Final Tally: Nvidia’s Pre-Earnings Jitters Turn the Market Into a Crime Scene… Walmart Watch Begins

If you looked up the term “Down Bad” in Webster’s Dictionary today, the definition would simply read: “See: U.S. Stock Market, November 17th.” Because wow… not only did the Monday blues show up… they brought friends, instruments, and a full marching band.

The Dow and Nasdaq each got hit with matching -1.5% losses, and the S&P 500 wasn’t far behind with a crispy -1.4%. Truly heartwarming to see the indices coming together as a family and suffering equally.

Surprisingly, things looked fine at the open. Then someone muttered, “Nvidia reports earnings this week,” and the entire market immediately shifted into profit-taking mode like, “Yep, let me lock this in so I have something to brag about to Grandpa at Thanksgiving.”

Tech was the main offender (obviously). Nvidia dropped about 3% heading into Wednesday’s earnings call. Salesforce and Apple also took turns whacking the Dow’s kneecaps just for good measure. Fast forward to the market close, and it’s not hard to see why it was such a blood in the streets kind of day now is it?

Bitcoin, the asset Saylor would marry if it were legal, slid 3% and kept tanking under $95K as the whales and sharks all but told us they believe the feeding frenzy in magic internet money is officially hitting that part of the cycle where a ton of laser eye portfolio pictures on Twitter get replaced with McDonald’s profile pictures.

The real comedy here is that everyone suddenly remembered valuations matter. Nvidia doesn’t have another Deepseek situation going on, but leading up to earnings, investors are finally asking the uncomfortable question: “Uh… is anyone actually making a return on all these AI chips, or are we just building the world’s most expensive bonfire?” Demand is clearly there, but demand without ROI is how bubbles are born… and how hedge funds start wearing adult diapers.

And just to give you more hope anxiety, Thursday is shaping into quite the double whammy (in a bad way).

Act I: Walmart reports earnings before the bell… and trust me, if Walmart shows a single dark cloud, Wall Street starts boarding up the windows. Walmart is the final boss of retail signals… so with everything else going on, prepare for an overreaction. 

Act II: The September jobs report drops a few hours later, the first real economic data since the government finished its shutdown nap and remembered it has a country to run. Sprinkle in the Fed’s October meeting minutes (old, but still important) and suddenly traders feel like they’re navigating a minefield with oven mitts on. 

Rate-cut expectations are also skidding across the pavement. A month ago, markets were 90% sure we were getting a December rate cut. Now it’s 40%, because the Fed barged in like my dad catching me planning a sleepover he never agreed to: “Who said that? I didn’t say that. Stop lying on my name.” Then disappeared again.

That said, there was one lone bright spot today, and of course it came from Warren Buffett,  the market’s emotional support golden retriever. Alphabet popped nearly 3% after Berkshire Hathaway revealed a new stake. Though, are we really pretending Warren himself clicked “Buy,” or was this just Greg Abel sneaking around the portfolio with the keys like, “Don’t worry, Grandpa’s napping… I got this”?

And say a prayer for all the cocaine-addict shortsellers… Chili’s parent Brinker International exploded 8%, delivering what might be the most boring short squeeze mankind has ever witnessed.

But on the bright side for us, the Stock Prophet Watchlist finally caught some clean moves. Our AMIX alert at 8:05 a.m. ripped 51%, and KXIN, which we called out at 10:29 a.m., jumped 38%. Props if you snagged those… absolute heater of a way to start the week.

Let’s keep it rolling tomorrow.

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 Apple, Bitcoin, McDonald’s, and Google as mentioned in the article.