Tesla stock jumps, Micron shares fall, Coinbase planning NFT marketplace launch

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports on the day’s trending tickers.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I want to take a look at some stocks that are actually trending on the Yahoo Finance site today. And for that, let’s bring in Jared Blikre. Jared, let’s start with Tesla jumping to a six-month high today. They’ve got some good news coming out of China. Tell us about it.

JARED BLIKRE: That’s right, and it gets back to those deliveries. They already beat on– beat expectations on US deliveries, which we got towards the beginning of the month. But in China, they sold– or actually, yeah, they sold 56,006 China-made cars. That’s up 26 and 1/2% month over month. And also, we’re looking at a figure. They exported 3,853 vehicles, a lot of those destined for Europe. And we know that they’re getting their Germany gigafactory up to snuff as well. So that’s going to be less of an issue for Europeans trying to get their hands on a Tesla.

But let’s check out the technicals on the YFi Interactive. And Tesla has now clear that it’s been holding above $800 a share for a few sessions now. I want to check in on the year-to-date view because we can see, this is a stock that bottomed in March, tested those lows in May, and has been on a very incremental incline ever since. We can see this trend channel in play here.

So at the $800 price level, we’re running into some resistance from those prior highs. The absolute high was $900 per share, but so close to the finish line, we might actually back off a little bit and consolidate. But I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t, at least, test those record highs of $900 per share. So, good news for those Tesla holders who went through a pretty nasty correction. I believe this was something like 40% or 45% from high to low this year.

So Tesla volatility in the stock has been trending down. And that’s also bullish for this particular issue, although it would be nice to see a surge, as we’ve seen in prior episodes. And I’ll go back, put on a two-year chart. You can see when the stock gets going, it really gets going, but probably have to wait for it to break to new highs first, Alexis.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: That’s a pretty nice looking chart there, Jared. Not looking too nice today is Micron. That stock is, I guess, at its lowest level in a couple of months. I know there are concerns about chip prices, but I’m wondering if that is bleeding into the entire computer chip sector, or is this just a Micron story?

JARED BLIKRE: I think when it comes to Micron– and they’re specifically levered to the memory space, And that’s very, very cyclical. It’s a little– it operates a little bit differently than the GPU and some of the other sectors, the server space, the cloud chips, all that good stuff. With respect to Micron itself, so despite the fact that we’ve seen most of the weakness in Micron today, I would say the semiconductor space has been flagging as of late.

Let me just read to you a quick excerpt from this report. It’s from Trendforce. They’re saying contract prices for the memory chips are poised to decline in the fourth quarter, citing falling demand and a drop in spot prices. Also seeing Western Digital, one of its peers, drop 3 and 1/2%.

But I want to get to a chart on the YFi Interactive here that shows the Philly Semiconductor Index over the last six months. And it has fallen to a key technical level. This is the 200-day moving average. That’s this purple line right here. So we might bounce around, find some support. We can see that it’s basically– this is the SOX Index. Again, this has been trading sideways for the last few months. And we might bounce off support here.

But my point is if we break to the downside through what’s not only price action support, also 50-day moving– or 200-day moving average support, probably going to get some momentum to the downside and test these levels from lower in May. In general, we’ve seen not only chip stocks, but also software, to a lesser degree, fall off. And that’s because we’ve seen yields rise. You take a look at what the 10-year T-note yield has done recently. This uptrend doesn’t bode well for the technology stocks. And that’s what we’ve seen happen.

Now, maybe a little bright spot– having hit about 1.6% very recently, having gotten a little bit overextended, could be due for a fall back to support here. So if that were the case, we would expect chip stocks and some of the other growth stocks that have been flagging. Those, we would expect to rally.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, and finally, Coinbase has now become the latest crypto exchange to plan an NFT marketplace. I guess it was just a matter of time, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Yes, you knew that had to come sometime. But they’re saying that the user experience of creating or purchasing an NFT has been, quote, “lacking.” They’re hoping to make things a little bit easier. They want people to work to create NFTs, what they call effortlessly and control them through these decentralized contracts. There’s going to be a social media function to it, too. So you know all of these things are going to come together. NFTs are still a fledgling market and also highly levered, I would say, to the price of Ethereum.

But since we’ve seen this resurgence in the price of crypto, not only Bitcoin, but also Ethereum– and we can see this on the YFi Interactive. Over the last month, Bitcoin up 21%, Ethereum up a more modest 2.4%. When we see these trends, when we see more interest in crypto, we do tend to see a resurgence in EFTs. I’m going to show a year-to-date chart of Ethereum. And you can see after getting a nice run-up in August and early September, it came back a little bit. But still, I would say the intermediate trend is still up, as is the long-term trend, Alexis.