Decisive election. Dramatic stock swings. How we handled the market last week — SkimNews
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- Nasdaq plunged 5.5% on Thursday into correction territory — a decline of at least 10% from recent highs — joining the Dow and S&P 500 in their worst single sessions since April 2025, barely a month after the tech-heavy index's record high.
- Dow closed the week down 1%, the S&P 500 sank 2.7% and the Nasdaq lost 3.4%, as defensive corners of the market from healthcare to consumer staples rose and data-center buildout stocks absorbed the selling.
- Micron dropped more than 17% in Thursday's session, with Intel down over 10% and Nvidia down 9%; the three chipmakers were the CNBC Investing Club's worst performers for the week.
- Democrats flipping both the House and the Senate plus a handful of swing-state gubernatorial races fueled the fear that a Democratic wave would slow the data center buildout, pressuring pockets of the AI trade — and Jim Cramer cautioned that the first-day reaction to the outcome might be overly optimistic, a warning vindicated by Thursday's rout.
- CoreWeave and other neoclouds that need financing to grow are the most vulnerable if the buildout slows, while hyperscalers Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft remain in the pole positions because of their massive scale — and compute demand, as the source puts it, stays "off the charts."
- CNBC Investing Club said it will lighten data-center exposure and lean into non-AI names, holding more than 15% of the portfolio in cash at its 4th Annual Meeting with portfolio director Jeff Marks at the New York Stock Exchange — dry powder that "is not burning a hole in my pocket."
- Cardinal Health rose 8.5% for the week, the Club's best performer, after a strong quarter that the Club used to book big profits; the Club also trimmed Eli Lilly, added to Boeing and Goldman Sachs, trimmed DuPont twice, and named FedEx and Kimberly-Clark as two stocks to buy after adding to them about a month ago.
Why it matters: The losses clustered in financing-dependent AI buildout names — Micron -17%, Nvidia -9% — while hyperscalers with massive scale stay in the pole positions even if the buildout slows, so the Club's answer was rotation, not a wholesale exit from compute. That pivot lands with more than 15% cash and fresh buys in FedEx and Kimberly-Clark.
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