Dow Tumbles 200 Points as Nvidia Slumps 4.5% and 10-Year Yield Hits 5.13%

Wall Street buckled under compounding pressures on Thursday, November 12. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 200 points to close at the day's absolute low, while the S&P 500 shed 0.35% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.4%.

A sudden corporate shock opened the floodgates. Shares of artificial intelligence bellwether Nvidia plunged 14% at the opening bell after Chief Executive and co-founder Jensen Huang abruptly announced his resignation. The initial panic wiped out tens of billions in market capitalisation within seconds before bargain hunters stepped in. The bleeding slowed once the board appointed Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress as interim chief executive, steering the stock to finish down 4.5%.

The blowback across specialized cloud infrastructure providers tied to Nvidia was far more severe.

Neocloud Sell-Off and Semiconductor Divergence

CoreWeave tumbled as much as 16% in early trade before clawing back to close down 7%, erasing the bulk of its previous 24% rally that had followed strong earnings and upbeat management commentary. Nebius Group suffered an even steeper rout, plunging 17% after slashing its forward sales guidance. Yet, capital did not flee the semiconductor ecosystem entirely. Rivalling chipmakers captured immediate rotational inflows: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Broadcom each leaped more than 5%, while Alphabet gained 2% to buffer the Nasdaq from broader devastation.

Market Context: Institutional desks initially treated the Nvidia leadership vacuum as an isolated corporate disruption, briefly nudging benchmark indices into positive territory at midday. But the intraday rebound collapsed under an onslaught of surging sovereign yields and escalating geopolitical friction.

Hawkish Fed Chorus and Surging Treasury Yields

Bond markets offered equity investors no quarter. The yield on the benchmark US 10-year Treasury note spiked to 5.13% on Thursday, up from roughly 5% earlier in the week, while the US Dollar Index climbed decisively past 103.

A concerted line of hawkish rhetoric from Federal Reserve policymakers triggered the repricing. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly declared that further interest rate increases will be required to bring inflation to heel, affirming that she would back aggressive action if the central bank risks falling behind the curve. Her hardline stance mirrored direct warnings delivered by Fed Governors Christopher Waller, Michelle Bowman, Jeff Schmid, and Austan Goolsbee, all of whom signaled that the Federal Open Market Committee must tighten monetary policy further at its December gathering.

Capital markets adjusted rapidly. Fed funds futures contracts now price in a 25-basis-point rate hike at each of the central bank's next three policy decisions in December, January, and March. The probability of an outsized 50-basis-point rate hike in December ticked upward to 14.5%, up from 12.7% just twenty-four hours earlier.

Crude Oil Spikes on White House Geopolitical Rhetoric

Energy desks added fuel to the market reversal. Brent crude climbed back toward $96 a barrel after US President Donald Trump issued a statement on Truth Social asserting that the United States does not need an agreement with Iran. The statement explicitly instructed Vice President JD Vance to drop negotiations with Tehran and redirect focus entirely to domestic matters. The sudden dimming of diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East instantly injected fresh risk premiums into crude contracts.

Traders now turn their attention to incoming macro prints for directional clarity. The US Department of Labor is scheduled to release October Producer Price Inflation figures at 7:00 PM Indian Standard Time, a print that will provide critical validation on wholesale price pressures ahead of the Fed's December rate-setting summit.