Morning Bid: The AI dip may not be done

A look at the day ahead in European and global markets from Tom Westbrook

Tech stocks headed for a wobbly finish to what is shaping as the sharpest market drawdown since the turbulence around U.S. tariffs seven months ago.

Shares of Softbank Group, the Japanese investment conglomerate famous for high-risk, high-reward tech bets are down around 20% this week - the biggest one-week drop since the pandemic. [MKTS/GLOB]

The Nasdaq is down more than 2% this week and futures were under pressure in the Asia session. Tech-heavy markets in Japan and South Korea fell.

To be sure, these are modest drops in markets that have run hard for months. The Nasdaq is up 50% from April lows.

But one unsettling feature of the pullback is that there has been no obvious trigger or reason for AI shares to break their stride, which raises the prospect that investors - en masse - are starting to have second thoughts about the rally.

More than half of the fund managers surveyed by BofA in October reckon we are in an AI equity bubble.

There may have been some signal in markets' sharply negative reactions to AI spending plans at Meta and outwardly very strong results at Palantir Technologies.

Herald van der Linde, HSBC's chief Asia equity strategist with several decades following the markets, recalled how the top of the dotcom bubble came with no fanfare or stunning news, just a collective realisation that valuations had run much too far.

"The problem with high valuations is that it's like blue sky," he told Reuters.

"The moment there's one small black cloud, it is not a blue sky anymore. So if you have very high valuations, small news, shifts in sentiment, can actually cause markets to come down a lot."The U.S. government shutdown means there will be no U.S. jobs data later in the day, leaving investors to pick their own way through the market's shifting mood.

In Asia, Chinese trade figures came in surprisingly soft, with a 1.1% fall in dollar-denominated exports in October, though the outlook is expected to stabilise since the trade truce agreed with the U.S. last week.

Focus will be on how equities trade to the weekend, while bond markets have taken private data showing a surge in U.S. layoffs as raising the likelihood of interest rate cuts.

Safe assets such as the yen, gold and Swiss franc were catching a bid in the Asia session.

Key developments that could influence markets on Friday:

- German trade data

- Canadian jobs figures

- U.S. equities session

(Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Sam Holmes)