New tariff threats crush stocks during a big week for Nvidia and key portfolio moves
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 United States wants the future to be built on American technology, the country must win the generative artificial intelligence race against China. “Just as we want the world to be built on the American dollar, we would like the world to be built on the American tech stack, including developers in China.” The tech stack expands to more than just Nvidia as Huang also cited holdings Apple, Amazon , and Microsoft . Huang also gave Club members updates on three other Nvidia partners . In addition, Huang said America refocusing on energy growth will help the U.S. win on AI and fuel continued prosperity. “Without energy growth, there is no industrial growth, without industrial growth, there’s no stock price growth, there’s no economic growth, there’s no national security,” he said. Among the stocks that will benefit from AI’s need for energy is GE Vernova . During Wednesday’s Morning Meeting , Jim said, “We bought the right one.” GE Vernova has a booming business in natural gas-powered turbines, which can be hooked up to data centers to generate additional energy needs outside the power grid. NVDA 5D mountain Nvidia weekly performance Nvidia shares certainly had some big moves this week — down days on Monday and Tuesday, and then up days on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was looking higher until Trump’s China threat slammed the market. When it was all said and done, Nvidia shares closed down 2.4% from their Oct. 3 close. Portfolio moves We purchased more shares of GE Vernova on Tuesday as the stock dropped below its all-time high set in early August. We upgraded the stock, which Jim has called “the best story in the market,” to a buy-equivalent 1 rating . “Our conviction in the long-term demand for AI infrastructure has increased over the past few weeks following OpenAI’s announcement of new partnerships to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers using Nvidia systems and 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs,” Jeff Marks, the Investing Club’s director of portfolio analysis, wrote in Tuesday’s trade alert. The Club offloaded some Salesforce shares on Monday. We booked profits on the lagging enterprise software name after it popped on OpenAI’s announcement that Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, would be integrated into the AI startup’s software engineering tool, known as Codex. “Monday’s pop eases some of the pain, but there’s still a significant overhang on the stock tied to concerns on Wall Street that artificial intelligence is ‘eating’ the software industry,” Marks wrote in the trade alert. Salesforce needs to make a big splash at this month’s Dreamforce client and developers conference to quite critics. On Monday, we also added Corning to our Bullpen watch list for consideration as a portfolio name. Sales of Corning ‘s fiber optic cables should surge as modern AI data centers require far more fiber than earlier generations of these energy-intensive facilities. That’s a key reason why the stock is up 75% year-to-date, versus the S & P 500 ‘s 11.4% gain. Another reason to like Corning: the company’s huge deal with Apple , announced in August, to produce all of the cover glass for iPhones and Apple Watches. On Friday, we trimmed our BlackRock position for the first time. Despite the selling in the overall market, the stock was not that far off its record-high close from Oct. 3. BlackRock shares were also still up nearly 10.5% year to date. We put some of those proceeds to work — adding to our newer names, Nike and Boeing . The Club has been buying these two stocks recently to build up the size of our positions. Despite last month’s earnings pop, Nike shares have lost nearly 14% year to date. Boeing has fared much better — gaining 19% in 2025. Nike’s turnaround Investors got an update on Nike’s turnaround plan this week. In a CNBC interview that aired Monday, CEO Elliott Hill said that it will “take a while” for Nike to return to profitable growth. Hill also said that fixing the company’s operations in China is crucial and part of his bigger effort to revive the brand. “The difference in the Chinese market versus the United States, as an example, is that it’s a mono-brand store. Physical retail is Nike only, and that, I think, we went too sportswear-oriented and not sport enough. Now, we’re reevaluating the concepts that we have in China,” Hill said. Nike’s new direction is sports-themed stores. “We have a running-led store that is starting to sell through really well [in China] because it’s anchored in sport. It has a point of view around sport. There are 5,000 [Nike stores there], so it’s just going to take time for us to roll those concepts out, but feel good about the consumer-led sports-led concepts there,” the CEO added. NKE 5D mountain Nike weekly performance Jim touted Nike stock shortly after the interview and said he still believes in management’s plan to revive the sports apparel and retail giant, which has lost nearly 14% year-to-date. “This fellow Elliott Hill. He’s about sports. He’s competitive,” Jim said on “Squawk on the Street” this week. “He will not lose because he’s got such a great brand, and they can make a comeback.” On Thursday, Nike got solid marks in the fall 2025 edition of Piper Sandler’s “Taking Stock with Teens” survey. Nike remained the No. 1 favorite footwear brand for all teens. Signs of stabilization among the cohort made Piper analysts more bullish on Nike. After ending five consecutive losing weeks, however, shares of Nike lost more than 9% this week. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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