• The Dow Jones rose 250 points on Wednesday as the index recovered.
• Equities are rebounding from Tuesday’s declines, with indexes sticking close to record highs.
• The recent ‘Fed frenzy’ has abated, with markets confident of a 25 bps cut in November.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rallied roughly 250 points on Wednesday as equities pivot around the mid-week inflection point. The Dow Jones is paring away Tuesday’s losses, where the index shed over three-quarters of a percent, keeping price action tight to record highs.

Markets have settled into a holding pattern on Federal Reserve (Fed) rate cuts, with rate traders firmly pricing in 90% odds of a 25 bps rate trim on November 7, with another quarter-point trim firmly priced in for December 18. Investors are exhausted after spending most of 2024 on Fed watch, and Q3 earnings reports have dominated traders’ viewports this week.

The US banking sector posted bumper Q3 earnings this week, dragging multiple indexes to record highs, and a steady stream of warnings about how high interest rates could negatively impact bank profitability has dried up practically overnight. Major players in the tech space, including Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG), are busy inking deals for future nuclear projects. Large-scale companies that deal in data storage and computing farms are looking to provide enough power to server farms being swallowed whole by the amorphous AI sphere. 

Costs are rising quickly for the still-budding “AI industry”, a label slapped onto any project that uses large dataset-crunching modeling methods to spit out other recombined, pre-shaped datasets. As energy demand and equivalent power costs soar, the companies selling the shovels in the AI goldrush are looking for ways to deliver cheap, readily available power on a large scale to an industry already grappling with finding value that isn’t direct injections from investors, and future net-positive revenue streams remain elusive.