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The market's love-hate relationship with new CEOs

This year has seen a pick-up in CEO turnover, but the market doesn't react to all of these changes in the same way.

On Thursday, after the market closed, Nike announced that its embattled CEO John Donahoe would step down from his role. He will be replaced by Elliott Hill, a long-time company veteran and former employees’ preferred pick.

The market seemed to love this announcement: Nike’s stock was up more than 6% on Friday, after declining more than 20% so far this year. 

Through July, 1,250 CEOs of US companies have announced their departures, according to data compiled by executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas. That’s the highest number of CEO exits in the first seven months of any year based on data going back to 2015.

Among these shifts was some high-profile turnover in the C-Suite, including Nike, Starbucks’ Brian Niccol and Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg. In some of these cases, there was a bigger market reaciton than others: On Aug. 13, the first trading session after news broke that Niccol would replace Laxman Narasimhan as CEO, shares of Starbucks gained 24.5%. It turned out that Niccol has brought Starbucks more than $21 billion in market value. 

In other cases this year, however, the market was rather muted on news of a CEO switch. For instance, shares rose 2% when Boeing said that Ortberg would step up as CEO during an earnings call after former CEO Dave Calhoun announced his retirement earlier in the year.

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Gold and silver plunge, suffering their worst losses since the 1980s

Gold and silver suffered their worst losses in decades on Friday, with the iShares Silver Trust falling more than 30% at one point during afternoon trading before recovering slightly.

After recently crossing $5,000 per ounce for the first time, golds dip was relatively muted compared to silvers rout, but nevertheless eye-watering for a traditional safe haven asset. At one point, golds intraday dip exceeded 10%, its worst intraday drop since the 1980s and surpassing its declines seen during the 2008 financial crisis, per Bloomberg.

Silvers drop was its worst in percentage terms since 1980.

Gold, and particularly silver, have been pushed higher recently by a storm of retail trader enthusiasm for the metals, as well as more traditional drivers of precious metals such as geopolitical risks and concerns over a fall in the dollars value due to trade wars and possibly waning central bank independence.

Leveraged ETFs that hold gold and silver futures have become increasingly popular trading vehicles amid the parabolic moves in precious metals prices, and likely contributed to the magnitude of the unwind today.

Case in point: look at silver futures for delivery in March. That’s the dominant contract held by the ProShares Ultra Silver ETF, which offers exposure to 2x the daily move in the shiny metal. Volumes exploded (and the contract rebounded modestly) right around 1:25 p.m. ET, which is when silver futures settled and around the time the ETF performed its daily rebalancing (which in this case, involved massive selling).

Gaming stocks plunge following release of Google’s AI tool that can create playable, copyrighted worlds

Shares of major gaming companies are plunging on Friday as investors get a deeper look at the capabilities of Google’s new generative-AI prototype, Project Genie.

The tool allows users to “create and explore infinitely diverse worlds” with a text or image prompt. Users have already exposed its ability to realistically recreate knockoffs of copyrighted games from Nintendo and other gaming companies.

As users experiment with recreations of game worlds like Take-Two’s “Grand Theft Auto 6,” shares of major gaming companies are sinking. Unity Software, the maker of the popular Unity game engine, is down over 25%, while gaming platform Roblox is down about 9%.

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SoFi bests Wall Street’s Q4 expectations, shares rise

SoFi Technologies reported better-than-expected Q4 sales and earnings-per-share numbers Friday before market open, sending the shares higher in the premarket. 

The online lender reported: 

  • Adjusted Q4 earnings per share of $0.13 vs. the $0.12 consensus estimate collected by FactSet.

  • Adjusted revenue of $1.01 billion in Q4 vs. the Wall Street forecast for $977.4 million.

  • Q1 2026 adjusted net revenue guidance of approximately $1.04 billion vs. the $1.04 billion consensus expectation, according to FactSet.

SoFi shares rallied roughly 70% last year, as the company’s growing menu of financial products — including trading, wealth management, mortgages, credit cards, and cryptocurrency trading — showed signs of gaining traction beyond its traditional base of student borrowers. But the stock has stumbled in early 2026, falling nearly 7% in January through Thursday’s close, though most of that slump seems to have been reversed this morning.

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