Chapter 1: What are the recent trends in AI-driven e-commerce sales?
Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action, news, and analysis. Good afternoon. Today is Monday, November 10th, and I'm your host, Kim Kahn. Our top story so far, Adobe says US online spending rose 8.2% year-over-year in October to $88.7 billion. Adobe also noted that shoppers are echoing the AI enthusiasm of investors.
Generative AI-driven traffic is rising sharply and converting better. In October, visits from AI referral sources surged 1,200% year over year. Those shoppers were 16% more likely to make a purchase and showed 31% lower bounce rates exploring more content and spending more time on retail sites. In short, AI visitors aren't just browsing, they're buying.
Mobile purchases made up 51.4% of that total, climbing 11.6% from a year ago, while buy-now-pay-later transactions hit $7.1 billion, up 7.6% as consumers look for more flexible ways to manage budgets.
Chapter 2: How are mobile purchases influencing online shopping behavior?
Spending spiked during the Amazon Prime Day event on October 7th and 8th, with discounts stretching across major U.S. retailers. Shoppers spent $9.1 billion over the two days, helped by markdowns that peaked at 18% off listed prices. Holiday decor led the way with online sales jumping 130%, followed by home improvement categories.
Hand tools up 83% and power tools 62%, signaling a DIY rebound that could benefit Home Depot and Lowe's. Appliance demand was strong with refrigerators and freezers up 55%, a boost for Whirlpool and Best Buy. Other fast-growing categories include e-readers, headphones and speakers, phone accessories, and video games.
Among active stocks, health insurers with big Obamacare marketplace businesses are among the biggest losers. President Donald Trump said federal funding should be sent directly to people bypassing big, bad, and money-sucking insurance companies. Centene, Oscar Health, Elevance Health, and Molina Healthcare are slumping.
Chapter 3: What impact did Amazon Prime Day have on consumer spending?
Major managed care organizations like UnitedHealth, Humana, and CVS Health are also in the red. Eli Lilly is up after Learing Partners upgraded shares to Outperform from Market Perform, saying its White House pricing deal could dramatically expand coverage for its obesity drugs. Monday.com is tumbling after fiscal Q4 revenue outlook came in below estimates.
Pagaya Technologies' stock is surging as the AI infrastructure provider for the financial ecosystem raised its full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance after boasting 91% year-over-year growth in Q3. And Papa John's is active on a report that Triartisan Capital, which recently agreed to buy Denny's, is close to buying the pizza chain.
But a source told Seeking Alpha that the report is not true and shares are off their earlier highs. In other news of note, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a new idea to make your car work for you. At the annual meeting, Musk floated a plan to pay customers $100 to $200 a month if they let the company use their parked vehicles for AI workloads when they're not driving.
Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas did the math. He points out that there are more than 300 million light vehicles on U.S.
Chapter 4: How is AI transforming the automotive industry?
roads and about 1.2 billion worldwide. If every one of them had the power of a single NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, that's about 9,000 trillion operations per second. The numbers get staggering fast. 300 million Blackwells in the U.S., 1.2 globally, and potentially 2 billion within 15 years. And that's before you add what Jonas calls the rest of the fleet.
Humanoid robots, electric vertical takeoff and landing carriers, drones, construction and manufacturing bots, and even surgical robots. He says it's not a stretch to imagine a world with tens of billions of Blackwell-class computers at the edge, each one humming away with its own cooling system, data centers, and AI jobs to do.
And in the Wall Street Research Corner, investors should consider shorting bonds of hyperscalers, but hold off on major shorts of the broader AI trade, according to B of A. Strategist Michael Hartnett said hyperscaler cash flow is no longer sufficient for Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle to sustain the ongoing AI CapEx arms race.
He pointed out that more than $120 billion in bonds have been issued over the past seven weeks, and that even the AI kings are hinting at the need for a government backstop to help lower funding costs. Hyperscaler credit spreads have widened from 50 basis points in September towards 80 basis points, suggesting the lows are in.
Chapter 5: What should investors know about the future of hyperscaler bonds?
Hartnett also added that U.S. tech bond prices fell 8% in the 12 months leading up to the March 2000 bubble peak. For AI, he said, markets are already flashing plenty of watch-out signs, but real get-out signals always come with rising rates. And for now, the Fed ain't hiking and yields ain't spiking.
That's all for today's Wall Street Lunch. Look for links for stories in the show notes section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at SeekingAlpha.com slash WSB. And make sure you're getting the most out of your portfolio with quant, news, and analysis by heading to SeekingAlpha.com slash subscriptions.