Ease-of-Use AI Platform DeepSeek Send U.S. Pre-Markets Reeling

Monday, January 27, 2025

We’re looking at a big drop in pre-market equities to start the last week on the first month of 2025. The rollout over the weekend of China’s DeepSeek AI platform has caused a big re-think among investors in the efforts of scaling-up AI. DeepSeek was reportedly developed for a low cost of $6 million as an open-source language model in only two months. Of course, this information comes from China, so verifying these details is not a possibility.

Even still, the easy utilization is disrupting the AI narrative, especially in investment dollars being rightly allocated to AI development efforts. NVIDIA NVDA, the chief provider of graphic processing units (GPU) used in this technology, is down -12% at this hour. Bitcoin, another entity valued on these high-tech measures, has sunk below $100K at this hour.

Thus, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq is seeing the brunt of this re-think — in terms of a market selloff — all major indexes are down currently in pre-market trading. The blue-chip Dow is performing best, -0.67% at this stage, but the S&P 500 is tumbling -2.05%, or -126 points. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is -763 points right now, -3.52%. The small-cap Russell 2000 in relatively unscathed at -0.79%.

Trump Swings Tariff Hammer at Colombia

Also in the news, a military plane carrying deported Colombian nationals undocumented in the U.S. was resisted by the South American country. This caused President Trump to threaten a +25% tariff on legal Colombian imports, a travel ban on Colombians to the U.S. and “immediate visa revocations” for Colombians currently in the U.S. This apparently brought the government of the South American nation around; it may also encourage the Trump administration to swing that tariff hammer robustly going forward.

SoFi Beats Q4 Estimates, Drops -9%

Perhaps by way of a clearer explanation of what’s going on in today’s pre-market, Silicon Valley-based financial platform company SoFi SOFI outperformed expectations on both top and bottom lines, but lower-than-expected forward guidance has joined with the tech-market selloff to send shares down -9% so far this morning.

Earnings of 5 cents per share beat the Zacks consensus by a penny, with revenues of $739.1 million outpacing expectations by +8.8%. Revenue guidance of between $3.2-3.27 billion on earnings per share guidance of between 23-27 cents are disappointing analysts this morning. Last week’s lingering issue of perhaps not having the funding (according to Elon Musk) to support the $100 billion project in AI development via the “Stargate” proposal may be pressing the accelerator downward at this hour.

Check out the updated Zacks Earnings Calendar here.

What to Expect from Today’s Stock Market

After today’s open, New Home Sales for December come out. A tally of 671K seasonally adjusted, annualized units is expected, above the 664K posted in the prior month’s quarter. It will be the first of major economic prints this week, ending with the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation, Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), which will be released ahead of the opening bell this Friday morning.

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