Johny Fernandez: And while it's lunchtime here in New York, it's 11 a.m. back in Chicago over at Cboe. So let's head over to FINTECH.TV correspondent Mark Payton, who is live from the trading floor. Mark, what's the latest over there?
Mark Payton: Hey, Johny, we're still seeing some pressure on stocks as we move through the morning. The S&P 500 is down about a third of a percent here at Cboe. The VIX has jumped roughly about 8%. It's in the teens now, like high 16s. So volatility has definitely picked up, although we're still below that 20 level.
Small caps are also under some pressure. Russell 2000 futures are around 2,880, down about half a percent.
But the number that really stands out this morning is the 10 year Treasury yield. It actually hit 5%. It's a major psychological level for the market and the highest we've seen since 2023.
Oil remains elevated as well. Brent is around $109 a barrel, up about 4%, while WTI is around $104, up more than 3%.
So right now, you've got higher volatility, the 10 year at around 5%, oil above $100, and continued pressure on AI stocks, all setting the tone here this morning.
Johny Fernandez: All right, Mark. So we're also seeing chipmakers take a hit as AI leaders warn on safety. So with Anthropic leading the charge in terms of these calls, do prediction market traders reshuffle any of their AI race predictions?
Mark Payton: Yeah, this is an interesting one, especially considering what we're seeing in AI stocks today.
So on Polymarket, Anthropic is the clear favorite at about 70%, followed by OpenAI at 14%, Google at 10%, and xAI at about 4%.
And this isn't just a popularity contest. The market will ultimately be settled using the Chatbot Arena LLM Leaderboard on December 31st, but the odds themselves, they come from traders putting money behind which company they think will be number one.
And what makes the timing really interesting is that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is one of the people calling for a slowdown in the development of advanced AI models over safety concerns that we've been talking about all day, and we're seeing the market reaction today.
Nvidia is down more than 3%, with AMD, Intel and Marvell all seeing even steeper declines.
So despite all the uncertainty surrounding AI today, prediction market traders are making a pretty strong call right now. Anthropic is the company they expect to be leading the AI model race at the end of the year.
Johny Fernandez: Mark, it's definitely going to be interesting to see how this plays out for the rest of the week. Again, Mark Payton live from the floor of Cboe. Thanks for joining us.
Mark Payton: Thank you.
