Usually bears are a bad sign for markets, but Starbucks customers are bullish for bears — the limited-edition “Bearista” tumbler, to be specific. People are literally fighting to get their hands on one, and demand for the beanie-clad bear was so overbearing, the company had to issue an apology. On one hand, it’s an unbearably funny tale of TikTok trends going too far, but on the other, the insanity over a $30 coffee cup tells you everything you need to know about the US economy and markets.
November may be historically the best month for US stocks, but you wouldn’t know it from the start of the one in 2025. US consumer sentiment sank to near historic lows during the ongoing shutdown, and the general mood of the markets was decidedly risk off.
The rough goings were highlighted by the company at the center of the AI trade, Nvidia, suffering its worst week since April 18, dragging down a cohort of tech stocks with it, and retail traders “skipping the dip” by selling single stocks amid the downturn.
The good news: after big declines in the morning, stocks staged a massive comeback in the afternoon on Friday to end well off session lows, with the S&P 500 inching into positive territory by market close. The Russell 2000 also clawed back losses to end in the green, while the Nasdaq 100 still finished last week slightly down.
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Jensen Huang continues to talk about the one thing going wrong for Nvidia, and investors sure seem to hate that
Last week was rough for Nvidia in no small part because CEO Jensen Huang continued to talk about perhaps the one thing that isn’t going well for the $4 trillion company: China.
The chip designer dropped more than 9% in the middlelast threefour days of the week, its biggest such tumble since April 7, the three sessions that followed President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcements on April 2.
“Currently, we are not planning to ship anything to China,” Huang said on Friday while in Taiwan, per Reuters. As it relates to Blackwell chips, this is the equivalent of us saying that we have no plans to ship raw elephant ivory tusks to Canada. For starters, we don’t have any, and secondly, it wouldn’t be legal.
On the H20 side, China simply does not want the nerfed chips; or more precisely, policymakers are not allowing their tech champions to act upon any potential desire to get their hands on those GPUs. As Huang noted, the ball is in China’s court here.
It’s not clear that analysts were ever expecting much of a pickup in Nvidia’s China business, even after export restrictions on the H20 were lifted.
Huang also further watered down his stance on the state of the AI race after the Financial Times reported that he said, “China is going to win the AI race,” earlier this week.
The Takeaway
Reading between the lines here, the key bit are the facts that were left unsaid at the end of that remark: “China is going to win the AI race” — without having access to Nvidia’s flagship processors, or even wanting its nerfed chips.
Not exactly a signal that Nvidia’s hardware is as all-important and synonymous with success in AI as its stock price and revenue trajectory would suggest it is!
Not to get too deep into the sausage-making process of news here, but when an outlet as credible and prestigious as the FT is putting quotes around words and attributing them to the leader of the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, one personally feels fairly confident that those words were actually said.
“That’s not what I said,” Huang said, per Reuters. “What I said was that China has very good AI technology. They have many AI researchers.” Sure thing, boss. After all, it’s Nvidia’s economy — we’re just living in it.
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Stories we’re obsessed with
D-Wave CEO’s bold pitch for the Trump administration: D-Wave Quantum is among the multiple quantum computing companies stacking up piles of cash, but its CEO, Dr. Alan Baratz, has bigger ambitions. He talked with Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa, who asked if the company is pursuing the US government amassing an equity position. Baratz said that he doesn’t “think it’s the best use of the taxpayer money” to “fund R&D,” but wants the US to “purchase some of our quantum computers to use them in solving their hard defense problems” and proposes they get “some equity as a part of that deal.” Read the full interview.
The wildest stuff Elon Musk said at Tesla’s shareholder meeting: Where else does a man, just awarded a $1 trillion pay package, come onstage to dancing robots? Musk said as much himself: “Other shareholder meetings are like snoozefests. This is sick. We get this cyberpunk nightclub here with real robots just standing there and milling around and dancing.” Sherwood’s Rani Molla listened to the whole thing and gave us the highlights.
The Best Thing We Read Today
Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea
While massive data centers on land are the focus of the industry right now, and space-based internet is scaling up, undersea fiber is still the most crucial part of tech companies’ infrastructure for global computing today, as they handle 99% of all international network traffic.
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Snack Shots
🏈 NFL: Tonight the Philadelphia Eagles are in Green Bay, with the Packers favored by a hair, coming in with a 53% chance of victory in what’s poised to be a great matchup between two teams that are serious contenders to win the conference.
📰 Person of the Year: About a month is left on the clock for TIME Magazine’s person of the year, and right now the market’s pricing in a 41% chance of the magazine copping out and just saying it’s “AI.” In terms of contenders with blood in their veins, traders think that the new head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV, has the best shot of a win, with the market giving the pontiff a 15% chance of being tipped for the cover.
🚘 Waymo: The market is shifting very fast on how many cities Google’s Waymo will be operating in by the end of the year. The self-driving car company spent last week riding out a crisis in San Francisco after one car struck a cat, and ire arose around the inability of its cars to avoid animals as well as people. Fears that one of the five cities it’s currently operating in might suspend the tech and stop testing the cars appear to be subsiding.
*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
What Else We're Snackin'
Hollywood is developing a film adaptation of the wildly popular Roblox gardening sim created by a 16-year-old
Half of new US companies disappear within five years — and only one in three makes it to year 10
Don’t worry, be happy? Target tells workers to smile, wave, and greet shoppers if they come within 10 feet of them
Snack Fact Of The Day
The US Army will reportedly buy 1 million drones.
This Week's Events
Earnings expected from CoreWeave, Rigetti Computing, Rocket Lab, Occidental Petroleum, and Plug Power
Earnings expected from Nebius Group, Oklo, and Beyond Meat
Earnings expected from On Holding and Cisco
Earnings expected from Disney, JD.com, Applied Materials, and Virgin Galactic
Earnings expected from Sony Group
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