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Weekly Roundup

Returns this week were brought to you by early-week record highs powered by AI and rate-cut hopes—and a late-week trade-war shock that flipped it all red.

Oh how we haven’t learned…. does no one remember all of the trade war antics that happened earlier this year? Does no one remember how they tanked the market just for it to recover weeks later? Nothing burgers. We know how this story goesBig threat → Big Market Drop → Nothing Major Happens → Stocks Returns

Remember that “Trade Wars” sell great in the news, but the news doesn’t make its money investing. The media makes its money selling fear or greed. When the sell fear, buy. When they sell greed, sell.

The Nasdaq and S&P 500 notched fresh intraday records as investors leaned into Big Tech and semis. Treasury yields hovered a little above 4.1% on the 10-year and drifted lower midweek, which usually helps growth stocks. Oil spent most of the week around $61–62 a barrel—cheap versus the past couple of years—which eases costs for shippers, airlines, and consumers but can pressure energy company profits. Gold stayed near an all-time high (around $4,000/oz), which tells you some money is still buying insurance against political and economic shocks even while indexes are near highs.

Then Friday hit. A fresh threat of “massive” U.S. tariffs on China sent risk assets into reverse: the Nasdaq dropped about 3.5% on the day, the S&P 500 fell nearly 3%, and the Dow slid close to 2%. When investors fear slower global trade and higher costs, they dump cyclical and mega-cap winners first, buy safer assets, and mark down anything tariff-exposed. You saw what happened: the 10-year yield slipped toward ~4.06% (a safety bid into Treasuries), gold popped, oil sank below $60 as growth worries rose, the dollar eased, and crypto struggled to maintain values.

Now remember what I called out last week! The shift in institutional money to defensives (specifically healthcare). We saw tons of retail investors selling CNC, UNH, MOH, etc… No surprise that they shift to defensives just in time for growth/cyclicals to tumble.

Big Company Moves

Banking got bigger. Fifth Third agreed to buy Comerica in an all-stock deal valuing Comerica at roughly a 20% premium, creating the 9th-largest U.S. bank by assets if regulators sign off. Divestitures are common in big deals like this, and we will likely see the same here.

Chips and AI stayed center stage. AMD ripped higher after OpenAI committed to deploy roughly six gigawatts of AMD GPUs—a huge signal that AI spending is shifting from demos to data-center build-outs. Nvidia grabbed its own headline later in the week with U.S. approval to ship certain AI chips to the UAE as part of a broader investment pact. Taiwan Semi’s September sales jumped more than 30% year over year, another sign the AI parts pipeline is still humming—right up until tariff worries sparked a broad semi sell-off on Friday.

Tesla teased a cheaper Model Y configuration after posting record quarterly deliveries; an attempt to keep volume growing now that a key $7,500 EV incentive has expired. Ford faced a potential material squeeze after a major aluminum supplier’s plant fire—important because modern pickups are aluminum-heavy. Boeing, meanwhile, is preparing to lift 737 MAX production (subject to FAA sign-off), a needed step to refill airline fleets and repair margins.

Deal and policy tape bombs kept coming. HSBC floated a plan to take Hang Seng Bank private, simplifying its Asia structure. Novo Nordisk moved to buy Akero to deepen its metabolic disease pipeline. Microsoft is baking Harvard Health content into Copilot so health answers are sourced and safer. Those same late-day Friday, tariff headlines led the entire market lower: megacap tech, semis, retailers and import-heavy names fell the most; classic “defensives” like consumer staples held up better (Pepsi kept rallying after an earnings beat and a CFO change).

Lot’s of things mentioned above — but a few things really stand out as opportunities to me: NVO’s purchase of Akero, and Pepsi’s movement.

Starting with Novo — their acquisition of AKRO is interesting to me, but could have large potential payoffs. AKRO, while not profitable, holds nearly no debt relative to their cash (36M in debt to 743M in cash). NVO stock is down 52% YoY but revenue growth still looks solid. Things slowed in Q1 of 2025, but seem to be pick up a bit of steam.

Pepsi’s recent moves should come as no surprise. The company owns around 11% of Celsius stock (which has been growing unreasonably quick), and still has very stable revenues, and margins. In fact, net margin even looks to be increasing! I think as/if things continue to shift defensive, PEP will be seen as an undervalued defensive play and will outperform in a bear market.

The End of The Road

Two forces are pulling in opposite directions. On one side, falling—or even just stable—rates and real AI orders are good for profits and valuations. On the other, new tariffs would raise input costs, risk retaliation from China, and could re-ignite inflation just as the Fed inches toward cutting.

That mix explains why gold is elevated (hedge demand), oil is soft (growth worries plus ample supply), and the VIX perked up into the weekend (investors paying for protection).

In the near term, price movements will be driven by 3 things:

* Trade headlines: tariff size, timing (Nov. 1 was floated), and any talk of carve-outs. Bigger, sooner, and broader equals more earnings risk for import-heavy sectors and semis with China exposure.

* Earnings season: banks first (a quick read on loan demand, credit quality, and deposit costs), then megacap tech and chipmakers where guidance will matter more than backward-looking beats.

* Yields: if the 10-year drifts lower, long-duration assets (software, semis, select biotech) can find their footing again; if tariffs push inflation fears up and yields back higher, expect another rotation into defensives and cash-flow compounders.

Like always, the actual path forward is anyone’s guess. I would assume the following going into the end of the year:

* China tariffs = nothing burger

* Rates probably cut this month & yields likely decreasing

Insider Trade Updates

As a side note, I try to stay away from insiders buying up their penny stock company. While these can still be great signals, the risk-to-reward ratio isn’t one I find favorable.

We keep track of all of these trades on our Google sheet (available to paid subs), and then insider returns are quite astounding… (I have been removing quite a few of the penny stocks/ super risky investments to make the returns more normalized.)

The current insider buy/sell ratio is sitting at 0.21, which is relatively low. Over the past 5 years, I have seen the average go as high as 0.81 in May of 2022 (a strong buying signal), and as low as 0.17 (a sell/hold signal).

Buy the Dip Tracker

* KMX — CarMaxDirector bought 10,816 @ $46.21 after a 22.88% one-month slide.

* FDS — FactSet ResearchCFO bought 370 @ $275.48 after a 25.01% one-month drawdown.

Whales & Standout Size ($1M+)

* SRRK — Scholar RockDirector bought 500,439 @ $37.58 ($18.81M).

* BGC — BGC GroupDirector bought 8,973,721 @ $9.21 ($82.63M). Potential dividend reinvestment/tax-related.

* GWRS — Global Water ResourcesDirectors bought 728,197 @ $10.30 ($7.50M) and 154,026 @ $10.30 ($1.59M).

* ASA — ASA Gold & Precious Metals10% Owner</stron