Record Hedge-Fund Tech Selling Splits Wall Street Over the AI Trade

On Friday, November 6, 2026, hedge funds sold technology stocks at a record pace, the clearest sign yet that the run-up in shares tied to artificial intelligence had hit a wall. Brokerages were split on what the selling meant: some called it overdone, arguing the computing buildout behind AI was still intact, while others said valuations had simply run too far ahead of near-term earnings. Amazon supplied the clearest test case. Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud-computing division and its main profit engine, grew revenue 39% from a year earlier — a rate most industries would celebrate — yet investors sold the stock anyway on the view that even that growth could not justify the spending required to sustain it. The chip sector showed the same split. AMD reported that its server-chip business pushed cash flow to records even as its PC-chip business shrank, and the company reaffirmed a target of $100 billion in annual revenue, evidence that demand for AI computing hardware had not slowed. Nvidia, meanwhile, faced a separate problem: espionage allegations against the company were now feeding a chip-export bill moving through Congress that would tighten rules on selling advanced semiconductors abroad. President Trump said he had not discussed the allegations with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, whom he called 'honorable,' but the overhang added regulatory risk Wall Street had not been pricing in a week earlier. Jefferies added to the unease outside pure AI names, cutting price targets on defense contractors Kratos and Leidos and confirming that both companies' order backlogs were weaker than the market had assumed. Elsewhere, dealmaking offered a contrast: Surgery Partners shares jumped after terms of its HealthSpan acquisition were reset to $25 a share, a reminder that risk appetite for deals had not disappeared everywhere. Commodities told a more mixed story. Gold rebounded above $4,100 an ounce as traders positioned for US inflation data due the following session, released on the heels of a jobs report that had already beaten forecasts and lifted the dollar. Oil fell after President Trump said fresh attacks on Iran were 'unlikely' if diplomatic talks progressed, pulling some war-risk premium out of crude prices. Natural gas moved the other way: traders holding record bets that prices would fall were forced to buy back those positions — unwinding their short bets — after forecasters flagged an incoming cold blast that would lift heating demand. In fixed income, the bond market lost a widely used reference gauge at the same time demand for government debt was already softening, leaving traders with less to work from just as appetite for new debt was weakening. The split verdict on tech showed up clearly in Indy News's own Buy List 2026 model portfolio. On €120,000 invested, it was worth €124,331, a total return of +3.61% (+2.93% on price alone). But the dispersion inside that number was the real story. MicroStrategy (MSTR) was up 33.04% and GameStop (GME) up 39.72% — both momentum names that rallied hard even as Bitcoin itself, held in the portfolio as BTC-EUR, fell 11.51%, a reminder that some of the market's strongest moves were no longer tracking the assets they were supposed to be proxies for. On the other side, Vonovia (VNA.DE) — held as two separate entries in the book — was down 28.39% in one and down 0.81% in the other, ASML was down 10.35%, and Novo Nordisk (NOVO-B.CO) was down 10.28%. Tesla (TSLA) fell 14.88% after the company said it would end production of the Cybertruck even while insisting demand still outstripped supply, a decision investors read as an admission the model had never become profitable at scale. Renewable-energy names in the same book kept climbing regardless: Iberdrola (IBE.MC) was up 23.24% and Ørsted (ORSTED.CO) up 14.86%, proof that capital was still flowing into established clean-power names even as newer energy bets ran into trouble elsewhere. What remained unresolved going into the next session was whether Friday's selling marked a genuine repricing of AI-linked stocks or a one-day flush that brokerages would later call overdone. US inflation data, due next, would help answer that by showing how much room the Federal Reserve had to keep supporting risk assets. The chip-export bill in Congress remained in play, with Nvidia's fate tied to a vote that had not yet happened. And further out, the broader capital rush into nuclear power ran into its own unresolved constraint: a $50 billion bottleneck in the cost of disposing of radioactive waste, a bill that financiers backing the nuclear buildout had only begun to price in.