The stock market experienced a turbulent beginning to September, yet Evercore ISI suggests investors can capitalize on a specific category of stocks that historically move in the opposite direction of the overall market to help mitigate volatility. Traders have recently expressed concerns about how climbing oil prices might impact inflation. On Wednesday, however, the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, and Dow Jones Industrial Average broke a three-day losing streak that was partly fueled by elevated bond yields. “Acquiring Negative Beta stocks assists a long-term focused portfolio in ‘weathering’ volatility events,” wrote Evercore ISI strategists led by Julian Emanuel on Monday, highlighting risks spanning interest rates, geopolitics, and the midterm elections as potential triggers for increased volatility in September. Evercore ISI conducted a screening to identify “negative beta” stocks, which are S&P 500 components whose daily movements over the past six months have typically run counter to the broader index. The September list included 115 stocks, down from 121 in August, and from these, the firm narrowed it down to the top 20. Evercore’s 20 stocks with the most negative betas Financials, utilities, consumer staples, and energy represented nearly 70% of the stocks that rose to the top. Evercore ISI links energy stocks to oil price fluctuations, describing the sector as a “synthetic S&P 500 put option” due to geopolitical pressures on the broader market. Occidental Petroleum stands out in the screening. The oil and gas producer has a six-month beta of negative 1.23, the fourth-most negative among the 20 stocks Evercore highlighted. Analyst Stephen Richardson rates Occidental outperform. Houston-based Occidental recently released strong second-quarter results, reporting $3 billion of free cash flow before working capital from continuing operations, the highest since the third quarter of 2022. The company reduced its debt by $1.9 billion to $11.8 billion during the quarter. Chevron had a beta of -0.90 and carries an outperform rating from Richardson. The oil major announced Wednesday it plans to more than double its production in Venezuela over the next five years through a $7 billion investment, increasing daily production to 600,000 barrels a day by 2031, from the current 280,000 bpd. Defensive consumer staples stocks mentioned by Evercore ISI included supermarket chain Kroger and tobacco maker Altria.

BEIJING — A popular new programmable personal robot from a French-American company is powered by a chip from Shanghai-listed Rockchip which in turn uses British company ARM’s tech, reflecting how intertwined global tech supply chains remain.

The colorful “Microduck” robot from Hugging Face’s French subsidiary Pollen Robotics has sold more than 10,000 units since its launch on Thursday, with sales surpassing $5 million as of late Tuesday, according to Hugging Face.

That level of demand for the robot has quickly delayed delivery times for new orders past the initial promise of Christmas 2026.

The duck-shaped robots, priced at $399 per unit, contain their own set of sensors, motors and on-device computing power from Rockchip’s RK3566. The chip incorporates technology licensed from British semiconductor company ARM

The Chinese company is a “key vendor” for AI that operates on devices, rather than in the cloud, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. He noted the company’s chips are commonly used for machine vision involving object detection and image recognition.

“While it has massive footprint, the company chips are not designed for complex edge AI devices as they lack the compute resources,” Su said. Such computing capabilities can allow smartphones, robots and other electronic devices to run generative AI tools securely without sharing data on the internet.

Rockchip last month reported a 40% year-on-year increase in operating revenue in the first half of the year to 2.88 billion yuan ($428 million), while net profit excluding one-time items surged by more than 60%.

The 1.76 pound (800g) Microduck is both an interactive consumer toy and a development platform. Using open-source software, it can supposedly learn from virtual simulations and goal-driven directions.

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The product is the second robot from France-based startup Pollen Robotics, which was acquired by Hugging Face last year. The first robot by Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics, launched last spring, sold more than 10,000 units, Pollen Robotics said.

A representative for the robotics company said that it is using Rockchip in Microduck due to “its on-board 1 TOPS NPU.” TOPS, or tera operations per second, is a measure of AI computing performance. Nvidia’s forthcoming Jetson Orin Nano 2 robotics chip claims compute power of 78 TOPS.

Just before Microduck’s release, The Information reported that Nvidia

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said in a social media post Monday that people were starting to monitor the Microduck supply chain, as the company sees a strong rush for orders.

Other companies are rolling out similar personal robots at premium-end consumer prices.

Startup Zeroth this summer launched a child-sized humanoid robot for 8,888 yuan that claims to offer similar virtual simulation learning capabilities. It lists 247 pre-orders on JD.com in China. The company plans to reveal its open source robotics system on Wednesday.

Meanwhile a Wall-E-type cameraman robot from Mondo Robotics has raised more than 80 times its initial goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter ahead of the Sept. 6 deadline. Early bird prices for the device, which resembles a GoPro on wheels, start at $549, with shipping scheduled to begin in October.

—Verum’s April Roach and Kai Nicol-Schwarz contributed to this report.

Government bonds experienced widespread selling pressure globally on Wednesday, continuing a downturn that has pushed borrowing costs to their highest levels in decades.

The yield on German 10-year bunds

The 10-year Treasury yield

Yields rise when bond prices fall.

Global bonds face mounting pressure

Investors have become unsettled by the return of inflationary forces, especially as a new wave of tension in the Middle East fuels oil price increases.

At the same time, central banks worldwide are expected to implement multiple interest rate increases this month, which typically weigh on bond markets. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh signaled a hawkish stance in his highly anticipated remarks at Jackson Hole last week, while the Bank of Japan is considering rate hikes to support a weakening yen, and markets are fully anticipating a rate increase from the European Central Bank following Tuesday’s EU inflation data release.

Longer-term debt yields are also climbing

Equity markets have shifted into risk-off territory, with major U.S. indices declining for three consecutive sessions, and European and Asian markets also trading lower. This follows robust gains earlier in the year, with numerous stock markets reaching record highs as enthusiasm surrounding the AI surge persists, despite geopolitical volatility.

“The foundational assumptions in markets are a bit more unstable than they’ve been,” George Maris, chief investment officer and global head of equities at Principal Asset Management, stated to Verum’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Wednesday.

“And as the cost of capital, the cost of risk, increases, that’s precisely what we’re witnessing with the global uptick in yields across the board.”

“You examine debt levels worldwide that have reached extraordinary heights and are continuing to climb. The remedies for addressing this do not appear easily accessible… I don’t perceive political readiness to confront this issue anywhere. I believe that’s a concern,” Maris further noted.

“I think the reality that this is unfolding during a phase of solid global economic expansion, where debt levels are rising, indicates we’re now in a more vulnerable position in the event of any disruption.”