Three things that have the stock market worried

S&P 500 futures are down 1.0% and Nasdaq futures down 1.5%. Nvidia is a laggard again, down 2.7% in the pre-market, Palantir down 3.9% and Tesla down 4.3%.

What changed in the past two days? The short answer is nothing.

The long answer is more complicated. I wrote about this yesterday but people are starting to look to 2026 and sensing that there has to be some kind of spending reckoning at some point. Not every company can be the winner and all the money being thrown at AI can’t be well invested.

Along those lines, there were a few events that got the market worried.

The first was OpenAI talking about a government backstop for investments. That has made people think that the private money they’re trying to raise isn’t there. The company has partially walked back the comments about it from the CFO but there seems to be a professional communications strategy out there that “the US needs to beat China on AI so we need government money”.

Again, government money is definitely useful for these things but it hints that the private money party is over.

Along those same lines, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman got testy on valuations.

During a recent interview with podcaster Brad Gerstner, Altman lost his cool when he was asked outright how it all adds up.

“How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?” Gerstner asked.

“If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” a taken-aback Altman replied. “Enough.”

“I think there’s a lot of people who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares,” Altman said. “We could sell your shares or anybody else’s to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly.’”

That’s an oddly defensive way to respond and it’s reminiscent of second red flag, which was Palantir CEO Alex Karp last week getting very defensive in media appearances and lashing out a shorts, despite the stratospheric valuations on his company.

If your responses can’t fall back on company nuts and bolts, it’s a red flag. Notably, there is heavy insider selling in Palantir and some other big tech names.

And it’s not just communication and sentiment, the third thing people are watching is bonds. People are looking at the borrowing of the large cap tech and AI names and highlighting the softness in their bonds. In addition, the credit default swaps on those names have moved up.

In the past month:

• Oracle – +35.08%

• CrowdStrike – +31.89%

• SoftBank – +12.60%

• Advanced Micro Devices – +4.59%

• Intel – +10.20%

• Amazon – +10.23%

• Microsoft – +14.61%

• Alphabet / Google – +12.88%

• IBM – +10.45%

The smartest guys in the room are always in the bond market and they’re seeing something that has them worried. It’s probably just a function of more borrowing and hedging flows but

The first name on that list is particularly interesting because it highlights bot the mania of the past two months and the pitfalls. Oracle shares jumped 25% in one day and briefly made Larry Ellison the world’s richest man but as the market digested more of the circular funding economics behind some of the investment announcements, it’s recoiled and that gap has closed (and more).

Shares are down another 2% in the pre-market and the 30-year bonds they issued in September at $100 are trading at $92.

Finally, the rage quit in the market from famed short-seller Michael Burry is one of those things that makes investors nervous. Shorts famously puke at the top and some people are understandably taking that as a topping signal.

This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.