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Investing.com – Saudi Arabia stocks were lower after the close on Tuesday, as losses in the Insurance, Hotels & Tourism and Media & Publishing sectors led shares lower.

At the close in Saudi Arabia, the Tadawul All Share declined 1.30% to hit a new 3-months low.

The best performers of the session on the Tadawul All Share were SNB Capital Funds of REITs Fund Unit (TADAWUL:4338), which rose 4.15% or 0.26 points to trade at 6.52 at the close. Meanwhile, Dar Alarkan Real Estate Development (TADAWUL:4300) added 3.47% or 0.53 points to end at 15.80 and Arabian Drilling Co (TADAWUL:2381) was up 1.53% or 1.45 points to 96.35 in late trade.

The worst performers of the session were CHUBB Arabia Cooperative Insurance (TADAWUL:8240), which fell 5.40% or 1.18 points to trade at 20.66 at the close. Rabigh Refining & Petrochemical Co (TADAWUL:2380) declined 4.76% or 0.35 points to end at 7.00 and Abdullah Saad Mohammed Abo Moati Stationeries Co (TADAWUL:4191) was down 4.23% or 1.82 points to 41.18.

Falling stocks outnumbered advancing ones on the Saudi Arabia Stock Exchange by 286 to 49 and 16 ended unchanged.

Shares in CHUBB Arabia Cooperative Insurance (TADAWUL:8240) fell to 52-week lows; falling 5.40% or 1.18 to 20.66.

Crude oil for February delivery was down 1.54% or 0.87 to $55.80 a barrel. Elsewhere in commodities trading, Brent oil for delivery in February fell 1.47% or 0.89 to hit $59.67 a barrel, while the February Gold Futures contract fell 0.31% or 13.50 to trade at $4,321.70 a troy ounce.

EUR/SAR was unchanged 0.07% to 4.41, while USD/SAR unchanged 0.04% to 3.75.

The US Dollar Index Futures was down 0.20% at 97.76.

Investing.com -- Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) has earned an Outperform rating from brokerage firm Raymond James, which argues that the stock’s trajectory will hinge on how a set of core strategic and financial debates plays out over the coming years.

Analyst Adam Tindle sees Snowflake at an inflection point as it evolves from a cloud data warehouse into a broader data and AI platform, with long-term growth and margin durability still under scrutiny.

He trimmed the stock target price to $250 from $274. 

In the note, Tindle highlighted "five key debates that will likely drive Snowflake’s stock over the next several years, tied directly to the company’s financial model."

1) AI monetization: Can product innovation turn into revenue? 

Tindle points to Snowflake’s expanding AI portfolio, which has already surpassed a $100 million AI revenue run-rate. The key question is whether these tools can meaningfully lift consumption and strengthen competitive positioning.

Investor focus is on how much AI contributes to product growth and whether margins can hold up as GPU usage increases. 

2) Platform convergence: Expanding wallet share as workloads consolidate

Snowflake is pushing to unify structured, semi-structured, unstructured and transactional workloads, while also enabling application development through Snowpark and container services. This strategy puts it in more direct competition with Databricks, Tindle said.

The analyst highlights net revenue retention, Global 2000 penetration and attach rates for new workloads as the metrics that will determine whether Snowflake can successfully expand wallet share.

3) Consumption elasticity: Re-acceleration or normalization?

Because Snowflake runs on a usage-based model, growth remains sensitive to customer optimization cycles, Tindle noted. The company has invested in automation and cost-governance tools, but questions remain about visibility into durable usage growth.

Analysts flag remaining performance obligations, free cash flow margins and credit-consumption efficiency as key areas of investor focus. 

4) Open formats and interoperability: Catalyst or moat dilution?

By embracing Apache Iceberg and launching the Polaris Catalog, Snowflake has lowered barriers to adoption in open data ecosystems. While this can support customer acquisition, it also reduces lock-in, Tindle said.

He believes key investor debates will center on customer acquisition versus churn, shifts in the storage revenue mix, and whether greater interoperability translates into incremental compute consumption.

5) Hyperscaler dynamics: Partner or long-term margin headwind?

Snowflake’s economics are closely tied to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. As those providers advance their own data and AI platforms, the company must balance partnership benefits against competitive and pricing risks, Tindle explained.

Investors are watching vendor mix, operating margins and multi-cloud adoption to assess whether Snowflake can sustain differentiation without sacrificing profitability.

Investing.com -- In a note to clients on Tuesday, Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya named six large-cap stocks he believes are best positioned to outperform as spending on AI infrastructure accelerates.

In a 2026 outlook, BofA said it expects next year to mark the “mid-point of an 8-10 year journey of upgrading traditional IT infra for accelerated and AI workloads,” even as greater scrutiny of AI returns could keep share prices volatile. 

Still, the bank forecasts “another ~30% growth towards the first $1tn for semiconductor sales” in 2026, supported by “nearly double-digit YoY wafer fab equipment sales growth,” according to BofA.

Against that backdrop, Arya named Nvidia, Broadcom, Lam Research, KLA, Analog Devices and Cadence Design Systems as its “Top 6 for ’26,” citing “quality and sector leadership.” 

BofA stated that its top picks are designed to capture demand across AI accelerators, advanced packaging, memory, and design software.

The bank remains constructive on AI-focused names, describing the race as “still in early/mid stages,” and forecasting “another year of solid 50%+ YoY growth in AI semis driven by strong data center utilization, tight supply, enterprise adoption and race between LLM-builders, hyperscale and sovereign customers.” 

Nvidia, which BofA called the sector leader, is seen trading at compelling valuation multiples relative to growth, while Broadcom is favored for its exposure to custom AI silicon.

The firm is also bullish on semiconductor equipment, with BofA forecasting continued growth driven by “fab upgrades to support high-bandwidth memory, higher layer count NAND, leading-edge logic and advanced packaging.”