Someone check on the Nasdaq… it’s been screaming for eight straight hours…

Looks like Spooky SZN came early on Wall Street… courtesy of Zuck and Bill Gates turning earnings season into a full-blown haunted house. Investors walked in expecting candy… and got chainsawed instead.

That prompted the S&P 500 (-0.7%) and Nasdaq (-1.3%) to react like they just saw Michael Meyers in their bedroom with a kitchen knife. And the Dow (-0.1%) tried to put on a brave face for the first half of the day, until it got a case of the scaries. 

Meta (-11%) just dropped an earnings report that made the Texas Chainsaw Massacre look like a Pixar film… starring a $15.9 billion tax hit as the villain. Zuck swore it was “a one-time charge,” but investors didn’t buy it… mostly because every “one-time charge” he’s announced lately has come with a sequel. Then he promised to dump billions more into AI data centers, and the market screamed, “Kill it before it spreads!”

Microsoft (-3%) wasn’t far behind… Azure’s growth slowed to 27%, its weakest in years, and investors bolted like kids spotting Pennywise smiling from a sewer grate with a 10-Q in hand. All that “AI Copilot” hype suddenly felt like a red balloon… full of hot air, waiting to explode.

Even the great and mighty Jensen Huang, fresh off crowning Nvidia (-2%) as the first company in stock market history to hit $5 trillion, couldn’t escape the monsters in the graveyard. Of course, it didn’t help that Jerome “I Don’t Know” Powell cracked open his own Pandora’s Box, leaving the December rate cut about as clear as mud.

That said, it wasn’t all terror on Wall Street… while tech stocks were bleeding out, old-school banks like JPMorgan (+2%) and Bank of America (+1.8%) had themselves a solid day. With bond yields ticking higher and Powell hinting that rate cuts might stay on ice a bit longer, Jamie Dimon and his fintech bros are grinning ear to ear, happily raking in those sweet, fat interest spreads while everyone else is busy counting losses.

As for the tariff circus… Donnie Twitterfingers met with Xi today and agreed to cut fentanyl-related tariffs on Chinese imports to 10%, bringing total tariffs down from 57% to 47%. In exchange, China promised to curb fentanyl shipments and buy more soybeans. (Every farmer between Kansas and Iowa just ordered a new John Deere on credit.)

And just a few months shy of his retirement party, Warren Buffett is still shuffling pieces on the board. Berkshire Hathaway smashed SELL on another $54.3 million off its DaVita position… continuing what’s starting to look like a slow-motion breakup with the kidney-care giant. 

The sale nudged Berkshire’s stake just below the 45% threshold, per a long-standing buyback pact. It’s the end of an era for a position Buffett’s held since 2011… three presidents, one pandemic, and roughly six crypto bubbles ago.

And finally, Chipotle (-17%) got wrapped, rolled, and wrecked (its worst beating in over a decade) after admitting that young customers are too broke to keep the burrito machine alive. Three sales cuts later, it’s official: the guac bubble has burst, and Wall Street’s left holding the soggy tortilla. (Maybe Brian Niccol saw this coming when he bailed for Starbucks).

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 Meta and Microsoft as mentioned in the article.