The Final Tally: Markets Are Moody AF… Meta’s AI Struggles Without a Cheat Sheet

Today’s market felt eerily familiar… like asking my wife where she wants to eat and somehow ending up in an argument about something I said in 2019. Total mixed signals.

At first, it looked like we had a plan. The S&P 500 was up 0.3%, notching a fourth straight win. The Dow was feeling good, too… up 253 points, confidently suggesting, “Let’s do sushi!” But then the Nasdaq hit us with a hard “I don’t know, you pick…” and fell 0.3%, breaking its six-day tech rally. From there, as you can imagine, things got messy. 

Walmart showed up like, “I’m fine,” but then dropped a surprise: prices are rising by double digits because of Trump’s new tariffs. April retail sales barely budged (up just 0.1%) while wholesale inflation surprisingly fell 0.5%. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. A new ISM survey says 87% of manufacturers plan to pass their price hikes onto us anyway. So yeah… pick your poison.

Meanwhile over in Silicon Valley, Meta slipped 2% after The Wall Street Journal said engineers are struggling to get its “Behemoth” AI model off the ground (I guess that’s what happens when he has no one to copy). Nvidia lost 1.2% and Amazon fell 2.4% after another round of Alexa job cuts… bringing its layoff tally to 27,000 since 2022. At this point, even Alexa’s updating her LinkedIn.

Fresh off its fancy new S&P 500 badge, Coinbase tanked 6% after revealing hackers bribed contractors, stole customer data, and demanded a $20 million ransom. Coinbase refused to pay and instead offered a $20 million bounty to hunt them down. If you think this sounds like a great documentary, I’m sure Netflix is already on it.

And the real headliner of the day was UnitedHealth collapsing 17% after news broke of a potential DOJ Medicare fraud probe. They denied it, swapped out the CEO, and yanked their 2025 forecast. That stock is now down over 50% in just one month. Oh, and Dick’s is buying Foot Locker for $2.4 billion. Foot Locker soared 84%. Dick’s dropped 14%. Because logic left the building.

Even oil couldn’t hold it together… Brent crude slid to $64 after Trump floated the idea of a possible nuclear deal with Iran. And just to keep everyone grounded, Jamie Dimon chimed in to remind us that, yes, a recession is still very much on the table.

But hey, not all doom and gloom. The market’s rallied over 6% this week, and if Trump manages to stay off the mic tomorrow, we’re on track for the biggest weekly gain since November 2023. A mess? Absolutely. But a profitable one, so far.

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.