The most expensive week in Nvidia's history did not start with a product recall or a missed earnings call. It started with the company's own board investigating its chief executive over a relationship with a woman US investigators suspect of working for Chinese intelligence, and it ended with Jensen Huang resigning the job he had held since founding the company 33 years ago. That is why we built Winvesta Crisps, to cut through the noise and tell you what actually moved markets and why. 60,000+ investors from across India are already in. What about you?
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Nvidia lost its founder and chief executive this week, not a product line or a customer. The company that more than any other built the AI trade now has to show, on a single earnings call next Tuesday, how much of that trade actually depended on one man.
📊 Market recap
Monday opened with the story already out: Nvidia's board was investigating reports that Jensen Huang had a relationship with a woman US authorities suspect of acting for Chinese intelligence. Nvidia shares fell as much as 8 to 9% intraday before paring the loss to close around 4.3% lower, wiping out roughly $192 billion of market value in a single session, per Dow Jones Market Data cited by MarketWatch. Over the prior 24 trading days, the stock had shed a record $1.46 trillion in market capitalisation for any single US company. The money did not leave chips altogether, though. AMD and Broadcom both jumped, by double digits on some readings, as investors rotated into Nvidia's rivals, and Coherent extended an AI-optics rebound that had started the week before.
Tuesday brought the inflation surprise. October's CPI rose 0.4% month on month, hotter than the 0.3% economists expected, and core prices ran at a 3.7% annualised pace over the three months to October, the fastest reading this year, per Yahoo Finance. The report re-priced the odds of further Fed easing and dragged the major indexes lower, with Nvidia extending its slide. Charter Communications was the session's outlier, rising about 11% after offering to buy back up to $1.5 billion of its long-dated notes as part of a plan to work down the debt it took on absorbing Cox.
Wednesday saw SanDisk lead the S&P 500 with a gain of roughly 13.7%, on continued strength in memory and storage demand tied to AI infrastructure build-outs. Airbnb gave back some of the previous week's post-earnings pop, falling about 3.1% as investors focused on a softer fourth-quarter margin outlook rather than the raised full-year guidance.
Thursday was the reckoning Wall Street had been pricing for a week. Nvidia's board confirmed that Jensen Huang had resigned as chief executive, with long-serving chief financial officer Colette Kress stepping in as interim CEO. Nvidia shares plunged as much as 14% at the open before paring losses through the session, closing down somewhere in the mid-single digits depending on the source. Broadcom and AMD both rose roughly 5% the same day, the clearest sign yet that capital is quietly repricing which chipmaker carries the least single-person risk. Despite the drama in one stock, the broader tape improved: by Thursday evening the major averages were tracking solid weekly gains, with the Nasdaq up about 3.2%, the S&P 500 about 2.9% and the Dow nearly 2%, clawing back a chunk of the prior week's worst Friday-to-Friday showing since the April 2025 tariff shock.
Friday opened with markets waiting on the October Producer Price Index, due at 8:30am US Eastern time, with economists pencilling in a 0.4% monthly rise and a 0.3% core reading, though the annual print remains clouded by data gaps left by this year's government shutdown. The dollar traded near a 19-month high and gold slipped below $3,900 an ounce into the release. Nvidia and oil both swung through the morning, though the market had clawed back most of its early losses by the time of writing, ahead of the print this piece cannot yet confirm.