You ever watched Groundhog Day with Bill Murray? The guy wakes up to the same nightmare on repeat, forced to smile through it like nothing’s wrong. That’s exactly what the market feels like right now.

Government shutdown? Check. Federal workers furloughed? Check. No jobs report? Check. And yet the S&P 500 still notched another record, like Bill Murray rolling over to Sonny & Cher on loop. Markets have decided that as long as Nvidia is ripping, nothing else matters. (Congress could unplug the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics and traders would still YOLO calls on anything that appears to sell or buy GPUs.)

Speaking of Jensen, Nvidia hiked another 2.5% to a record high, essentially carrying AMD (+1.8%) and SK Hynix (+2.1%) on its back. The Nasdaq rode the AI gravy train to finish up 0.4% and touched another record too… while the Dow tagged along with a 0.3% gain.

And because you can’t say “GPU” without someone blurting out “OpenAI,” Sam Altman went ahead and took another swing at Elon’s ego. OpenAI’s employee cash-out pumped its valuation to $500 billion, officially pulling ahead of SpaceX in Silicon Valley’s favorite d***-measuring contest (valuations). All it took was $6.6 billion in shares getting passed around to Thrive, SoftBank, Abu Dhabi’s oil money, and a few other big wallets.

And since the Labor Department is closed for business, we’ve been forced to rely on Challenger, Gray & Christmas (which still sounds like a law firm from Better Call Saul) for jobs data. Their read: hiring plans are at their lowest since 2009. Pair that with ADP’s anemic numbers and you’ve got a labor market that’s more “sleepy Joe” than “raging bull.” We all know how this game goes… the Fed will pretend it needs more data, but traders already smell a rate cut coming.

Talk about witnessing a legend’s downfall… Tesla, somehow found a way to turn a record sales quarter into a stock dip (-5%). The federal EV tax credit expired and suddenly investors remembered that long-term growth is not looking hot. 

Bitcoin cracked $121k, up nearly 30% on the year… just as Don Jr. tried convincing everyone that his family’s crypto hustle isn’t a conflict of interest. Small detail: his dad’s the President, signing crypto policy by day and launching $TRUMP tokens by night.

And for the biggest WTF moment of the day… FICO (the boring credit score people) suddenly went full meme stock. Shares exploded 20% after it announced it’ll start selling scores straight to lenders, basically telling Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion to beat it.

So yeah… same old Groundhog Day, except for the chaos in “Single Stock Land.” And to be completely honest? If this is how Wall Street wants to party during a shutdown, they can leave the lights off in D.C. for the next twelve months… I won’t complain. 

Lastly, if you followed our Stock Prophet Watchlist at all today… I’m not gonna sugar-coat it… today sucked… we tracked several names, but nothing ever took off and we didn’t want to force anything. That’s obviously unusual, considering our moonshots earlier this week (total of +335% in opportunities), but we’d rather be safe than force something and be sorry. After a couple slow days, it feels like we’re due for some big moves. So make sure to keep your eyes peeled for our alerts tomorrow morning.

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 Tesla as mentioned in the article.