It was a topsy-turvy week for the stock market — featuring jobs and inflation data, Nvidia ‘s $100 billion investment deal with OpenAI, and signals of stronger-than-expected new iPhone demand. The S & P 500 and Nasdaq closed at record highs Monday but then went on three-session losing streaks. The market did get a boost Friday on an in-line consumer inflation report. In the end, though, it wasn’t enough to flip the weekly performance positive. For the week, the S & P 500 and Nasdaq saw losses of nearly 1% and just over 1%, respectively. With just two trading days left in the notoriously tough month of September, the S & P 500 and Nasdaq were tracking for a fifth straight month of gains and a second straight quarter of gains. .SPX YTD mountain S & P 500 (SPX) year-to-date performance Investors this week remained fixated on economic data. Thursday brought a big, unexpected drop in weekly jobless claims and a strong upward revision in gross domestic product for the second quarter. As a result, stocks tumbled Thursday as investors worried that a possibly improving labor market and better economic growth might give the Federal Reserve less of a reason to lower interest rates further. Central bankers cut rates by a quarter-point earlier in the month. The buyers stepped back into the market Friday after the year-over-year increase in the August core personal consumption expenditures price index matched estimates. Core PCE , excluding food and energy prices, is the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge. When it was all said and done, the market was still pricing in another half-point of rate easing by year-end. Club stocks Nvidia, Costco, Boeing, and Apple were all in the news. Kicking off the week, Nvidia stock closed at a record high Monday after the chipmaker announced a whopping $100 billion investment into OpenAI to help the startup build artificial intelligence data centers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman broke the news in a CNBC interview . Huang said the benefits had not been accounted for in management’s previous public financial projections. “This is additive to everything we spoke about so far,” he said. This also means that analysts need to update their earnings outlooks for Nvidia for 2026. NVDA YTD mountain Nvidia (NVDA) year-to-date performance Club take: For us, the Nvidia-OpenAI announcement is yet another sign of how early we are in the AI trade. “In case anyone had doubts, the AI trade is just getting started,” Zev Fima, portfolio analyst for the Club, wrote in an analysis. “We have always seen plenty of runway in the buildout of AI data centers and the role of Nvidia’s chips at the center of it all. But the scale of the opportunity described in this partnership is incredible.” Not only is this huge for Nvidia, but it’s beneficial for fellow Club holdings GE Vernova and Eaton as well. That’s because they’re winners of the growing demand for more energy to support the building of AI…
Read More: Stocks stumble, Nvidia bankrolls OpenAI, and iPhone sales surprise