My dad used to joke about my Grandpa and his selective hearing…

“Time for your doctor’s appointment.” (Crickets)

“Mom just baked Coconut Cream Pie.” (Launches out of the recliner like a dog hearing the snack container open)

Well, just like my Grandpa’s selective hearing, Grandpa Market decided to have selective memory to open the week… erasing last week’s AI bubble scare completely out of its mind. The S&P 500 crept up 0.2%, the Nasdaq added 0.5%, and the Dow just stared at the wall and did practically nothing (.13%).

So where did the bounce come this time? AI chips, baby.

After a week where traders suddenly remembered GPUs run on actual electricity (and started sweating about whether the grid could keep up), Nvidia rebounded about 2%. AMD and Micron also rallied, with Micron clawing back 4% because memory chips are finally catching a hit again.

The funny part is that just last week traders were treating the AI trade like expired milk, ready to pour it down the drain. Then Venu Krishna at Barclays stepped in, channeling peak Aaron Rodgers with a big R-E-L-A-X, reminding everyone the AI spending firehose is still blasting. Suddenly, the panic vanished and everyone went back to business as usual.

Electronic Arts decided it’s done living the public company grind. EA shares jumped 4% after announcing it’s going private in a $55 billion deal. Toss that onto a pile of more than $1 trillion worth of M&A so far this year (up 29% from last year) and you’ve got investment bankers officially suffering from success.

And because Sam Altman hasn’t had a headline in 5 minutes… OpenAI dropped a new feature called Instant Checkout… meaning you’ll soon be able to buy your Etsy crystals or Shopify drop-shipped garbage directly inside ChatGPT. Etsy soared 14% to a fresh 52-week high, Shopify jumped 6%, and Sam Altman locked in a slice of every transaction. ChatGPT for the win… again.

Hear that? If you listen closely, that’s the government shutdown clock ticking. Polymarket has the odds north of 80% this week. Normally, a shutdown just means federal workers kick back and enjoy some unpaid vacation until Congress decides to grow a brain.

But with Spooktober around the corner, President Trump decided to up the scare factor: permanent firings. He told NBC, “We are going to cut a lot of the people that … we’re able to cut on a permanent basis.” So if you’re a government employee, well, as Michael Scott once said: all you can do is put on a brave face.

Markets usually yawn through shutdowns, but if agencies can’t drop key reports like Friday’s jobs data, the Fed will be steering the economy with a blindfold on. And nothing spooks traders faster than uncertainty… well, except maybe opening their portfolio and realizing they bought Cathie Wood’s ETFs after 2021.

But hey, let’s just wait and see… unless the market decides to hit us with a jump scare. September, usually one of the worst months for tendies, actually served up a decent plate. Despite the red days last week, markets are finishing the month in the green: S&P +2.8%, Dow +1.5%, Nasdaq +2.9%. 

And for our Stock Prophet Watchlist (free, by the way), we flagged $BQ this morning… and it went crazy, ripping 249% after we pushed the update to Stocks.News members. Hopefully you caught that wave, because if not… that’s a tough pill to scroll past.

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 doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.