Welcome to Staten News, where the chips got crushed, the soda got bought, and nobody wants to say the word "hike" out loud.
The S&P 500 fell 1.95% last week. Most of its stocks went up.
Read that again. 339 of the 500 names in the index finished higher, but the Nasdaq dropped 4.48% and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost 11.41%, so the averages took the hit anyway. Money didn't leave the market. It moved across the street.
📉 The loser: Seagate (STX), down 18.39%
Seagate had the worst week of any big name we tracked. SanDisk fell 17.86%, Western Digital lost 16.43% and Micron dropped 14.59%. Storage and memory got taken out back together.
Two hits landed in the same week. China's CXMT reported a denser memory-cell design, the kind of headline that makes investors reprice every memory maker's moat in one afternoon. Then Gartner put out a forecast that more than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure spending could face impairment by 2030.
Translation: the people selling the shovels just heard someone ask whether the gold mine is real.
CoreWeave told the same story louder. The stock went from $82.08 to $61.39 on the week, roughly 25%, including an 11.91% drop on Friday alone. Broadcom fell 9.07%. Nvidia lost 6.61%.
📈 The winner: Walmart (WMT), up 6.70%
No earnings. No product launch. Walmart was simply the stock people buy when they stop trusting the stocks they were holding.
Coca-Cola rose 6.64%. Procter & Gamble gained 5.37%. Consumer staples climbed 5.02% as a sector while tech fell 7.70%, and energy added 4.86% with WTI crude jumping 10.41% to $101.41 a barrel.
That's not a crash. That's a rotation wearing a crash costume.
🔥 The macro problem nobody can rotate out of
September CPI came in at 3.7% year over year, up 0.6% in a single month, per the BLS. Core inflation ran 2.6%. Energy prices are up 20.4% from a year ago. Producer prices jumped 1.3% in September, more than double the 0.6% forecast.
And the 10-year Treasury? It finished the week at 5.097%. That was actually down 14.6 basis points, because scared money runs to bonds even when inflation is running hot.
The Fed's target range sits at 3.75% to 4.00%, and the debate on the table isn't about the next cut. It's about whether there's a hike. Fed officials are in their quiet period now. The next decision lands October 28.
🎬 This week's predicted gainer: Netflix (NFLX)
Netflix reports Tuesday after the close, and the setup is about as clean as earnings setups get.
Back in July, Netflix guided Q3 to $12.86 billion in revenue, a 33.2% operating margin and $0.82 in earnings per share. Wall Street basically copied that homework: consensus sits around $12.88 billion and $0.82. Full-year guidance calls for $51.0 to $51.4 billion in revenue, roughly $3 billion in ad sales and about $12.5 billion in free cash flow.
Because the bar is the company's own number, a small beat clears it. Netflix also has nothing to do with memory chips, AI capex or a Chinese DRAM design. In a week where money went hunting for businesses that just sell a product people pay for every month, that's the whole pitch.
The risk is the full-year guide. If Netflix trims that $51 billion floor, the safe trade stops being safe in one line of a shareholder letter.
🚗 This week's predicted loser: Tesla (TSLA)
Tesla reports Wednesday after the close, and the delivery number is already out. It was good: 486,532 vehicles in Q3 against roughly 462,000 expected.
The rest of the picture is shakier. Energy storage deployments came in at 13.7 GWh against 15.9 GWh expected, and Tesla built fewer cars (464,391) than it delivered. Consensus EPS sits around $0.43 to $0.45, below the $0.50 from a year ago.
The stock already lost 7.31% last week, closing at $354.72 after the Roadster reveal. Deliveries got the headline. Margins decide the reaction.
A stock priced for perfection doesn't need bad news to fall. It just needs to miss good news in the one place everyone is looking.
📅 The rest of the week
Tuesday: Netflix, GM, 3M and RTX report. Housing starts and building permits.
Wednesday: Meta, Tesla, IBM, Texas Instruments and Lam Research report after the close.
Thursday: Procter & Gamble before the open. Weekly jobless claims.
Friday: flash PMIs and final University of Michigan sentiment.
Wednesday night is the real test. Lam Research reports into a chip index that just lost 11% in five days, and Meta reports while everybody is asking who pays for the AI buildout.
This is the week the market finds out whether last week was a rotation or a warning. If Netflix holds and Lam's guidance holds, it was a rotation. If both wobble, the 339 stocks that went up won't be enough to carry the ones that went down.
Sources: BLS Consumer Price Index, Netflix Q2 2026 shareholder letter, Federal Reserve FOMC calendar, Portfolio Terminal week in review
This is not financial advice. Always do your own research.
— The Bandicoots 📉📈