Monday Takeaways: Consumer Spending Cracks Could Trigger Market Breakdown

Shah Gilani|November 17, 2025

The worst sector last week is telling us something…

Of the 11 major sectors, consumer discretionary performed the worst – down 2.7%.

The S&P 500 was flat. But if consumers are pulling back heading into the holidays, this market faces serious headwinds.

This week brings the real test: Home Depot, Walmart Thursday, and Target all report earnings.

Walmart is especially critical. Are they raising prices? Eating margin hits? Their guidance could move the entire market.

But it’s not just consumers showing weakness:

• Bitcoin down $600 billion since October
• Meme stocks down 40%
• NVIDIA earnings Wednesday (Peter Thiel and SoftBank both dumped their shares)
• S&P support levels at 6,625, 6,500, and 6,000 all at risk

I sold my NVIDIA at $203 – took profits and wasn’t greedy.

Right now, caution is warranted. Not the time for aggressive capital allocation.

Click on the image below to see what I’m watching this week.

Transcript

Hey, everybody. Shah Gilani here with your Monday Takeaways. And as always, we’re going to have a quick look back at last week, which was a very sloppy week. However, the S&P 500, the benchmark, the institutional benchmark of what we call the market, eked out a tiny 0.1% gain.

Now the other benchmarks – Nasdaq Composite, certainly the Nasdaq 100 when we’re talking about tech stocks, the Russell when we’re talking about the broad market with mid caps, small caps included – not so good. So we’re going to get into all of that. But the reason that things were pretty sloppy last week is the confluence of, I think, nervous – I’m going to call them attributes. Because they’re attributes to me in the sense that they certainly perk up your ears, or they should cause your ears to perk up.

And maybe for some, the hair on the back of your neck to stand up, because this nervousness is out there and it has changed the tone, the market tone for the time being. Whether we change back to bullish mode, chasing the high-rising stocks, chasing the momentum higher, chasing again all-time record highs, we may. But right now, especially with what happened last week, not so much. So nervousness to me is a prevailing sentiment out there.

And we see that in a bunch of things. Of the 11 major sectors or industry groups in the market, the worst performing last week was consumer discretionary, down 2.7%.

Now, again, call the S&P pretty much flat, but it was the worst of the 11 sectors. That’s a problem, because if questions continue about the state of consumers and their spending going into the holiday season, that’s a problem. Now, we’ve got some earnings coming up this week, and we’ll maybe get a look at some of those consumer trends. But last week was also, I think, predominantly – even though it wasn’t the headline story, it was a secondary story – the week before it had become the headline story about the AI spend and how many companies have spent how much money, and will they ever be able to actually monetize that capex, those capital expenditures.

That was a week before, also was out there last week, but then that sort of pushed into the labor market. We don’t have data because BLS has been shut down because the government was closed, so we don’t know. And then what does that mean for the Fed if they don’t really have data when they’re supposed to be data dependent? Will they not cut come December?

And that was the headline story last week. Well, Fed may not cut and, oh, markets sold off and were sloppy because of that. Well, it wasn’t really because of that. The market doesn’t need another 25 basis point cut to rally. It doesn’t.

That’s not going to move the market higher. It’s the other stuff that’s more important right now. The Fed eventually will cut. Doesn’t matter.

The market hasn’t needed Fed cuts before. They have been doing quite well on earnings. Thank you. So the nervousness last week about the consumer, about the labor market, about the lack of data, I think was the reason that the markets were pretty sloppy.

Yes, the S&P eked out a gain. So again, that nervousness is going to, I think, come home to roost this week because we’ve got earnings, some pretty important earnings. And we’ve got a jobs data number on Thursday. But first up is going to be – I think to set the tone will be NVIDIA.

NVIDIA earnings come out on Wednesday after the close. Now NVIDIA, let’s have a look, shall we? Let’s have a look at the market and NVIDIA as I go through some of these names. NVIDIA and here’s the S&P 500.

