Burry Goes Dark | Verizon Slashes 15k | OpenAI Losses Exposed | Foreclosures Climb

Stocks sold off sharply Thursday as investors recalibrated rate expectations and unwound portions of the AI trade. 

The Dow fell more than 700 points, snapping its four-day streak and pulling back from record highs. 

The S&P 500 dropped nearly 2%, led by communication services and technology, while the Nasdaq slid more than 2% and broke below its 50-day moving average for the first time since April.

The move came as futures shifted toward a sub-50% probability of a December rate cut, down sharply from yesterday, after the government reopened without releasing October’s core economic reports. 

Heavyweights Nvidia, Alphabet, and Broadcom led declines, extending a three-day tech drawdown. Disney fell on weaker-than-expected revenue.

The six-week shutdown has left the Fed without jobs and inflation data heading into its final meeting of the year, a gap that increases uncertainty around the policy path. 

Agencies warned that some missed releases may not be published at all, forcing traders to rely on second-order indicators until the pipeline resets.

Outside the index declines, Cisco outperformed on raised guidance, and Verizon traded higher following plans for a 15,000-job restructuring.

Investor Signal

The selloff shifts the near-term playbook back to rates and positioning. 

With the odds of a December cut falling below 50% and the Nasdaq breaking its 50-day trend, leadership continues to rotate away from crowded AI trades. 

Expect factor dispersion to widen: value, low-volatility, and earnings stability screens gain traction while mega-cap tech faces valuation compression. 

The path of least resistance runs through sectors with cleaner balance sheets and lower duration risk until the data blackout resolves and the Fed’s December reaction function becomes clearer.

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Michael Burry has taken Scion Asset Management off the grid. 

The SEC logged Scion’s registration as “terminated” on Nov. 10, removing the fund from federal reporting requirements and ending a disclosure trail that the market has treated as a sentiment indicator since 2008. 

His X post, “On to much better things Nov 25th”, arrived after weeks of public criticism aimed at Big Tech’s AI infrastructure spending and the accounting choices behind it.

Burry has argued that hyperscalers are stretching depreciation schedules on billions in Nvidia-powered data-center hardware. 

His estimate: $176 billion in understated depreciation between 2026 and 2028, inflating reported profits at Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Meta. The backdrop matters: AI-linked names have driven 75% of the S&P 500’s gains since November 2022, according to JPM Asset Management. 

With short sellers exiting, Hindenburg shut down, Jim Chanos scaled back, the market has become structurally hostile to bearish positioning. Burry’s move looks less like retreat and more like repositioning into a private structure.

Deeper Read

Burry’s deregistration lands in a market where transparency has tightened even as AI-related balance-sheet commitments have accelerated. 

His accounting critique highlights a growing divergence between reported earnings and cash investment in GPU-dense compute buildouts. 

The Scion exit also removes one of the few contrarian markers the market tracked for early signs of excess. 

In an environment where depreciation timelines directly shape tech-sector profitability, any shift in regulatory scrutiny could reprice AI infrastructure winners quickly.

Investor Signal

Depreciation risk is the new undervalued variable in the AI trade. 

If regulators tighten guidance or if hyperscalers adjust accounting to match physical asset lifecycles, reported earnings could compress across the largest index weights. 

Investors with outsized exposure to AI infrastructure names should treat Burry’s exit as a sentiment reset: the next phase of risk is balance-sheet-driven, not narrative-driven.

Verizon is executing the biggest headcount reduction in its history, 15,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its workforce, as the carrier moves to stabilize financial performance after three straight quarters of postpaid subscriber losses. 

The cuts will roll out over the next week and will combine direct layoffs with a shift of ~200 company-owned stores into franchise operations, effectively moving those employees off Verizon’s books.

The company entered the year with about 100,000 employees, per SEC filings. 

The restructuring follows worsening competitive pressure: in the most recent quarter, Verizon reported a net loss of 7,000 consumer postpaid phone connections, missing Wall Street’s expectation for a +19,000 gain. 

AT&T and T-Mobile continue to expand their postpaid bases, while Verizon has relied on price-lock guarantees to defend share, a promotion rivals quickly matched.

The overhaul coincides with leadership change. New CEO Daniel Schulman, formerly of PayPal and Virgin Mobile USA, has signaled a full reset of the carrier’s cost structure. 

Schulman has committed to eliminating or restructuring legacy operations, tightening expense lines, and restoring subscriber momentum. 

Analysts at Morgan Stanley note the execution risk: improving operating performance in a mature U.S. telecom market is “not easy or quick,” though achievable over time.

Verizon joins a growing list of large U.S. employers, including Amazon, UPS, and Target, that are cutting staff as they shift to tech-enabled efficiency and margin protection.

Deeper Read

The scale of Verizon’s cut reflects structural pressure in wireless: slowing industry growth, high churn sensitivity, and rising competition from fixed-wireless and cable MVNOs. 

The cost reset is less cyclical and more strategic, a fight to defend EBITDA in a market where unit economics have tightened.

Investor Signal

Expect Verizon to prioritize margin stabilization over subscriber growth near-term. 

