Tech stocks slide as Chinese equities enter bear market

Stock markets fell sharply on Thursday, with technology shares leading the decline as sellers dominated early trading. Futures dropped, Asian markets closed deep in the red, and Europe traded broadly lower, while China's benchmark CSI 300 entered bear market territory with a 20% drop from its June peak. Tesla shares fell despite better-than-expected third-quarter results, weighed down by lower average car prices, a battery supply crunch, and Elon Musk's warning that the Robotaxi fleet would not "move the needle" this quarter. Meta also turned negative in premarket trading after an initial rally on its sales beat, while chip stocks and neocloud firms like CoreWeave and Nebius faced renewed selling pressure. Oil prices rose amid reports of U.S.-Israeli plans for renewed strikes on Iran after the midterms, and the State Department ordered non-emergency employees to leave Saudi Arabia. Separately, governments worldwide took websites offline after security flaws were discovered in PHP, an open-source programming language, with Google, OpenAI, and Amazon involved in uncovering the vulnerabilities.