Week In Review: The Lead Singer Quit. The Band Played Its Best Set Since August.

Week of Monday, November 9 to Friday, November 13, 2026. Full five-day week. The bond market took Wednesday off for Veterans Day. Stocks did not.

The 30-second version: Your 401(k) had its best week since early August, even though the most famous CEO in the AI business quit on Thursday. Chip stocks went up 8% while Nvidia went down almost 13%. Prices ran hot, so the Fed is all but certain to raise rates in December, and the 10-year Treasury rate (the one mortgages follow) jumped above 5%. Good week for stocks. Bad week for anyone shopping for a loan.

The fund rows are there for the move, not the price. The SOX is a basket of 30 big chip stocks. The VIX, the "fear gauge," measures how much traders will pay to protect against big swings. All 11 stock-market sectors finished the week higher, in the same week one of the world's most valuable companies lost its boss.

The $1,000 test: $1,000 in an S&P 500 fund last Friday is about $1,025 now. $1,000 in AMD is about $1,189. $1,000 in Nvidia is about $872. Same industry, same week, a $317 gap. Picking the right band member mattered more than picking the right genre.

Last week the lightning found the tallest trees, and chip stocks had their worst day since March 2020. This week, the trees grew back in five days. Mostly.

On Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told employees in a memo that he had been "unfaithful to my wife." U.S. intelligence agencies say the woman involved, an executive at a cloud company, has been passing information to Beijing. China calls that a smear. NVIDIA's board said it had "no reason to believe" company secrets were compromised and opened an independent investigation. On Monday, the stock fell 4.3%. We covered the first act Tuesday, back when the company said he would keep leading "without interruption."

Interruption arrived on schedule. The board hired a former top federal prosecutor and a big law firm on Tuesday. Wednesday night, reports said the board was preparing to push him out, and a second relationship surfaced. Thursday morning, Huang resigned as CEO, president, and board member. He co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for its entire life. That's 33 years of wearing the same outfit to every product launch, and now the closet is empty.

Chief financial officer Colette Kress is the interim CEO. She also keeps her finance job, which is a lot of hats for one week. The Financial Times reported the board has approached Arm's CEO, Rene Haas, about the permanent job. Nobody has confirmed that. HSBC downgraded the stock to "hold" and cut its price target to $170 from $365, which is Wall Street for "we liked it better with the old singer."

The stock fell 12.8% for the week. That's six losing weeks in a row, and about 30% since early October. On Thursday, it fell as much as 14% before clawing back to a 4.3% loss, which is the market's way of saying "nervous, not panicked."

NVIDIA didn't stop making chips this week. It stopped making the headlines it wanted.

Here's the strange part. While Nvidia's stock slid, the chip index rose 8.05% for the week. That's a basket of 30 chip companies, and Nvidia is one of the biggest members. It's like the lead singer quitting and the band's album jumping up the charts.

The spark came Tuesday night. CoreWeave, a company that rents out data centers packed with AI chips, reported sales of $3.66 billion, up 168% from a year ago, and raised its forecast. Its stock jumped 24.7% Wednesday, and everybody else in the AI supply chain got loud with it. On Thursday night, Cisco (the company whose gear connects data centers) reported record sales of $18.5 billion, up 24%. Applied Materials, which makes the machines that make chips, reported record profit per share. We called it the AI office party on Thursday.

The other band members cashed in on Nvidia's bad week. AMD rose 18.9%. Broadcom rose 18.2%. Micron, which makes memory chips, rose 12.8%. The bet: big customers will want a second supplier while the first one is between bosses.

Then came Friday's encore. AMD fell 8.75%, Broadcom 4.8% after a downgrade, and the chip index gave back 3.4% in one day. Cisco dropped about 6% Friday, the day after its record quarter, which is like getting booed for an encore you nailed.

A crowd that's been nervous for weeks cheers the loudest when someone says the snacks aren't running out.

On Tuesday, the government said consumer prices rose 0.4% in October. Economists expected 0.3%. "Core" prices, which leave out food and energy because those jump around like a toddler on soda, rose 0.3% against a forecast of 0.2%. Gasoline, electricity, and food all went up. Your grocery receipt could have told them this for free. We took its temperature Wednesday.

There was no "compared with a year ago" number this time because the government never collected October 2025 prices during last year's shutdown. So the whole fight was over in one month. And the Fed had told us which month would scare it. Hours before the report, Fed Governor Christopher Waller, one of the 12 officials who vote on interest rates, said a half-point hike "should be considered" if inflation ran hot. Several outlets reported his line in the sand as core prices up about 0.3% in a month. Core came in at exactly 0.3%.

Friday brought producer prices, meaning what businesses pay for their supplies. They rose 0.3% in October, a little less than the 0.4% economists expected. But they're up 6.5% from a year ago, the biggest yearly jump since November 2022. Businesses don't eat that kind of increase forever. They pass it on, usually to you, usually right before the holidays.

The Fed's key rate sits at 3.75% to 4.00%. The next decision is on December 9. By Friday, futures markets (bets on where rates land) treated a December hike as a near-lock, about 87% for a quarter point and about 13% for a half point. The betting site Polymarket had a quarter-point hike at about 89%.

The thermometer only moved a tenth. But the Fed had already said out loud which tenth would scare it.

Bond investors got the memo before anyone else. The 10-year Treasury rate rose from 4.86% last Friday to 5.15% this Friday. The 2-year rate, which tracks what traders think the Fed will do soon, jumped from 4.51% to 4.88%. That's a big move for a market that usually moves in hundredths of a point.

When rates go up, the price of older bonds goes down, because nobody wants your 4.5% bond when new ones pay more. A popular fund of long-term government bonds lost 3.1% this week, its worst week since April 2025. Bonds are supposed to be the boring part of a retirement account. This week they were the part that lost money while the exciting part made it.

