November 28th Market Overview

Happy Friday

Markets came back from Thanksgiving to find futures frozen until 8:30 AM from a data center meltdown, but markets opened higher anyway. Dow's tracking its seventh straight winning month while gold pushes through $4,200.

People buying both at the same time is still the insight that makes me cautious. The “everything but the dollar market” is a theme I’ve been paying close attention to this year.

Let's dig in...

P.S. Paid subscribers will now be receiving premium newsletter additions, not just the Market Health Dashboard, or the Equity Research Terminal.

Today's Big Picture

The Plumbing Broke 
A cooling system failure at a CyrusOne data center froze all CME trading for hours Friday morning. Treasuries, oil, equity futures..stuck until 8:30 AM. One data center took down the entire derivatives market for hours.

Trump Floats Eliminating Income Tax 
Trump said Thursday "we may be cutting income tax almost completely because of tariff proceeds." Not policy yet, but it shows tariffs aren't a negotiating chip anymore,they're a revenue plan. Markets haven't figured out what permanent high tariffs do to inflation.

AI Competition Heats Up, Nvidia Pressured 
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released its latest open-source model Friday, sending Nvidia $NVDA down nearly 2%. This comes right after Alphabet $GOOGL unveiled Gemini 3. Nvidia's moat depends on proprietary advantages, open-source models directly challenge that.

Market Overview

Index Performance

Stock Spotlight

Intel $INTC ( ▲ 10.19% ) 
rose after an analyst suggested it could become the foundry for some Apple $AAPL M-series chips. If true, Intel would finally have a marquee customer to validate its foundry strategy.

Alphabet $GOOG ( ▼ 0.05% ) 
L is the only Mag 7 stock up this month. Gemini 3 and its custom AI chips shifted investor perception from "Google is behind" to "Google is competing." Buffett's Berkshire $BRKB taking a position didn't hurt.

JPMorgan $JPM ( ▲ 1.77% ) 
broke above its 50-day moving average, now less than 3% from all-time highs. Goldman Sachs $GS up five days straight.

Big Name Updates

Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 1.77% ) 
and Walmart $WMT rose on strong Black Friday data. Adobe Analytics reported $6.4 billion in online Thanksgiving sales, up 5.3% year-over-year. Consumer spending fears aren't showing up in the numbers.

Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 0.84% ) 
up after Elon Musk said he'll double the robotaxi fleet in Austin next month. Stock is approaching its 50-day line but hasn't broken through.

Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 1.47% ) 
dropped after Morgan Stanley flagged credit concerns. The firm's five-year CDS spread sits at 1.25% and could push toward 2% - its 2008 peak - as Oracle borrows heavily to fund AI data center construction.

Other Notable Company News

Delta Air Lines $DAL ( ▼ 0.27% ) 
and United Airlines $UAL gained on record travel volume and lower fuel costs. Multiple airlines broke out of bases this week.

Strategy $MSTR ( ▲ 0.88% ) 
rose as Bitcoin climbed back above $92,000. Stock remains down roughly 40% from its recent peak despite the bounce.

Jefferies $JEF ( ▲ 0.58% ) 
is under SEC investigation over its ties to bankrupt First Brands. Regulators are examining whether investors in its $3 billion Point Bonita fund got proper disclosure on exposure.

Alibaba $BABA ( ▼ 0.19% ) 
and ByteDance are now training AI models in Southeast Asian data centers - a workaround to keep using Nvidia chips after the U.S. banned H20 sales to China.

Sector Watch

Bond Market

Ten-year Treasury yield held steady near 4% in the shortened session after the early CME outage.

Traders are now pricing in over 80% chance of a 25 basis point cut at the December 17-18 meeting after New York Fed President John Williams said there's room for "further adjustment in the near term."

Policy Watch

Tariffs

Trump floated eliminating income tax and replacing it with tariff revenue. Most are dismissing this as talk, but if he's serious, it means tariffs aren't temporary negotiating tools - they're infrastructure. That changes everything from Fed policy to corporate planning.

Trade

• India's trade secretary expects to finalize a U.S. deal before year-end

• Alphabet pulled its EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft's Azure after Brussels opened a DMA probe into both

International

• Switzerland's economy contracted 0.5% in Q3 - first contraction since 2023.
  

• Japan approved an 18.3 trillion yen supplementary budget, funded by increasing short-term debt issuance
  

• OPEC+ meets Sunday and is expected to maintain its plan to pause production hikes in early 2026

Data Center Power

AI data centers are driving electricity prices high enough to shut down U.S. aluminum smelters. Those smelters produce the metal needed for the data centers themselves. The buildout is cannibalizing its own supply chain.

Today’s Sponsor

Wall Street Isn’t Warning You, But This Chart Might

Vanguard just projected public markets may return only 5% annually over the next decade. In a 2024 report, Goldman Sachs forecasted the S&P 500 may return just 3% annually for the same time frame—stats that put current valuations in the 7th percentile of history.

Translation? The gains we’ve seen over the past few years might not continue for quite a while.

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_{*Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.}

What to Watch

ISM Manufacturing Monday
Consensus 47.5. Recent regionals were weak - anything above 50 would be a bullish surprise.

OPEC+ Sunday
Expected to delay production hikes. Watch for any language shift to "considering cuts" - that moves crude Monday.

Earnings Next Week
Credo $CRDO Monday after close - estimates call for earnings up 603%, revenue up 226%. CrowdStrike $CRWD and Snowflake $SNOW also report. Macy's $M and Dollar Tree $DLTR will show if consumer spending is real or front-loaded.

Thanks for reading 🙂

- John

Today’s Sponsor

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