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What’s furry, funny, and a surprise hit in China? If you guessed “Zootopia 2,” give yourself a prize. While the sequel to the popular Disney hit did really well in the US, its fluffy, buddy cop appeal was a global smash, netting over half a billion dollars globally to make it the highest-grossing debut in 2025 as well as a rare win for a US-made movie in China.

The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Russell 2000 all traded lower on Monday as investors eschewed riskier assets. Hopes for a December rate cut remained high, with Bank of America analysts joining the bandwagon of hopefuls anticipating a rate cut at the conclusion of the Fed’s two-day meeting next Wednesday.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives is still very bullish on the outlook for AI stocks as we creep closer to the start of another new year.

“In a nutshell, this AI Revolution is just beginning today and we believe tech stocks and the AI winners should be bought given our view this is Year 3 of what will be a 10-year cycle of this AI Revolution buildout,” he wrote.

But he’s switching up his roster of potential stock market beneficiaries from the ongoing boom.

Let’s read between the lines here, because there’s something super interesting going on. 

The analyst is leaning a little more into the upstream parts of the AI supply chain, rebalancing his ETF toward the facilitators rather than the names that are closer to end consumers. He's swapping out three downstream companies for one downstream and two upstream companies. One would think that by now, the beneficiaries of the AI boom ought to be the businesses applying the tech, you know, like ServiceNow and SoundHound. Instead, Ives is rallying behind the picks and shovels of the gold rush.

Jensen Huang is talking about robots. Masayoshi Son is talking about AI being 10,000x to 100,000x smarter than a human. Dan Ives is like, yeah, buy the fundamental nuts and bolts. Worth a thought!

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On the final night of November, a month many in the crypto community dubbed “Painvember,” things didn’t look so bad for bitcoin: as of 7 p.m. ET on Sunday, the price was hovering around $90,000, where it had pretty much been since just before Thanksgiving. Maybe the worst was over, investors hoped.

But by the time the East Coast woke up on Monday, December 1, things looked markedly worse, with bitcoin plummeting to below $85,000 and taking its friends along for the ride:

All of this is why Timothy Misir, head of research at Blockhead Research Network, called bitcoin’s drop “violent.” He added that the washout is a “classic liquidity and positioning event, painful, fast, and crowd-creating.”

It’s just one day, but bitcoin is off to its worst December since 2022, and experts say bitcoin is still facing several macro headwinds that could put further pressure on the asset. One factor causing a sense of déjà vu was a surge in the Japanese yen once again playing havoc with markets, according to Nic Puckrin, cofounder of Coin Bureau. The last time the yen carry trade unwound, in August 2024, bitcoin plunged from over $66,000 to around $54,000 in just a few days, an 18% drop, he said. So prepare for more volatility.

Sherwood News’ Matt Phillips nabbed a call with David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, and he pointed us to the reason “why we are very reluctant to call for recession, even though we can see some weakness in economic data right now,” as well as his predictions on rate cuts and why it may be time to add more foreign market exposure to portfolios.