relief — remains in growth and technology.
Ten Sessions of Pain, One Morning of Relief
The setup into this bounce deserves scrutiny before traders get too comfortable. A chip-focused ETF is tracking toward its first daily gain in 10 consecutive sessions, up 2.6% in pre-market trading — a streak of red that context alone should give pause. The underlying damage to semiconductor names was not random noise. It was a coordinated repricing of AI-adjacent multiples against a 10-year Treasury yield that closed last week at 5.10%, a rate level that continues to act as gravitational pull on any stock trading at a premium to near-term earnings. Ten straight down sessions in chip names is the kind of technical exhaustion that produces violent short-covering bounces, and Monday's pre-market action looks, at minimum, partly mechanical.
The individual movers tell a cleaner story. Intel is up 4.19% to $93.61 on 2 million pre-market shares — notable volume for a name that spent most of the past two years as a value trap. SK Hynix's ADR is gaining 4.18% to $142.19. NVIDIA, the bellwether for the entire AI infrastructure theme, is adding 1.31% to $216.93. CoreWeave is up 1.61% to $62.38, and Nebius Group — a smaller but increasingly watched AI infrastructure name — is up 4.10% to $172.26 on nearly 500,000 pre-market shares. None of these are earnings-driven; this is purely a sentiment reset after last week's institutional selling.
The Fear Gauge Gives Ground, But Not Entirely
The VIX is at 18.68 Monday morning, down 1.31 points or 6.55% from Friday's close, as the fear trade begins unwinding. That is the headline read. The nuanced read is more complicated. The VIX spiked above 22 last week — its highest print in four months — and option positioning tells you the institutional hedging community is not fully convinced this bounce holds. Late last week, traders paid $1.7 million for 9,200 contracts of the November 18 20-strike VIX calls, and $1.1 million for 12,500 contracts of the November 18 23-strike VIX calls. Both positions are underwater at Monday's open. But they exist, and they represent real conviction that volatility stays elevated through mid-November — not a view that typically accompanies a durable bottom.
There is also a structural disagreement embedded in the options market right now that every serious trader should be tracking. The SPY at-the-money implied volatility for this Friday's expiration is running at 14.0%, while the spot VIX sits at 20.0 — a ratio of 0.70x. That spread signals that near-term options traders see significantly less risk over the next five days than the broader VIX term structure implies. Either the short-dated market is complacent about this week's earnings risk, or the VIX is pricing in tail risk that the underlying market has already discounted. The CNN Fear & Greed Index at 18 out of 100 — deep in extreme fear territory — leans toward the latter interpretation: sentiment has overcorrected, and the bounce is at least partially justified on a contrarian basis.
What Actually Moves the Market This Week
The Polymarket contract on Monday's S&P 500 direction had already priced an 88% probability of a higher open before futures hit their session highs — a bet that looks prescient as of this writing. But the Monday open is the easy part. The real test for the AI trade comes mid-week, when the market gets the earnings reports that will either validate or destroy the narrative that drove the Nasdaq to its highs in the first place.
Tesla reports this week and is already up 2.40% in pre-market to $371.13, extending Friday's nearly 5% surge after unveiling its second-generation Roadster — a vehicle that uses SpaceX-developed rocket-style thrusters and performed aerial maneuvers in demonstration. Production is guided to begin in 2028. Whether that product spectacle translates to earnings-quarter enthusiasm is a separate question. Meta Platforms is also on the docket, and as the largest pure-play AI spending story among the mega-caps currently reporting, its capital expenditure guidance will do more to reset the semiconductor narrative than any pre-market futures level. Netflix, meanwhile, is down 3.68% in pre-market to $69.94 — that move appears tied to subscriber or guidance anxiety ahead of its own print.
The macro backdrop offers modest, conditional support. Oil prices eased into the week, removing one inflation input that had complicated the rate picture. Mohamed El-Erian flagged something important last week: Treasury yields fell despite hotter-than-expected CPI, PPI, and import price inflation data, and market-implied odds of an October rate hike dropped below 20%. That is a bond market telling you it does not believe the Fed will act — which loosens financial conditions at the margin without requiring any official policy shift. XLE, the energy ETF, is the strongest sector in pre-market at +2.52%, while XLK is still down 3.02%, SMH down 3.41%, and ARKK off 4.71% on a rolling basis — the rotation out of growth and into defensive and commodity-linked names has not reversed overnight, it has merely paused.
The level to watch on the Nasdaq 100 is 29,400. A clean intraday hold above that mark — representing roughly the midpoint of last week's 1,400-point drawdown from peak to Friday's close at 29,187.55 — would confirm that institutional buyers are stepping in with size rather than simply letting short-covering do the work. Failure to hold 29,400 into the afternoon, particularly if Treasury yields tick back above 5.15%, would suggest the bounce is borrowed time ahead of a earnings week that carries asymmetric risk in both directions. Meta reports Wednesday. That is the session that matters most.
The Weekly Investor
Daily market analysis for active traders. Free.