As you can see, I just want to point out something here. This is a one-year chart. This is support over here, people. We don’t want to break down below 6,600, 6,625.

We don’t want to break down here. We certainly don’t want to break down below 6,500. That would be pretty dramatic. So there’s support.

We’ve got a little bit of support here. We’ve got a lot more support here around 6,500. We’re at 6,734. We don’t want to see that breakdown.

We’re in this nice uptrending channel. We can continue in there. We can break down. But I think that would create even more nervousness.

And speaking of nervousness, Bitcoin absolutely slammed lately. And this is part of the nervousness. Part of it is the retail nervousness. Some of the retail story stocks have been hit.

Bitcoin has lost $600 billion in value since its October highs. That’s insane. It’s given back all the gains that it made this year. Bitcoin.

Yes, definitely a retail darling play.

Meme stocks, yes, they came back into the, I’m going to call it, in vogue for a little while. Well, there is a gauge, an ETF, actively managed ETF, ticker symbol MEME, and absolutely hammered. So the meme stock, the retail darling, fun stuff to play, not so much. It’s down 40% from its highs.

Forty percent. Now, yes, it’s a pretty newly minted ETF and it is completely speculative, but that gives you some idea of the pain that retail traders are experiencing in terms of if they’re trying to play these meme stocks or getting beaten up trying to catch a ride higher. So a lot of nervousness out there, and we’re seeing it in the way certain things trade. Cryptos, of course, I think may be one of the premier indicators of how nervous things are out there.

Now speaking of NVIDIA, which has its earnings coming out Wednesday after the close, stock’s done a whole lot of nothing. And here we are in the premarket. As you can see, this is premarket, down 1.61%. It looks like it opened around $187 and change.

People, right here, $176. Again, this is support. We don’t want to see – for those of you who own NVIDIA, I sold mine, truth be told, a while back. I’m very happy.

I sold north of $200, sold around $203. I’m out of NVIDIA. And I’m out of NVIDIA because I had a tremendous profit in it and I wasn’t greedy. Now we find out today that Peter Thiel’s firm is out – they sold all their NVIDIA.

We found out last week that SoftBank sold all its NVIDIA. So yeah, listen, I was a little bit ahead of the curve. Yes, pat on my back. But this is very nerve-wracking.

And investors who want NVIDIA with the earnings coming up are likely nervous.

Now me, I’m not nervous. I think if they miss, they can bring the market down and I’ll look for a buying opportunity to get back into NVIDIA at some point. But this is an important pivot point for the market. If NVIDIA fails to attract buying and if it collapses, guess what?

This market’s got a lot lower to go. So NVIDIA earnings on Wednesday are going to be a big deal. We have consumer – I would say sentiment indicators in terms of spending – because we got Home Depot this week, we have Walmart this week, and we have Target this week. Now, those are all important.

How do consumers do? We’ll get a read from the earnings calls, from management as to how they see consumer spending. Now here’s Walmart.

This isn’t a great picture here. Again, some support here, they’ve just gone through it. So markets are nervous because this is what they are looking at. And as far as the AI spend, well, go no further than one of the, I would say to me, meme stocks that represent the AI spend or overspend if you want to – CoreWeave – and bam, that’s pretty ugly, people.

So that’s where we are. That’s where the nervousness abounds. So we’ve got payrolls, nonfarm payrolls on Thursday. And the problem with that is these aren’t October’s numbers.

These are September’s numbers. So yes, they’re old, they’re stale.

But what will they tell us? The expectation, FYI, is for a gain of about 50,000 to perhaps 70,000 jobs. Fifty thousand is the median. Fifty thousand jobs, nonfarm payrolls having been created in September, the month of September.

If we get considerably above that, then the Fed’s not likely to cut. If we get considerably below that, then they’re likely going to cut. Is that going to be enough to move the markets higher? No, I don’t think so.

There’s enough other stuff out there to make me nervous, and I think you guys should be a little bit cautious out there. Those are your Monday takeaways. I’ll catch you guys next week. Cheers.