Layoffs and franchising reduce fixed costs quickly, but the longer-term equity story hinges on whether Schulman can reverse postpaid erosion without escalating promotional spending.

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Big Tech’s AI earnings surge has a structural weak point: the startups driving the hype are posting losses on a scale usually reserved for distressed conglomerates. 

New disclosures and shareholder figures indicate OpenAI lost more than $12B last quarter, a burn rate that rivals the largest corporate losses in the world, and one projected to accelerate.

The math is stark. OpenAI expects $13B in revenue this year, ramping to $30B next year and doubling again by 2027. 

But costs are rising even faster: projected losses triple to $40B+ by 2027, driven by commitments to consume $250B of Microsoft cloud, $300B from Oracle, $22B from CoreWeave, and $38B from Amazon. 

These obligations underpin the data-center construction boom, and a sizable share of public-company AI profits.

In Q3, OpenAI’s estimated loss equaled 65% of the EBITDA growth reported by Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta combined. 

Meanwhile, Anthropic, also loss-making, generated a $9.5B paper gain for Amazon through markups. 

Public-company AI margins are increasingly tied to private-company deficit spending.

Deeper Read

The AI ecosystem is running a barbell: highly profitable suppliers on one side, deeply unprofitable model developers on the other. 

If revenue adoption slows, hardware costs rise, or capital tightens, the funding chain snaps first at the startup layer, and the earnings tailwind for Big Tech turns into a drag.

Investor Signal

AI profits look stable, but they’re subsidized. Monitor cloud capacity commitments, capex trajectories, and funding conditions for OpenAI, Anthropic, and peers. 

Big Tech’s AI margins remain strong only as long as startups can afford to lose money at industrial scale.

U.S. foreclosure activity climbed again in October, extending an eight-month streak of annual increases and signaling a slow but broadening rise in housing stress. 

New filings, including default notices and scheduled auctions, continued to edge higher, while completed foreclosures posted one of their strongest year-over-year jumps since the pandemic recovery. 

The levels remain low in historical context, but the direction of travel is no longer ambiguous.

States with the fastest population growth, Florida, South Carolina, and Texas, are also seeing the sharpest increases in distressed filings, a reversal from the boom-era resilience that defined the past three years. 

Rising insurance premiums in coastal markets and still-elevated mortgage rates are beginning to pressure recent buyers who had expected refinancing relief sooner. 

Markets like Tampa, Jacksonville, Orlando, Riverside, and Cleveland now rank among the busiest for early-stage defaults.

Industry analysts emphasize that foreclosure volumes are nowhere near crisis levels, but the composition matters: FHA-backed loans represent a growing share of serious delinquencies, suggesting more pressure ahead in the lower-income segment of the market.

Deeper Read

The foreclosure uptick is not a shock event, it’s a normalization pattern tied to higher carrying costs, weakening job stability, and stretched consumer balance sheets. 

Housing demand is still firm, but early cracks typically appear at the margins. 

The trend points to stress accumulating underneath headline price stability.

Investor Signal

Watch inventory in Sun Belt metros and servicers with heavy FHA exposure. 

A gradual rise in distressed supply could reshape pricing dynamics in 2026 and shift leverage toward buyers for the first time in years.

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The IRS raised the 401(k) employee deferral limit to $24,500 for 2026, a modest bump that extends the inflation-driven increases seen across retirement accounts this cycle. 

Catch-up limits for workers 50 and older will rise to $8,000, while the higher Secure 2.0 catch-up tier for ages 60–63 remains locked at $11,250. 

Roth IRA income thresholds and traditional IRA limits also move higher next year, widening the window for tax-advantaged saving.

The announcement lands against a familiar backdrop: most workers aren’t contributing anywhere near the cap. 

Vanguard data shows only 14% of participants maxed out their plans last year, and the typical savings rate still sits near the low-teens even with employer contributions. 

Fidelity’s readings for Q2 echo the same pattern.

The timing adds another layer. 

The IRS published the update hours after the federal government reopened, ending a six-week data blackout that stalled several other inflation adjustments earlier in the month.

Deeper Read

The higher limits matter, but the adoption gap matters more. 

Contribution caps continue to rise faster than actual participation, creating a widening disconnect between what savers could shelter and what they are sheltering. 

The increase signals policy continuity rather than a shift in retirement behavior.

Investor Signal

Watch plan providers and asset managers with heavy workplace-savings exposure. 

Rising limits expand contribution ceilings, but real revenue impact depends on whether participation improves as inflation cools and confidence rebounds.

Today’s reversal underscored how quickly positioning can flip when the rate path loses clarity. 

With the Nasdaq breaking below its 50-day and rate-cut odds sliding sharply, markets are recalibrating after weeks of tech-driven momentum. 

The end of the shutdown removes one uncertainty but introduces another: the data vacuum now forces investors to trade without the jobs and inflation signals that typically anchor the Fed’s final meeting of the year.

The day’s sell-off centers on three shifts:

The market closed weaker, but the signal is clean: positioning is resetting ahead of the first full data cycle post-shutdown.