Market Close: Stocks Higher, Apple at Record, Cheap Airfares May Be Scarce • 11/11/26

0:00See NBC Business News Update Market Close. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street opens Thursday morning after a pop Wednesday for the major averages and a record high for shares of Apple. CoreWeave shares soared up 24 percent on Wednesday, lifting AI and neocloud stocks. The Dow up 254 points, a half percent. Caterpillar shares led it higher. They were up almost 3 percent. The S &P 500 index added 98 points. That was 1.3 percent. The Nasdaq up 400 points, 1.5 percent. Mad Money host Jim Cramer has a thought on Wednesday's gains. We all see what's going on with Anthropic and we say to ourselves, wait a second.

0:43Did we oversell these stocks off the blue wave? Did we oversell them off of the prurient problems of Jensen Wang? Has the group come back to a level where it's the cheapest it's been in many, many years? And I think the answer is yes. And I think that that's why you're having a rally. NVIDIA shares were up almost 3 % Wednesday. CEO Jensen Wang back in the office after admitting the extramarital affair with what the government believes is a female Chinese spy. Former FBI agent Robin Peek specialized in catching spies on U.S. soil. And he says the CEO wasn't really the target. was probably President Trump.

1:20A lot of people have been saying this is a honeypot or a typical thing we see in like a James Bond movie, but it's really not. You know, when we're talking about espionage at these higher levels, we're talking about soft influence campaigns and they're very common because what the Chinese do, they flood the zone with access points. It's influence because when we're dealing with executives at Wong's level, you know, these are not the guys that are actually going to hand over the classified chips or the proprietary information to the other engineers. They're going after the people that have access to policymakers like Trump or like others that are actually going to deal with businesses and nation states.

1:55The Jensen-Wong NVIDIA scandal is highlighting his ownership of shares and whether the CEO's wife could divorce him, sell her shares and depress the stock price for everybody. Here's CNBC's Robert Frank. You know, there are all these stories that say, you know, and we hope their marriage stays together and he can work through this. There are all these stories that she could get half. She already owns it. And the good news for NVIDIA shareholders is for many of these irrevocable trusts, it's the trust that owns the shares. So the likelihood or possibility that, let's say there's a split, she gets the share, she sells them, that depresses the price, that can't really happen or it's going to be difficult for that to happen because it's the trust that owns these shares.

2:40Would-be homebuyers pulled the trigger and applied for mortgages last week. the biggest weekly increase since last April. They were excited by a drop in mortgage rates from 7.6 down to 7.3%. The average rate on a 30-year fixed home loan is 7.3 % on Wednesday, according to Mortgage News Daily. JetBlue unveiled its first Blue First domestic first-class cabinet at Kennedy Airport ahead of its first revenue flights in December. This is JetBlue's CEO Joanna Garrity with CNBC's Phil LeBeau. What do you expect fares to do when jet fuel finally breaks and it falls down meaningfully? Yeah, I don't think fares are going to fall as much as people expect because we actually haven't been covering our operating costs to begin with even before fuel started to rise.

3:26That said, there are days where we have tremendously strong fares. It's still cheaper to fly to Florida at points in December and January from New York than it is to take an Uber from lower Manhattan. So, you know, I think airfare remains a great, great value. Meantime United Airlines moving to block AI agents from its platform, citing security concerns. The agents can find the cheapest fare for you and book a flight. On Thursday's watch list, we get earnings from Applied Materials, Cerebris, and Palo Alto networks. Jessica Ettinger, CNBC. Traders don't need a prettier app. They need a better angle.

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