markets

Luke Kawa2/28/25

A positive Friday? S&P 500 looks to snap Trump 2.0 market trend

With the S&P 500 flipping from early losses to a 0.5% advance on Friday, one of the Trump 2.0 market patterns may now be snapped.

TGIF has not been a phrase traders have been uttering this year. Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the S&P 500 has traded down on every Friday. It’s been the worst session of the week over this period.

One would be tempted to point to price action like this as screaming “policy risk” — the idea that traders might take some chips off the table on Friday, fearing that potential measures taken by the new administration (particularly related to trade) could be negative for stocks. This kind of trading pattern often shows up during times of particularly high geopolitical tensions.

However, while there have been many plans to impose tariffs, there hasn’t been much follow-through yet. And if this were the story, we’d expect to see down Fridays and positive Mondays, a relief rally as the weekend concerns are unwound. This hasn’t been the case.

But Mondays, of course, are somewhat skewed by having a very low sample, even considering this short time frame (just four sessions since the inauguration, thanks to holidays), and January 27, the day of the DeepSeek-induced market freak-out, having fallen on a Monday.

This weekly trading pattern has not gone unnoticed, and as can be common with market trends or coincidences, just as they start to be more commonly appreciated, they stop working.

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Tasha Matsumoto

Tech drags down stocks; gold and silver plummet

Gold and silver sank amid Trump’s plans to nominate reputed inflation hawk Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair.

Public sculptures along the Clear Creek Trail in downtown Golden, Colorado.

Ben Walsh, Luke Kawa11h

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, gold’s dip was relatively muted compared to silver’s rout, but nevertheless eye-watering for a traditional safe haven asset. At one point, gold’s intraday dip exceeded 10%, its worst intraday drop since the 1980s and surpassing its declines seen during the 2008 financial crisis, per Bloomberg.

Silver’s 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 dollar’s 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).

Max Knoblauch15h

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%.

Collision 2019 - Day One

D-Wave Quantum CEO on what’s next after the most eventful month in the company’s history

“If 2025 was the international year of quantum, 2026 is the international year of D-Wave Quantum,” said CEO Dr. Alan Baratz.

markets

Matt Phillips17h

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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