The 7-Year Car Loan Trap | Hollywood’s $1.5B Reboot | AI’s Mega Deal Fizzles

The morning’s anxiety turned into afternoon amnesia.

The Dow ripped 550 points higher after the Senate finally greenlit a deal to end the government shutdown, even as the Nasdaq limped under the weight of fading AI stocks. 

Relief washed over the tape, but it felt less like conviction and more like exhaustion wearing a smile.

Nvidia slipped 3% after SoftBank confirmed its $5.8B exit, funneling the cash into OpenAI and the Stargate project. 

Meanwhile, gold blew past $4,100, sending miners like AngloGold (+7%) and Newmont (+2%) surging as traders quietly rotated from silicon to safe havens.

The market’s mood is almost manic: exuberant on policy relief, wary on earnings, and numb to risk. 

The government’s back on, data will flow again, and yet the smartest money seems to be moving underground… into hard assets and hedges.

Investor Signal

Today’s rally looks more like decompression than direction. 

The risk-on tone hides a split screen: institutional money hedging with gold while retail traders chase AI dips. 

Relief is bullish and rotation is smarter.

AI isn’t a tech trend – it’s a full-blown, multi-trillion dollar race.

And these 10 companies are already pulling ahead.

One dominates AI hardware with a full-stack platform and rising analyst targets.

Another ships accelerators to major hyperscalers with ~28% revenue growth ahead.

Get those tickers and 7 more in The 10 Best AI Stocks to Own in 2025 for free today.

The market’s message is clear: if you’re spending on AI, you’d better be rich enough to survive it.

This earnings season turned the hype cycle into a hierarchy. 

Alphabet and Amazon raised capex guidance, and got rewarded. DoorDash, Duolingo, and Roblox did the same, and got obliterated.

DoorDash plunged 17%, its worst day since going public, after promising to spend “several hundred million” on new tech and autonomous delivery. 

Duolingo lost a quarter of its value chasing user growth over profits. Roblox cratered 16% after pledging more money to safety and infrastructure. 

Their sin? Investing without infinite patience, or infinite cash.

“Investors don’t like investment cycles,” said Evercore’s Mark Mahaney. But that’s only half the truth. 

They love investment cycles when Amazon or Google run them. When trillion-dollar balance sheets build AI empires, it’s “vision.” When mid-caps do it, it’s “margin compression.”

Meta sits somewhere in between, spending $72 billion on capex without a cloud business to justify it, and losing 11% for its trouble. Wall Street is effectively grading AI bets by net worth, not strategy.

Deeper Read

This is the new divide in Silicon Valley: the builders versus the believers. The hyperscalers are buying the future wholesale; everyone else is renting hope.

AI has become a balance-sheet privilege, and innovation without scale now trades like recklessness. The irony is that the very companies being punished for spending are the ones actually innovating, but without the war chest to absorb the burn, progress looks like panic. 

Investors aren’t funding vision anymore; they’re funding survivability, and the scoreboard now measures cash flow, not code.

Investor Signal

AI is the new leverage. 

Giants like Amazon and Alphabet can borrow against time; smaller players can’t. 

The next phase of this boom won’t be about who builds faster, but who can afford to wait. Watch for capital efficiency, not ambition, to become the new multiple driver. 

The companies that turn AI from cost center to profit engine first will own the next decade… everyone else will be a line item on their balance sheets.

Wall Street loves a good AI headline… until it looks under the hood.

Nebius Group just locked in a five-year, $3 billion deal with Meta to supply AI infrastructure, a partnership that could double its annual revenue overnight. 

But investors didn’t cheer…it turns out even triple-digit growth can’t outrun widening losses. The stock popped early, then fizzled, as traders weighed hypergrowth against hemorrhaging cash.

Q3 revenue hit $146.1 million, up 355% year-over-year, but that still missed lofty expectations of $155 million. Losses ballooned as spending surged on data centers and hardware, with adjusted EBITDA down 90% and net losses up 175%. 

Analysts were quick to defend the move, calling it “foundational burn,” money spent now to own the future, but patience has a shelf life.

With $4.8 billion in cash and bullish institutional inflows (four buys for every sell), Nebius isn’t in trouble yet. 

Still, the company’s value pitch depends on turning infrastructure into income faster than dilution hits the door.

Deeper Read

The Meta deal cements Nebius as a serious player in the AI compute arms race—but also exposes the fragility of the model. Revenue is surging, but cash flow is chained to capital intensity. 

This isn’t a software margin story; it’s an industrial one.

Investor Signal

Nebius is the new litmus test for AI realism. 

If it can scale without bleeding dry, it becomes the next Nvidia-adjacent darling. If not, it’s another warning shot that in the AI boom, growth is cheap… and capital isn’t.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone hit 50M+ users even before global satellite coverage.

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Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur. The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period. The offering is only open to accredited investors.

Something unusual happened at Schwab’s biggest advisor conference this year: the CEO sounded more like a cultural critic than a banker. 

Rick Wurster, barely a year into the job, used his keynote to call out one of Wall Street’s fastest-spreading fads — prediction markets — and the brokers feeding it.

“I just don’t want young people thinking betting on Monday Night Football is the same as buying stocks,” Wurster told 5,200 advisors. 

