Sellers are back in tech, while bear market grips Chinese stocks

Hello, this is Leonie Kidd with today’s edition of Morning Squawk.

The pickup in volume during super early trading has been overwhelmingly to the downside. 

Futures are worse, Asia closed deep in the red, and Europe is also broadly lower.

It seems the all-or-nothing approach to tech continues… 

The earnings handover from Wall Street was mixed, but investors seem more hung up on Tesla’s disappointing forecasts than Meta’s beat.    

Tesla round-up: Better-than-expected third-quarter results are failing to support Tesla shares, with the stock falling in premarket trading. Lower average car sales prices and a battery supply crunch weighed on revenues. 

Musk also warned the group is “not going to move the needle” on its Robotaxi fleet this quarter. 

• Former Tesla board member Steve Westly told CNBC that Musk must scale across self-driving and robotics to justify its $1.6 trillion valuation. 

Meta round-up: Shares in Meta have also turned negative in premarket trading. The stock initially rallied in extended trade on Wednesday, after it posted a sales beat for the quarter. 

• Meta also convinced Mark Zuckerberg to stay in California for 8 years by offering a new class of stock, helping him manage the so-called “California Wealth Tax.”

At 11am, Squawk on the Street will speak to Bill Ackman about his tech portfolio, which includes Meta, as well as the big market trends and the midterms. 

Brent crude and WTI are driving higher in early trading. Here are the latest geopolitical developments fueling the moves: 

• A New York Times report outlined how the U.S. and Israeli militaries have developed plans to renew strikes on Iran after the midterm elections. The Times, citing unnamed U.S. officials, said this would be a “short but intensive” operation. 
• Overnight, the State Department announced it was ordering non-emergency government employees to leave Saudi Arabia amid the Houthi attacks on the kingdom. 

China’s benchmark CSI 300 dipped into bear market territory today, marking a 20% drop from its June peak. The index, which tracks 300 of the largest stocks listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen, has declined for ten consecutive weeks. 

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Fresh data seen by CNBC shows sovereign wealth funds are pouring billions back into China, with investment surging 190% from 2025. Read more on this with CNBC’s Lee Ying Shan’s report here. 

Big movers in Europe:

• Consumer giant Nestle is higher in European trade after sales beat third-quarter forecasts. 
• British bank Barclays is cutting 5,000 jobs this year, as profit missed expectations this quarter, sending shares lower in London.  
• European tech giant SAP is under pressure alongside other European technology stocks despite hiking its sales outlook. 
• The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, NBIM, has posted a $30 billion loss amid the bond market turbulence. 

In an exclusive interview with CNBC, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang said that market fundamentals show that demand for neoclouds is “off the charts.”

• Shares in neocloud firms are back under pressure in premarket trading, led lower by a more than 5% drop anticipated for both CoreWeave and Nebius. 
• The selling pressure is extending to the big players, with Nvidia itself down ahead of the open, alongside Intel and Qualcomm. 

Why it matters: PHP is an open-source programming language used to power websites. The discovery of flaws in the system has led to governments across the world taking websites offline. 

Google, OpenAI and Amazon are involved in uncovering these vulnerabilities in an effort to protect systems. 

• Authorities from the FBI to the U.K.’s National Health Service and police forces across the globe have issued alerts. You can follow key developments here. 

James Talarico fires back at Elon Musk in Texas Senate race feud

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee seeking a Senate seat from Texas, fired back Wednesday night at Elon Musk for an X post in which the world’s richest man hours earlier had said, “There is something deeply wrong with Talarico.”

“There is something deeply wrong with a political system that allows one trillionaire to buy his own personal U.S. Senator,” Talarico wrote in reply to Musk’s tweet.

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian, Lora Kolodny, Jenny Lee, Lee Ying Shan, Anniek Bao and Dan Mangan contributed to this report.

John Melloy edited this edition.