Neocloud selloff shock! Basket returns -35.6%

The whole group fell, and the market did not

Neocloud stocks had an ugly stretch. These are the companies that rent out AI computing power to other businesses. We lined up an equal-weight basket of them against a broad market benchmark. The basket holds 2 stocks, so it is a small sample, not the whole industry. Over the recent short window the basket returned -35.6%. The benchmark returned -1.5% in the same window. The difference, -34.1%, is the part the group lost on top of the market.

That gap is the thing to hold on to. The market was close to flat. The group was not. My reading is that when a group moves this far away from the benchmark, investors are repricing something specific to that group, and the talk in this case has been about borrowing. Prices on their own cannot prove that.

Inside the group, the losses were not shared equally

Zoom out to the longer window and the picture softens a little. The basket returned -21.2% over the longer window. The benchmark returned 2.7% over the same stretch. So the group handed back ground while the market inched ahead.

The members did not fall together, though. Nebius Group returned -15.8% over the longer window. CoreWeave returned -26.6%. Same business idea, very different numbers. The spread between members, a cross-member standard deviation, was 5.4% over the longer window, which is a plain way of saying the names drifted apart.

We also wanted the building side of the story, how much of each company's revenue goes into new data centres, but those company financials are not available here. So this note stays with prices.

Around the news day, both names trailed the market

Now narrow the lens to the days around the news. Abnormal return is the leftover part of a stock's move once you subtract what the market did on the same day. Only 2 stocks are measured here. The median abnormal return from day zero was -6.6%.

Nebius Group's abnormal return was -3.7%. CoreWeave's was -9.5%. Both trailed the market in the same window as the debt headlines. That is co-movement and nothing more; no figure here tests whether the news moved the prices. Note too that these price series run through the last available trading day, 23 October 2026, so a later quarterly report is not in them.

On the business itself, Nebius' founder and chief executive told an investor conference that the company uses 「those big contracts to help finance our main part and to build our independent part, our cloud part」.