Some thoughts and prayers, please, for the Facebook moms who post crockpot recipes with 14-paragraph life stories attached. 

Tough day for them… Zuck just announced he’s slicing Meta’s budget by 30%, and somewhere the algorithm let out a soft, panicked wheeze.

And naturally, he paired that announcement with his favorite side quest: mortgaging everything that isn’t bolted to the floor (the farm, the house, and rumor has it, his own mother) so he can shovel even more billions into AI. 

The stock jumped 4% because investors decided that Zuck spending money like a man caught up in an extremely expensive addiction is, somehow, bullish.

But let’s not lose the plot here. This is a massive moment. We’re talking about Facebook Zuck’s first baby… the one he may or may not have quietly “acquired” from the Winklevoss twins back in the Harvard era. 

So why the big pullback? Probably because basing a multibillion-dollar corporate strategy on Ready Player One turned out to be… shocking, I know… a terrible idea. 

And while the Meta Ray-Ban glasses weren’t a complete embarrassment, they also didn’t fly off shelves the way Zuck’s internal delusion engine predicted.

Which is why Zuck is now going all-in on his AI world-domination blueprint, snapping up data centers like he’s trying to open a Chipotle on every corner. The Hyperion facility alone is being kept upright with a financing deal from Blue Owl… Meta’s version of “yeah, just put it on the corporate AmEx.”

Meanwhile, Indexland was dead asleep at the wheel. The Dow (-0.23%), S&P (-0.09%), and Nasdaq (+0.005%) barely made a peep as traders priced in an 87% chance of a Fed cut next week. At this point, the market isn’t even pretending to be surprised.

That said, much like that meme where grandparents dramatically throw themselves down the stairs the second they aren’t getting enough attention… the labor market also decided to act up. 

Weekly jobless claims plunged to 191,000, the lowest since September 2022, which makes zero sense in an economy where layoffs are somehow speeding up. California alone dropped nearly 20,000 claims, which I’m sure Gavin Newsom will take full credit for.

But get this…even with claims dropping, corporate layoffs still smashed through one million for the year. That lovely stat comes courtesy of restructuring “initiatives,” AI replacing anyone with a pulse, and tariffs doing their best impression of a wrecking ball through payroll budgets. 

The ADP report didn’t help either, coming in noticeably softer and adding more lighter fluid to the already roaring “things are slowing down, so Powell better cut” bonfire.

Earnings season may be sputtering out, but Kroger (bless its Cincinnati heart) still managed to make some noise, and unfortunately it was the bad kind. The stock dropped 6.5% after missing revenue expectations and delivering same-store sales that were essentially “close, but no cigar.” 

Then came the gross-margin miss: 22.8% versus the 23.0% analysts wanted. Apparently that tiny 0.2% was all it took for shareholders to grab their carts and head straight back to Walmart. 

And our Stock Prophet Watchlist, we’ve got another winner (that’s 4 days in a row). We alerted PMCB at 9:31am right after the market opened and it skyrocketed from our $1.01 bias all the way to $1.47 for a massive 47% move. If you jumped in, consider yourself blessed. If you didn’t… I don’t know how else to say this, but download the Stocks.News app. It’s free. Your future self will thank you.

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 as mentioned in the article.