Hey Snackers,
If you wore pajamas on the plane during your Thanksgiving travels, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy might have some thoughts on your outfit. Last week, the US Department of Transportation rolled out a civility campaign called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” a nationwide push to restore old-school travel etiquette. In an interview with Fox Business, Duffy urged travelers to not wear pajamas and slippers at airports, saying, “People dress up like they’re going to bed when they fly.”
All major US indexes closed higher on Friday amid thin trading volume. Stocks seemed unaffected by an outage at CME caused by a cooling issue at a Chicago-area data center. The S&P 500 and Russell 2000 ended essentially flat for the month of November, while the Nasdaq 100 dipped 1.6% for the month.
See how well you digested last week’s news with our Snacks Seven Quiz. Here’s the first question:
What is the best-performing stock in the Magnificent 7 this year?
Check your answer.
Companies linked up with Google’s AI business are mooning. Everyone else wants to get off OpenAI’s wild ride
The TL;DR trade within AI has recently been “long Google and its supply chain partners, short anything closely affiliated with OpenAI.” The Google ecosystem has been booming, while key OpenAI suppliers and investors have been languishing.
Early last week, a high-profile relationship with OpenAI was a millstone around your neck. The ChatGPT maker seemingly getting smoked by Google’s Gemini 3 while burning a lot of cash, with no end to the red ink in sight, made for a bad look for many of its allies.
SoftBank is a useful way to express a view on how OpenAI is doing because the Masayoshi Son-led firm is poised to own about 11% of the company. In the month of November, the stock fell 40%.Â
Microsoft has a tighter partnership with and bigger equity position in OpenAI than SoftBank. On the plus side, it’s also a successful company in its own right, but that didn’t stop some pain early last week.
Oracle’s stock peaked after it was revealed it had cut a $300 billion deal with OpenAI. More recently, credit default swaps tied to Oracle’s debt have also widened significantly, as the company’s infrastructure build-out is launching to fulfill demand from OpenAI, a customer that’s considered to be significantly less creditworthy.
On Wednesday, at least, they got a little relief, as the Nvidia-CoreWeave-Oracle-AMD coterie of OpenAI-linked stocks did better. In what’s very positive for markets on the whole, outperformance of the OpenAI-linked cohort rather than intense pain for the Google group means that everybody’s ships rise a bit.
The Takeaway
OpenAI has been scrambling to figure out how to generate enough steady revenue to turn the expensive AI services it offers into profits, as it spends dizzying sums on the infrastructure needed to scale its business (or at least, convinces its partners to shoulder debt on its behalf) to meet the expected demand. It has done a very good job of lashing together a raft of public companies in its quest to dominate what is hoped by Wall Street to be a remarkably lucrative business.Â
But just because it’s assembled a coalition of the shilling around the AI trend doesn’t mean it’s immune to competition, and Alphabet seems by far the strongest contender it’s up against.
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Storie's We're Obsessed With
Last Tuesday, the parent company of the coastal-inspired mall staple, Abercrombie & Fitch, reported earnings that crushed expectations and sent shares soaring, with Hollister’s growth cementing its position, once again, as the prize item in Abercrombie’s closet. Read how Hollister secured its status as the “number 1 apparel brand for female teens, disrupting Nike’s dominance,” per a Piper Sandler survey from earlier this year, and plans to capitalize on the nostalgia-driven appetite for all things 2000s with a new noughties-tinged Taco Bell collab.
Nvidia can’t sell its best AI chips in the world’s second-largest economy. That’s an Nvidia problem. But it’s also a China problem — and it’s one that the region’s tech giants have resorted to solving by training their AI models overseas in data centers across Southeast Asia, the Financial Times reports.
The Best Thing We Read Today
The idiot’s guide to AI jargon
We built a glossary of AI-adjacent vocab for words and phrases that have gone modestly viral at the various peaks and troughs of the hype cycle this year. We hope it will empower you to be more artificially intelligent yourself. Read more.
Snacks Shots
🏛️ Fed rate: After a bunch of uncertainty in mid-November, the odds are back in favor of the Fed cutting rates by 25 basis points at its meeting in December, with prediction markets* pricing in an 85% chance of a cut to that effect and a 15% chance that the rate holds.
đź“Š S&P 500: Right now prediction markets are pricing in a 36% probability that the S&P 500 finishes the year between 6,800 and 6,999. There’s still a shot at a more bullish end to the year, with the market giving a 28% chance of a finish between 7,000 and 7,199.Â
🎬 Golden Globes: With just a week to go until the nominees for the Golden Globes are announced, several movies are entering December with lots of momentum in the top categories. “Hamnet” (96%), “Sinners” (95%), and “Sentimental Value” (93%) are all considered essentially locks to bag a nomination in Best Motion Picture Drama category, while “One Battle After Another (99%)” and “Marty Supreme” (95%) are both looking like shoe-ins for the Musical or Comedy category.
*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
What Else We're Snackin'
Hedge fund manager turned Substacker Michael Burry published nostalgic tweets from his time spent betting on the success of GameStop
2025’s biggest movies are family-friendly PG flicks and R-rated horrors
Alibaba launched its first consumer-ready, AI-powered smart glasses last Thursday, taking on Meta directly in the wearables race
Apple beat Samsung in smartphone shipments for the first time in 14 years
According to CEO Elon Musk, Tesla’s Austin Robotaxi fleet will “roughly double” next month, which would put its vehicle total at… 58?
Snack Fact Of The Day
Gen Zers’ holiday spending this year is expected to fall 23%.
This Week's Earnings
Earnings expected from MongoDB
Earnings expected from Marvell Technology, CrowdStrike, and American Eagle Outfitters
Earnings expected from Salesforce, Dollar Tree, Macy’s, Snowflake, and Five Below
Earnings expected from Kroger, Dollar General, Ulta, and HPEÂ
Earnings expected from Victoria’s SecretÂ
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