“What more do you want from me?” -Jensen Huang to anxious traders after delivering another clutch earnings 

If November has taught me anything, it’s to be grateful for the cosmic reminder that sometimes the market refuses to let us have even one nice thing.

Nvidia delivered another monster quarter, beat every analyst breathing, rolled out a sexy Q4 forecast, and Jensen even hit us with the classic line about Blackwell demand being “off the charts.” He practically begged everyone to stop treating the AI boom like a conspiracy theory cooked up by people who think the moon landing was filmed in a strip mall. Didn’t matter. Not even close.

Nvidia still fell 3%, and tanked the entire market down with it as traders lost confidence that Jerome Powell might slip a beautifully wrapped rate cut under the Christmas tree. The Dow swung from a massive morning run to a final drop of 0.6%. The S&P 500 gave back its early 1.9% surge and finished down 1.2%. The Nasdaq blew a 2.6% lead and ended at -1.8%. A full reversal across the board.

And to make things even more backwards, the jobs report rolled in and showed the economy is still annoyingly strong. That’s usually a good thing, but not when investors are asking Powell to reach for the rate-cut lever like he’s trying to crank-start a lawn mower. 

The delayed September print showed 119,000 new jobs (above expectations) and rate-cut odds for December immediately sank below 40%. In plain English: “Nope, not happening unless the economy actually collapses.”

I’ll at least give Target this: they’re contributing to the chaos. Yesterday they essentially told Wall Street, “We’re confused too,” then tried to distract everyone with a new ChatGPT shopping toy.

Meanwhile, Walmart showed up and reminded everyone who actually runs big-box retail. Q3 numbers solid, online sales climbing, everything working the way it’s supposed to… and boom, shares up 6%. Walmart didn’t even try to be subtle about it. They basically said, “Relax, we’re the new Target. We’ll handle it.”

Over in Seattle, Brian Niccol’s probably pacing a whole through his office floor. The Starbucks strike has now entered its “eternal storyline” arc, with Workers United expanding it to 95 stores across 65 cities and around 2,000 baristas walking out. They even picketed a distribution center in Pennsylvania. 

The stock dipped about 1%, but please… Starbucks has survived far uglier plotlines. The bathroom-policy meltdown of 2018 made this look like a minor inconvenience.

And then there’s crypto, sitting in the corner going, “Oh, you think that’s bad? Watch this.” Bitcoin dropped to $86,500 (its lowest since April) while Ethereum slid to around $2,800, a nasty 40% haircut from late August. Coinbase fell 6%, Robinhood dropped 8%… basically, if it’s tied to crypto in any way, do yourself a favor and don’t open the chart.

What makes all of this even stranger is that today should’ve been an easy win. Nvidia crushed earnings. Walmart delivered. The jobs report beat expectations. Everything on paper pointed higher.

But it didn’t matter. The selling showed up anyway.

Whatever’s happening out there, it’s getting harder to pretend everything makes sense. Private credit is ballooning, AI financing looks like a dare, crypto is behaving like it lost custody of its stability, and the Fed seems determined to make the holidays feel like tax season. Whatever the culprit is, the cracks are getting harder to ignore.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Robinhood as mentioned in the article.