Behind the polite phrasing sat a clear shot at rivals like Robinhood, Webull, and Interactive Brokers, which now let users wager on everything from election outcomes to inflation prints. 

The line between portfolio and parlay is getting blurry, and Schwab’s chief doesn’t like where it’s headed.

He has reason to worry. 

U.S. gambling revenue hit $51 billion through August, up nearly 9% year-over-year, and prediction markets are skirting state taxes under federal commodity-futures rules. 

Robinhood’s new Kalshi partnership is already generating $100 million in annualized revenue, with DraftKings building its own platform. If even 20% of sportsbook volume migrates, analysts estimate an $8-billion market by 2030.

Wurster insists he’s not anti-gambling, just anti-blur. Schwab won’t join the hype, betting instead on wealth management and alternative assets, businesses built on compounding, not coin flips.

Deeper Read

Wurster’s stance is market positioning. 

The “financialization of fun” threatens firms that still preach patience, and Schwab is drawing its moat in ethics as much as in yield. 

If trading is dopamine and investing is discipline, the industry’s next war may be fought over attention, not returns.

Investor Signal

As brokers chase betting revenue, Schwab is selling trust. 

It’s a slower trade, but one that compounds longer than any parlay. The winners of this cycle won’t be the flashiest apps, they’ll be the ones investors still respect when the odds turn.

David Ellison isn’t inheriting Hollywood, he’s trying to rebuild it from the wreckage.

Barely months after merging Paramount and Skydance, the 41-year-old CEO is cutting thousands of jobs, burning cash, and promising that the studio behind Top Gun and Mission: Impossible can rise again as a streaming-age powerhouse. 

The market seems to believe him… for now. Shares jumped 8%, capping a 30% rally since the merger closed.

Ellison’s playbook reads like a cross between Silicon Valley scale and old-school studio swagger: a $1.5 billion investment push into streaming and film, 15 theatrical releases planned for 2026, and headline grabs like a Timothée Chalamet-led heist flick, a South Park mega-deal, and talks to bring Call of Duty to the big screen. 

There’s even chatter of a Warner Bros. Discovery takeover, yes, including Harry Potter and DC.

But beneath the flash, the math still bites. 

The company raised its savings target to $3 billion and slashed 1,600 jobs this week, on top of earlier cuts. 

Analysts are split: MoffettNathanson praised the focus on “North Star” priorities, streaming scale and efficiency, but warned that cash drag could delay a return to investment-grade credit.

Deeper Read

Ellison’s Hollywood is less about nostalgia and more about velocity. 

He’s betting that consolidation, IP leverage, and unified streaming can outmuscle Disney’s fatigue and Netflix’s saturation. 

The risk? That transformation burns through cash faster than audiences return.

Investor Signal

Paramount Skydance is now the market’s new test case for media reinvention. 

Execution, not vision, will decide whether Ellison’s empire becomes Hollywood’s comeback, or its next cautionary tale. For now, Wall Street’s buying the story. 

The box office is next.

NVIDIA’s AI chips use huge amounts of power.

But a new chip, powered by “TF3” — could cut energy use by 99%…

And run 10 million times more efficiently.

One U.S. company has cornered the TF3 market.

They control the only commercial foundry in America.

And at under $20 a share, it’s a ground-floor shot at the next tech giant.

Everything you need to know in this new presentation.

It’s the new American dream… on layaway.

The average new car price has blown past $50,000, and buyers are fighting back with debt. 

According to Edmunds, the average auto loan now runs 69 months, while a record 22% of new buyers are locking into 84-month loans… that’s seven years of payments for something that starts depreciating the second it leaves the lot.

The math is ugly: on a $50,000 car with 10% down and a 7% APR, a 48-month loan costs $6,724 in interest, while an 84-month one costs $12,050 — a $5,326 difference just for stretching the term. 

And that’s before factoring in the higher rates lenders tack on for longer loans, often “nearly a point and a half higher,” says Way.com’s Ezra Peterson.

Financial planners call it the “warranty trap.” Buyers will still be paying long after coverage expires, juggling repair bills and car payments at once. 

Worse, depreciation guarantees that many end up underwater, owing more than the car is worth, if they need to sell early or suffer an accident.

Deeper Read

The auto market’s affordability crisis is rewriting financial behavior: buyers are thinking monthly, not total cost. 

That mindset keeps showrooms busy, but traps millions in rolling debt cycles that outlast their cars.

Investor Signal

Longer loans mean delayed trade-ins and a slower replacement cycle, a drag on automakers’ margins and dealership turnover. 

The next credit crunch may not start in housing—it could start in the driveway.

The market exhaled… and might have overdone it.

The shutdown deal lifted spirits, but the fine print only funds Washington until January. Nvidia’s slide shows how fast AI euphoria can turn to second-guessing, while gold’s breakout whispers that safety is back in style.

Underneath the green screens, the tape looks tired: liquidity thinning, leadership narrowing, and sentiment wobbling between hope and hedge. 

The question isn’t whether the rally can hold, it’s whether anyone believes it should.

Evening takeaway: the shutdown’s over, but the reset isn’t. 

The market’s not rising on strength, it’s floating on relief. 

And relief, as every trader knows, is the most temporary of rallies.