Affected by the selling of chip stocks on Friday, most U.S. stock markets closed lower, with NVIDIA's market value falling below the $4 trillion mark at the close. However, the three major stock indices still achieved cumulative gains this week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose by 50.46 points, or 0.10%, to 52,347.55; the S&P 500 Index fell by 30.73 points, or 0.40%, to 7,561.67; the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped by 229.82 points, or 0.91%, to 25,136.27.
The seven giants of U.S. tech stocks showed mixed performances: Meta rose by 2.90%, Apple by 0.39%, Microsoft by 0.17%, Amazon by 0.29%, Google by 0.96%, Tesla by 1.82%, and NVIDIA by 2%. NVIDIA's stock price fell 13% this week, marking the largest single-week decline since April 2025, and it is the sixth consecutive week of declines, setting a new record for the longest streak of losses since 2012. This week, NVIDIA's market value evaporated by over $573 billion.
Chip stocks declined, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index falling 3.43%. AMD fell more than 8%, SanDisk and Western Digital fell more than 5%, Broadcom and ARM fell more than 4%, Ram Research and Seagate Technology fell more than 3%.
NVIDIA's stock price dragged down the market for the second consecutive trading day. The stock fell 2% on Friday, continuing the decline of over 4% from the previous trading day. Prior to this, Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA who was embroiled in a scandal, announced his resignation, putting additional pressure on the stock price.
HSBC downgraded the rating of the chip manufacturer to ‘Hold’ on Friday, believing that the company’s stock price will remain low until a permanent succession plan is established.
Coulter Cross, the Chief Financial Officer of NVIDIA who has been with the company for over a decade ( Colette Kress ), will lead the company as interim CEO. Currently, the company's board of directors is seeking a full-time successor to Jensen Huang both internally and externally.
Thomas Martin of Globalt Investments expects that the process of finding a new CEO will "take a considerable amount of time" and will bring more uncertainty to the stock.
However, Bernd Rose Mayfield believes that the market has largely absorbed the pain caused by this negative factor, although he expects stock prices to continue to fluctuate in the future. From a broader market perspective, he predicts that regardless of how NVIDIA's latest developments unfold, investors will continue to shift their investments towards sectors other than artificial intelligence ( AI ).
International oil prices saw little change. As of the close of trading on that day, the price of light crude oil futures for December delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell by 18 cents to close at $88.56 per barrel, a decrease of 0.2%; the price of London Brent crude oil futures for January delivery rose by 2 cents to close at $95.84 per barrel, an increase of 0.02%.
As traders prepared for a potential interest rate hike in December, the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds reached a high of 5.17% on Friday, the highest level since October.
This macroeconomic environment has put pressure on Bitcoin, and on Friday, the world's largest cryptocurrency fell below the $70,000 mark for the first time in nearly three months.
Despite recent market turmoil, the three major U.S. stock market benchmarks still closed higher this week. The Nasdaq index rose by 2.3% cumulatively this week, the S&P 500 index by 2.5%, and the Dow Jones index by 2.1%. All three indices recorded their best single-week performance since early August of this year.
In terms of economic data, according to the Producer Price Index ( PPI ), wholesale inflation rose by 0.3% month-on-month in October. Although this figure is lower than the economists' expectation of 0.4%, the year-on-year increase of 6.5% highlights ongoing inflationary pressures, which is likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to raise interest rates next month.
