Monday Takeaways: Will Investors Get Lucky in This “Throw the Dice” Market?

Shah Gilani|November 10, 2025

Last week was ugly – until it wasn’t…

Markets clawed back from the brink on Friday, with the S&P 500 rallying 100 points off its lows. But the damage was done. The AI overbuild narrative dominated headlines, with nearly $500 billion spent this year on infrastructure that may not monetize as expected.

Here’s what else is worrisome…

• Nvidia and Intel – the market’s bellwethers – took a beating last week
• Government shutdown means we’re missing crucial inflation and employment data
• The Fed may not have the numbers it needs for its December decision

With the Atlanta Fed showing 4% GDP growth while Bloomberg’s nowcast shows just 1.4%, we’re in throw-the-dice territory.

The divergence between these GDP measures tells you everything about the uncertainty we’re facing. And that uncertainty gets worse as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday without critical data.

Click on the image below to find out if it’s time to be aggressive or cautious heading into year-end.

Transcript

Hey everybody, Shah Gilani here with your Monday takeaways. As always, we’re going to start with last week. What were the takeaways? Well, the takeaway on Friday was the markets rallied as best they could on an ugly week. Friday started out pretty ugly but ended up a lot better than it could have been.

Certainly, while we were close to the lows on some of the major benchmarks, the likes of the S&P 500 rallied back 100 points from its lows of the day to end up pretty much just a little bit around the flat line. So we’ll call it that. We’ll come take a look at some of the charts. But the problem last week was the predominance of the AI overbuild story.

It seemed to be everywhere in financial media. The headlines were all about how much the spend has been. So far this year, it looks to be close to $500 billion, and the year isn’t even out yet. So there’s a tremendous amount of capital expenditures – and by the way, this is global – on AI infrastructure.

We don’t know the full numbers because certain countries aren’t giving the full information. China – we’re not so sure what their CapEx is, but it’s big. What we do know is it’s huge. In the U.S., leading the way, the question has become front and center once again because this came up before when DeepSeek came out and everyone said, “Wait a second, the Chinese have what? A ChatGPT that they built for fractions of the cost that OpenAI spent on ChatGPT?” Uh-oh. So are American companies getting too far ahead of themselves in terms of their thinking of what they need to build and how they build it?

Well, that passed, and markets continued to rally after a nice little dip. By the way, on that DeepSeek news, Nvidia stock fell 17% that day back in late January of this year. Now we’ve gone past that. Markets have rallied, and we’re getting close again to all-time highs.

But last week was another dust-up, led by the likes of Nvidia, which was down about 9% in, I think, four sessions. So tough going for the most valuable company in the world.

But Intel got hit also. Part of this overbuilding, spending too much, not being able to monetize the spend – issues and questions are out there. They were prominent. And now, as of this morning – as of Monday morning pre-open – the futures are like, “Nah, we’re past that already.”

So are they? No. I think what we’re past is the government being shut down, mostly behind us. Now there’s some movement yesterday where a handful of senators – Democrat senators – are moving towards the Republicans and likely to vote for the continuing resolution, which would reopen the government. But we’re not there yet.

Markets seem to think we’re going to go there, and we’re having a nice rally. But really, just to give you guys a look at what happened last week – because there’s a lot to take away from the action in the market, as there always is – to me, the most important thing is always price action.

Here’s the Nasdaq Composite. What a beautiful rally.

But then this is pretty ugly here, people. We ended up here on Friday – this is a one-year chart – we ended up on Friday at 23,004. Now the low of the day was 22,563, so we had a 460-some-odd-point move back up off the lows. But pretty scary when you see this kind of rollover.

Now, again, we’re looking positive. The Nasdaq Composite looks like it’s going to open up maybe 1.5% higher. That’ll be a nice little bounce and a much-necessary bounce. So we’ll see what happens with the Nasdaq Composite.

But meantime, the Dow – again, hanging in there. It’s looking better this morning as far as futures. S&P 500 – again, this probably gets the credit for the best bounce back on Friday.

