Meta to Acquire Startup Manus; Tesla Rebounds; Natural Gas Rises

On this episode of Stock Movers:

- Shares of Meta (META) fluctuated in early trading after the company agreed to buy Manus, a popular Singapore-based artificial intelligence agent with Chinese roots, in its effort to build a business around its massive AI investment. The deal values Manus at more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. It marks a rare US acquisition of an Asian tech company and the latest multibillion-dollar AI bet from Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. Meta intends to continue operating and selling the Manus service while also integrating it into its products, it said in a statement. Backed by some of China’s biggest names like Tencent Holdings Ltd., ZhenFund and HSG, Manus shot to prominence early this year not long after DeepSeek’s debut.

- Shares of Tesla (TSLA) rebounded in the premarket session after the company published a compilation of analyst estimates for vehicle deliveries to its website, with averages for the current quarter more pessimistic than those gathered by Bloomberg. By Tesla’s count, analysts on average expect the company to deliver 422,850 cars in the fourth quarter, down 15% from a year earlier. That compares with a Bloomberg-compiled average of 445,061 vehicles, a 10% drop.

-One-month at-the-money implied volatility in EQT Corp. rose to 33.1% from 31.8%.Three-month implied volatility is in the 23rd percentile for the last 12 months. The shares were up 1.3%, within 1 standard deviation of the 20-day moving average. Combination of a large increase in implied volatility and a relatively small move in the underlying stock took place 18 times since Dec. 28, 2022. Stock rose 0.1% on average in the next trading session. The put-call volume ratio in the company's options is 5.65, compared with the average over the past year of 0.88. The three-month 90-110 skew is 1.94 (a high skew value indicates more demand for downside protection versus demand for upside participation).

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