What you missed if you completely disconnected from markets for the holidays
Tons of M&A news, some economic data, and executive actions to boot.
This is the time when a chart of “out of office” auto-replies starts to look like a meme stock rally that’s beginning to roll over.
If you took some well-deserved time off in the past few weeks — the Friday after the Fed meeting has typically served as the unofficial start of the holiday season — and are just settling in to figure out what’s what, here’s a rundown of what you may have missed.
Markets
The S&P 500 posted its final record close of 2025 on December 24 before ending the year with a four-session losing streak that saw the benchmark US stock index slip 1.25%.
Every S&P 500 sector aside from energy declined over this stretch, with consumer discretionary, financials, industrials, and tech underperforming.
Silver went completely parabolic in December to cap off its best year in decades, up nearly 150% in 2025. The shiny metal has retail attention and is a bank-shot play on the energy demands of the AI boom due to its use in solar panels, which is being backed up by signals of strong physical demand. Silver hit an all-time high of $84 per troy ounce as markets reopened last Sunday night, but reversed course to finish sharply lower that Monday.
Micron’s Q1 results affirmed that the hottest stock market real estate is on memory lane. The memory chip specialist showed the AI boom’s continued demand is well ahead of supply, exceeding estimates on the top and bottom line. Management also offered guidance for the current quarter for sales and adjusted earnings per share that were above every analyst’s estimates.
The four top-performing stocks in the S&P 500 in 2025 all had memory ties: Sandisk, Western Digital, the aforementioned Micron, and Seagate Technology Holdings.
Things look different this time for Nvidia’s Chinese sales prospects. Chinese tech companies appear to have a much stronger appetite for the H200 chips that US President Donald Trump recently said would now be allowed to be sold to China, compared to the nerfed H20 chips that were the subject of export restrictions (which were later reversed).
Per Reuters, Nvidia has asked TSMC to boost production of H200 AI chips as Chinese firms have already placed orders for more than 2 million of these chips this year, which could drive more than $54 billion in revenues for Nvidia based on estimated pricing.
The VIX, aka Wall Street’s “fear gauge” (the 30-day implied volatility of the S&P 500 derived from out-of-the-money options prices), hit its lowest level of 2025 on December 24.
The VIX often declines around this time, as the combination of Christmas, New Year’s, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day reduces the amount of trading days — and opportunity for markets to move — over the forward 30 days.
After a very hot rebound following the S&P 500’s intermediate bottom in late November, speculative trades ended the year with a whimper:
A Goldman Sachs basket that tracks nonprofitable tech was down about 9% from December 11 through year-end, retail favorites were off more than 5%, and high-beta momentum longs fell around 7.5%.
Late in the year, Oklo closed below its 200-day moving average for the first time since October 2024, while retail favorite Opendoor Technologies gave up all of the gains it received in the wake of its September leadership overhaul, which saw Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian become its new CEO and cofounders Keith Rabois and Eric Wu added to the board of directors.
That being said, the cohort looks to be kicking off the year on a strong note, with many of the speculative AI stocks trading higher on Friday.
M&A, IPOs, and fundraising
The Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition saga continues. Paramount Skydance bolstered its offer by providing a personal guarantee from Larry Ellison; reports indicate that Warner Bros. Discovery still prefers Netflix’s bid.
Separately, the streaming giant has also refinanced some of its $59 billion bridge loan that it would be using for this transaction. (The winner should really be obliged to make a movie or a short miniseries on this.)
Reports suggest Elon Musk’s SpaceX is on the verge of an IPO that would value the company at roughly $800 billion.
OpenAI’s new fundraising round could see the ChatGPT maker valued at as much as $830 billion.
Nvidia struck a not-an-acquisition-in-name-only deal with AI inference specialist Groq, which will see its founder, president, and other members of the team join the $4 trillion chip designer.
TikTok signed contracts with the three major investors leading the joint venture to take over its US operations, a trio that includes Oracle.
Shares of the cloud computing company soared following this news. Oracle’s five-year credit default swap spreads peaked at 156 basis points on December 17 ahead of this announcement, before falling and trading in a very tight range around 145 bps over the final eight sessions of the year.
Meta agreed to acquire AI startup Manus for a reported more than $2 billion.
SoftBank announced a deal to purchase AI infrastructure company DigitalBridge for about $4 billion.
ServiceNow is buying cybersecurity startup Armis for $7.75 billion in an all-cash deal, the largest acquisition in its history.
The software platform company is leaning more on cybersecurity features to bolster its appeal to customers amid rising AI-fueled vulnerabilities.
Trump Media & Technology Group will also soon be a fusion energy company as part of its combination with TAE Technologies in a $6 billion all-stock deal, which sent shares of the Truth Social owner skyward.
Economic data
The combined release of October and November nonfarm payrolls reports showed the unemployment rate rose by more than anticipated to 4.6% in the 11th month of the year.
This marks the first time since June 2009 that the unemployment rate has risen for four consecutive readings.
Core CPI inflation cooled to just 2.6% year on year in November, while the consensus estimate was for a rise of 3%.
However, some of this deceleration may be overly flattered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ decision to assume key parts of housing inflation were zero in October, based on its inability to collect data due to the government shutdown.
The initial estimate for US third-quarter GDP showed the economy expanded at an annualized rate of 4.3%, well above economists’ estimates for 3.3%.
Much of this better-than-expected showing was attributable to surprisingly strong consumer spending.
Executive actions
Trump signed an executive order on December 18 that directs the Department of Justice to reschedule marijuana as a less dangerous drug. The long-rumored move is poised to result in meaningful tax benefits for US cannabis operators and could also improve institutions’ willingness to invest in these firms.
Elsewhere in drugs: Trump followed this up by announcing more deals with nine major pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug prices for Americans.
On December 23, the Trump administration’s Office of the US Trade Representative indicated that tariffs on imports of Chinese semiconductors would be coming — by mid-2027.
This kicking of the can creates no immediate change to business as usual, similar to how China delayed additional restrictions on rare earth shipments as part of the deal reached between Presidents Xi and Trump following their October meeting.