Being absolutely hammered and then making a pretty nice comeback to end up in the green. So again, bull market territory here, sure. But when you start to see this kind of rolling over and you get down to these kinds of bottoms – and certainly for the S&P, 6,500, about 6,540 – you break down below there, and there’s going to be a lot of selling.

Why? Because there are going to be stops that are going to be triggered, and folks are going to want to get out because it looks like the move has maybe rolled over. But we’re not there yet. And we didn’t get that close to it on Friday. What we did get down to on the lows was 6,631. So really, that’s a pretty good cry from 6,540. So that’s what happened last week.

Now, again, today we’re talking about the lack of data that we don’t have from the government. We missed two crucial price indices for measuring inflation. We’re missing certain unemployment numbers. We’re missing a whole bunch of labor statistics that will tell us how the labor market is doing. And we know that’s important to the Fed because if the labor market seems to be weakening – and it does, at least some private-sector readings are saying that it is weakening – and there are job cuts that have been happening that are not getting registered. Though the private sector – some Christmas Day and some of the others – are coming up with some numbers that indicate that there are layoffs, and there might be some substantial ones, and a lot of them at tech firms.

So the S&P holding up so far. It’s just a question of what’s going to happen this week. We’ve got a bunch of important earnings this week, people. And again, we will see if the government gets reopened. I don’t know that it can happen today. They’re going to have to certainly take a preliminary vote. They’re going to have to put it through the Senate, and that might take a couple of days. Then it has to go back to the House. There’s no guarantee that the House will pass the continuing resolution, but it should because it passed it before.

And we have a Senate majority there, so that should be a done deal. But if it happens, we still may not get numbers in time for us to evaluate what the Fed might do at their December meeting.

So the takeaway from all this is there’s a lot of uncertainty. The bounce-back is really good this morning in the futures, but the day is not over. If markets can bounce in the morning and stay up there and even end the day at close to the highs of the day, then I think the worst of this may be past for now. But if we double back down and end up lower on the day after the futures being up, that’s going to shake a lot of loose chinks in this rather tightly wound chain around the highs here.

So the takeaway from all that is we’re not out of the woods yet. If we have a good day today – not that one day makes the market – that will be a positive going forward for the rest of the week because there’s the hope that the numbers won’t be so bad whenever we get them, and the Fed will have room to cut in December. There’s hope that once the government’s open, a lot of the money that has been held back – and folks haven’t been paid – will rush in, and consumers will get back to spending, and things will look brighter moving into the Thanksgiving holiday and then the holiday season after that as far as spending goes.

So there’s a lot of, I would say, hope that things can get turned around quickly. The question is, did we hit the brakes? Have the brakes been hit hard enough as far as the economy where things are going to slow down?

The thing I’m going to say about that is the Atlanta Fed has its GDPNow, which is their real-time measure of GDP, and they’re knocking on 4% GDP growth rate. So that’s pretty darn good. However, Bloomberg has its own nowcast, they call it, and they are showing GDP at 1.4% growth. So huge difference between the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow and Bloomberg’s measure.

So we’ve got 4% growth on one hand, and we’ve got 1.4% on the other. That’s the way the market looks. It’s a throw-down-the-dice, see-where-it-lands kind of action that we’ve got here. And going into the year-end, traditionally November is a good month. Traditionally, we’re going to have had this kind of a move up, about 15% to just shy of that as far as the S&P this year. Can we make it to new highs? Can we see a year-end rally? Yes, but a lot of things have to line up. I’m rooting for a year-end rally.

So there are the takeaways for today. Be careful out there.

The last thing I want to say is let’s keep an eye on Nvidia and Intel because those two last week were the bellwethers for the market. So keep an eye on those two. If they can do well – and they’re up nicely in the pre-market – and they can hold their gains, then maybe we’re out of the woods. If not, if they slip back, be careful out there.

Cheers, everybody. Catch you next week.