Thursday added another push. President Trump posted that the U.S. doesn't "need a deal with Iran," oil jumped about 3% that day, and the 10-year rate finished above 5.1%. Higher oil means higher prices. Higher prices mean the Fed has more reason to hike. Small companies, which borrow a lot, fell 1.6% on Thursday alone.

On Monday, Trump said the war with Iran could end "fairly soon." Oil fell almost 6% that day. Brent crude, the world's main oil price, settled around $92.57 a barrel. Gas got a little cheaper. Everybody exhaled.

On Thursday, Trump posted: "We don't need a deal with Iran. Those days have long since passed." He told Vice President JD Vance, who had been leading talks, to focus on other things. The naval blockade of Iran stays. Iran is still demanding that the blockade be lifted, sanctions eased, and frozen money returned before any real talks. We covered the pivot Friday morning.

You'd think oil would rocket on that. It didn't do much. Brent finished the week near $96, down about 2%, its second straight weekly drop. The International Energy Agency, the world's energy watchdog, said Friday the oil market is heading back to a surplus as Gulf exports recover faster than demand. U.S. oil stockpiles also rose more than expected. So: more oil sloshing around, and a president who says he's done negotiating. The market picked the barrels over the posts.

Friday at about 2:54 PM Central, minutes before the stock market closed, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a rare nationwide ground stop. Planes in the air could land. Planes on the ground could not take off. The FAA blamed communication problems at several air traffic control centers, and officials said there was no sign of an attack. Thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled by late afternoon, and the order was set to run into Friday night.

The last nationwide ground stop was in January 2023. They're rare, which is the nicest thing anyone can say about them.

Polymarket is a site where people bet real money on events. Odds as of about 6:30 PM CT Friday, ranked by total money bet. These move constantly.

The gold fund fell 4.6% this week, its worst week since early June. It's now down about 5.5% from a year ago. Grandma's coins are not having a good autumn.

The reason is boring and powerful. Gold doesn't pay interest. When a 2-year government bond pays almost 4.9%, holding a shiny rock that pays nothing starts to feel like keeping cash in a sock. The dollar also climbed to its highest level since April 2025, and a strong dollar makes gold more expensive for everyone else in the world. Gold is supposed to be what people buy when they're scared. This week, stocks had their best week since August, so nobody was scared enough to pay up.

Bitcoin had it worse. It fell about 8% for the week to roughly $69,500. "Digital gold" lost more than the real thing, which is a sentence crypto fans would like back.

Freddie Mac's weekly survey put the average 30-year fixed mortgage at 7.11% on Thursday, down from 7.18% the week before. A year ago, it was 6.24%.

The catch: that survey mostly reflects rates from before the 10-year Treasury jumped past 5%. Next Thursday's number has a lot of catching up to do, and it won't be catching up.

What it means for actual humans: on a $400,000 loan, 7.11% works out to about $2,691 a month for principal and interest. Last year's 6.24%, it was about $2,460. That's $231 a month, or about $2,770 a year, for the privilege of buying the same house twelve months later. Mortgage applications rose 6.2% in the first week of November while rates dipped. That window may have just closed.

Headlines stayed weirdly upbeat. EODHD's news-tone score, which runs from -1 (all doom) to +1 (all sunshine), had the S&P 500 fund averaging about +0.93 all week. NVIDIA averaged about +0.59 across nearly 1,200 articles, bottoming at +0.50 on resignation day. The CEO quit after a spy scandal, and the headlines still came out mildly positive. Somewhere, a PR team deserves a raise.

Fear left the building. The VIX, the fear gauge, fell almost 25% for the week, from 25.6 to 19.3. Last week, the crowd was looking for the exits. This week it was looking for the merch table.

The mood in one sentence: Stocks were cheerful, bonds were furious, gold was sulking, and crypto was asleep in the van.

The appetizer was a comeback: stocks had their best day since April on Monday, like a band walking out to a roaring crowd after last week's disaster. The soup was hot, literally. Inflation came in a tenth warmer than ordered, and the Fed asked to see the dessert menu early. The main course was a surprise. The lead singer left the table halfway through, and the rest of the band ate his steak, ordered another round, and toasted with CoreWeave's champagne. Dessert was served on Friday: AMD tripped carrying the cake, and Cisco got booed for bringing a cake that was actually great. Then the airport cancelled everyone's ride home. The bill? It arrived from the bond market, and the total at the bottom says 5.15%.

Here's what this week actually means for you. Your stock funds are up. Your bond funds are down. Your next loan is going to cost more than your last one. That's three different directions in one week, and none of them required you to do anything.

The big story is that the AI trade proved it can survive losing its biggest celebrity. Investors didn't run from chips. They ran to the other chip companies. That's a sign of faith in the business, not the person. But it also tells you how crowded the room is: one good earnings report moves 30 companies 6%, and one Friday afternoon can take a big chunk of it back.

The one question that decides next week: what does Nvidia sound like without Jensen Huang? Tuesday after the close, the company reports earnings with an interim CEO who is also still the CFO. If the numbers are strong and the plan sounds steady, the band keeps touring. If the call is shaky, the rest of the chip business finds out how much of this week's rally was borrowed from Nvidia's bad luck.

The singer left. The crowd stayed. Now the venue wants to talk about the rent.

Times are Central.

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Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational, educational, and mildly therapeutic purposes only. It is not financial advice, a buy or sell recommendation, or a backstage pass to the market's inner workings. We are a newsletter with opinions and a spreadsheet. Past performance does not guarantee future results, and a band's best set does not guarantee a good encore. Do your own homework, and please don't pick your retirement fund based on who quit, who got hired, or who the President thinks should run a chip company.