Key Takeaways This Week
- NVDA pulled the trigger and took the entire market with it, turning a clean earnings beat into a bloodbath
- Key indexes tagged their support zones on Friday and delivered a sharp rebound that reminded everyone buyers still exist
- The VIX signal finally materialized, which means pullbacks can be bought, but stops still matter more than the signal itself
- A holiday shortened week shifts Black Friday from markets to retailers
- Last week’s movers: HD, PDD, GOOGL, NVDA and AVGO
- Earnings to watch this week: ADI, BABA, DELL, WDAY and DE
1. Market Overview
The week opened with a market that already looked uneasy before Nvidia even spoke, and by midweek it finally cracked. What should have been a straightforward setup for follow through buying turned into another reminder that bears are alive and kicking. Stocks slid almost 2% across the major indexes, Bitcoin sliced below the 85000 key support area like nothing was there and dragged sentiment with it, and the Nasdaq logged its weakest stretch since early summer as traders bailed on anything tied to AI or high beta. The irony was that the biggest event of the week delivered everything bulls wanted and still failed to rescue the tape. When a market sells good news this aggressively, it is telling you something about positioning, not fundamentals.
Nvidia’s earnings were the centerpiece and they lived up to the hype. Revenue up 62% year over year to 57B. Data center revenue up 66% to 51.2B. Guidance near 65B for the January quarter excluding China entirely. Networking sales surging 162% year over year. Blackwell already sold out. Cloud GPU capacity fully booked. Growth accelerating for the first time in almost 2 years. The kind of quarter that would have melted faces in any other cycle. Yet by the next morning the Nasdaq was down more than 2% and the stock gave back its post earnings spike almost immediately. That was not a verdict on Nvidia. It was a verdict on a market that has been leaning too hard on a single narrative for too long.
The concern is not about Nvidia’s numbers. Those were exceptional. The concern is about everything orbiting it. AI capex continues to expand at a pace that forces credit markets to absorb rising debt loads faster than revenue catch up. The Bitcoin slide amplified margin pressure on the speculative end of the tape. And the broad selloff following Nvidia’s blowout showed that the trade is now struggling under its own weight. Investors are questioning whether the AI cycle can maintain its current velocity without hitting a wall of financing constraints. And with Bitcoin tumbling more than 10% on the week, the risk off tone found a convenient accelerant. Crypto weakness rarely stays contained. It bleeds into liquidity pockets that broader markets quietly depend on.
By Thursday, the tape cracked in familiar places. The volatility spiked toward 26, the highest since April. Profit taking in the high valuation AI names became wild. Some traders blamed forced unwinds linked to the Bitcoin drawdown. Others pointed to exhaustion after a year of concentrated leadership with too many investors clustered in the same trades. Either way, the market finally behaved like one that remembers gravity.
And yet, as always, the other side showed up quickly. Friday’s session saw nearly 80% of S&P 500 constituents finish green as supportive commentary from the New York regional president reignited hopes for a December cut. The rebound did not erase the damage, but it did show buyers have not vanished. They are just not willing to chase strength anymore. The tape now trades like a battleground between dip buyers defending every 10-20 point slide and sellers of strength fading every bounce. Strategists call it violently flat. Sharp intraday swings. No real directional resolution. A market that wants to go somewhere but cannot pick a direction until the next catalyst forces its hand.
The Fed sits in the background of all of this, even if it made no policy moves. Odds of a December cut fell early in the week and then doubled within 48 hours after the New York regional president signaled room for further adjustment. A delayed jobs report that beat headline expectations with 119000 new jobs but weakened underneath added to the uncertainty. Unemployment rose to 4.4%. Prior months were revised lower. Wage signals softened. The economy still tracks near 3% to 4% quarterly growth, but the policy fog thickened as officials split between those warning against early easing and those arguing that restrictive conditions are biting harder than the headline data suggests. And with markets closed for Thanksgiving and no fresh CPI or jobs report before the December meeting, traders remain stuck navigating with incomplete information.
This is happening alongside global liquidity shifts that deserve more attention. Japan’s currency weakness and rising bond yields open the door to potential intervention. Any move to stabilize the yen near 160 would require selling Treasuries, withdrawing dollar liquidity at a moment when Western deficits are already testing supply. The market is not priced for liquidity tightening from abroad, but the setup is there if Japanese policymakers decide the currency slide has gone far enough.
All of this lands in a market entering late November with seasonal tailwinds but poor momentum. The S&P 500 is on track for its weakest November since 2008, an uncomfortable stat in a year defined by concentration and narrative dependence. Earnings season is basically done. Roughly 95% of companies have reported. More than 80% beat EPS estimates. Roughly 75% beat on sales. Yet price reactions remain lifeless. The good news has been sold. The bad news is getting amplified. And the one company capable of resetting sentiment just delivered a monster quarter that the market shrugged off.
So the question now is whether Nvidia’s results eventually calm the tape or whether this week was the first real sign that the AI trade is maturing into something less forgiving. The AI infrastructure buildout is still accelerating. There is no evidence that hyperscalers are slowing purchases. But when Bitcoin drops more than 10%, volatility spikes and the market sells off after the cleanest set of numbers of the entire quarter, it is clear the balance has shifted. The next move will be about positioning more than valuation, and the tape knows it.
On the bright side we finally got a proper VIX signal, and this time it actually triggered:
On Thursday both SPX and VIX closed outside their bands, the exact setup required to start the sequence. On Friday both closed back inside, completing the pattern and confirming the signal. That matters because most of the time the market only brushes the setup, front runs it, or misses by a fraction. This one printed cleanly.
It is a powerful technical reversal signal. It often marks the point where fear exhausts itself and price starts to recalibrate. But like everything else in markets, it is still a probability setup. Nothing is guaranteed in this business. Even the best signals fail, and even the cleanest bottoms can be followed by several more. There is still a non zero chance this bottom simply joins the list of recent ones as we continue the slow staircase lower, and trying to guess which bottom is the bottom is usually the fastest way to meet the next one unprepared.
That is why it is usually safer to buy the next pullback rather than chase the first bounce. Let the market test the signal. Let the tape prove it. And above all, mind your stops, know your risks, and remember that this is a marathon, not a 100x sprint and early retirement story.
Read the rest: https://priceactionplaybook.substack.com/p/weekly-playbook-november-24th
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