CNBC Daily Open: Tech investors buy the dip — but debt remains a concern

Business News and FinanceVIEW IN APPMarketsBusinessInvestingTechPoliticsSelectMake ItDaily OpenCNBC Daily Open: Tech investors buy the dip — but debt remains a concernPublished Mon, Oct 19 2026 9:11 PM EDTUpdated 14 Min AgoLim Hui Jie@in/hui-jie-lim-a7371176/WATCH LIVEKEY POINTS The Nasdaq Composite rebounds after a week of bruising losses. Oracle bonds inch closer to junk territory. Anthropic seen as the last AI IPO that could happen for 2026. Tensions between the U.S. and Ukraine continue to rise. Elon Musk says he’ll give a SpaceX share to every child in AmericaIn this article

Hello, this is Hui Jie writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to another edition of CNBC's Daily Open.

After a bruising week for the tech trade, investors seem to have came back into the sector, with the Nasdaq Composite rallying overnight.

The optimism is cautious, with debt concerns still a key worry for a sector that has seen record bond issuance this year.

Investors are once again piling into tech, after fears over AI financing, rising competition and possible excess chip supply in a few years drove them to cash out of the market last week.

The Nasdaq Composite rebounded more than 1% on Monday, after sliding 4.5% last week and snapping a four-week winning streak.

Intel advanced 2% after JPMorgan analysts upgraded their rating on the chipmaker. Advanced Micro Devices added 1.8%, and Micron Technology jumped about 3%.

It was not a wholesale embrace of the sector, however. Funding concerns still loom, especially over neocloud companies.

Shares of neocloud mainstay CoreWeave reversed course from earlier gains, falling 0.4%, even after receiving Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock to buy from neutral.

CoreWeave shares plunged more than 25% last week — their biggest one-week drop since November 2025 — over debt concerns.

Another company that is also facing credit stress is Oracle. It risks a credit rating downgrade that could tip its debt into junk territory. Oracle's rating at S&P Credit Ratings is BBB-, the lowest level in the investment-grade spectrum.

While the bonds are still investment grade, the shift in sentiment can be seen in the spread of Oracle's five-year credit default swaps, which are insurance against default.

Oracle's five-year CDS spread, or premium, is currently at 295 basis points, after briefly hitting 300 basis points on Thursday. It is up 287% in one year.

The range is more in line with BB and B credit, which is high yield, said Gavan Nolan, executive director of fixed income pricing at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

When the year started, investors were predicting a slew of AI companies going public, including SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI.

But now investors will have to settle for less, with OpenAI ruling out its market debut in 2026 and several other planned offerings postponed this year.

On prediction market platform Kalshi, speculators think the only major company left that might officially announce an IPO this year is Anthropic, which confidentially filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early June.

Only Anthropic offers greater than 50% odds — 75% as of Monday morning — to officially announce an IPO this year, out of the 23 companies that Kalshi lists on its market that remain open to trade.

On the geopolitical front, the tensions between Washington and Kyiv continue to rise with President Donald Trump saying Monday he would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping to discuss how to end the Ukraine war.

That comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin in an Oct. 9 phone call with Trump had floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Xi next month, although the meeting is envisioned to exclude Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"Anything I can do to end the war, whether somebody's there or not," Trump told reporters when asked about the potential meeting as he departed the White House for a campaign rally in Kansas.

Trump also doubled down on his criticism of the Ukrainian leader when he was asked about Zelenskyy's remarks that Trump is on the wrong side of history, saying that "Zelenskyy doesn't know what he's talking about," and reiterating his call for Kyiv to "get a new president."

Elon Musk says he’ll give a SpaceX share to every child in America next year

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Monday that he'll give every child in the U.S. one of his shares in the company next year.

Musk currently owns about 4.8 billion SpaceX shares, according to an August SEC filing. That figure rises to 6.4 billion when taking into account unvested awards and stock options, representing a 48.4% beneficial stake in the company.

There were 72 million children under 18 in the U.S. as of July 1, 2025, according to official census data.

That would amount to the CEO giving away about $10.5 billion worth of shares, taking into account SpaceX's closing stock price of $146.03 as of Friday.