Your Evening Briefing

December 04, 2025

Large caps waver ahead of next week’s Fed meeting; small caps notch record close

The S&P 500 closed slightly higher, the Nasdaq 100 closed slightly down, but small caps continued to rally, with the Russell 2000 notching a new record close. Hopes of a rate cut at next week’s Fed meeting remain high, despite jobless claims falling to a three-year low. Tomorrow’s delayed release of September personal consumption expenditures, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, could impact rate cut expectations.

Stocks that moved higher:

Quantum computing companies IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum were buoyed by a wave of bullish options activity.
AI-linked energy plays also benefited from an explosion of call buying, as Oklo, Nuscale, and Bloom Energy soared.
Nvidia was unfazed by US Senators’ plan to introduce a bill blocking them from selling H200 and Blackwell chips to China for 30 months.
Meta surged after a report that the social media giant will slash metaverse spending by up to 30%.
Hims & Hers spiked after it announced its acquisition of Livewell, a Canadian telehealth company, marking its official entrance to that market.
Salesforce rose after reporting higher-than-expected earnings and guidance after the bell yesterday.
Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

Stocks that moved lower:

Intel fell after reversing plans to divest its networking division.
Netflix dipped amid reports it’s leading the Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war as Paramount Skydance cries foul.
Snowflake sank after the cloud company gave an operating margin outlook that fell short of analyst expectations, reflecting investors’ worries about the profitability of new AI-based products.
Symbiotic tanked as the robotics company and SoftBank, Symbiotic’s largest shareholder, announced an offering of 10 million shares.

Technology giants don’t look like they used to, as the asset-light era fades

Oracle and Meta are now some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the S&P 500, spending more than energy giants. I guess data really is the new oil?

Read more.

Retail traders are killing it this year because of both what they’re buying and when they bought it

Buy the dip. Buy AI. Buy gold.

Read more.

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit. Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year. Read more.

Singer d4vd has been named the top trending person on Google in 2025
Not many people were expecting that on prediction markets; one user seemed almost sure of it.
The best quotes from Salesforce’s earnings call
CEO Marc Benioff doesn’t disappoint.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has explored bringing his feud with Tesla’s Elon Musk to space
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored buying or partnering with a rocket company to compete with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Headline-fatigued Americans are tapping out of the news cycle
A new survey indicates US adults across all age groups are increasingly taking a break from constant breaking news.
EU calls for bids to build “AI gigafactories” in 2026
Lagging the US and Asia, the EU seeks to build its own sovereign AI infrastructure, but will still likely need to rely upon American chips.

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