Wall Street’s weekly performance was near the flat line heading into Friday. Things started OK on the final trading day of the week, until President Donald Trump ‘s new China trade threats tanked the stock market. The S & P 500 lost 2.71% on Friday — the worst single-session decline since April 10, the day after soaring on the White House pausing “reciprocal” tariffs. For the week, the index sank 2.43%. The Nasdaq also suffered its worst day since April 10, losing 3.56% on Friday. It sank 2.53% for the week. .SPX 5D mountain S & P 500 weekly performance After Friday’s close, Trump followed up his broader morning social media warning with an announcement of an extra 100% tariff on imports from China, saying the duties will be “over and above any tariff that they are currently paying.” He also added export controls on “critical software.” Both are set to begin Nov. 1. The president said the moves were being made to “financially counter” new export controls that China imposed on rare earths — these are key elements needed in the modern-day production of everything from iPhones to missiles. In another dose of uncertainty for markets, earlier on Friday, the 10th day of the government shutdown, the Trump administration started laying off federal workers. Nvidia’s big week The big week for Nvidia began Monday, when shares fell after GPU rival Advanced Micro Devices announced a blockbuster chip-buying agreement with OpenAI. The deal, which sent AMD stock soaring nearly 24% in a session, could result in OpenAI taking a 10% stake in the company. Investors shouldn’t worry about Nvidia’s dip on Monday, Jim Cramer said, since the AMD-OpenAI deal is not enough to threaten its dominance in the heated AI chip race. “In the end — I know this is going to be facetious — I think everybody wins,” Jim said Monday, referring to OpenAI’s huge $100 billion equity-and-supply agreement with Nvidia last month. The Information on Tuesday reported that Oracle is seeing thin margins on its business of renting out Nvidia chips as a cloud provider to clients like OpenAI. For the three months ending in August, Oracle’s cloud business reportedly had 14% gross margins on $900 million in sales, which is much lower than Oracle’s overall gross margin of roughly 70%, according the The Information. Oracle shares fell as much as 5% as a result during Tuesday’s session. That same day, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back on those claims during an interview with Jim at the October Monthly Meeting, saying that Oracle is “going to do incredibly well.” Although margin pressure in the near-term isn’t out of the question with new chips, that won’t be the case down the line. “When you first ramp up a new technology, there’s every possibility that you might not make money in the beginning. But over the life of the system, they’ll be wonderfully profitable,” Huang said from the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday afternoon. During the hour-long interview, Huang also argued that if the…
Read More: New tariff threats crush stocks during a big week for Nvidia and key