Shares of Robinhood Markets, AppLovin, and Emcor are all rallying in post-market trading on Friday upon news that they’re being added to the S&P 500.

Shares of the brokerage popped 7.2%, the adtech company rose 7.8%, and the construction company was up a more modest 2.7% in the minutes following the announcement.

(Robinhood Markets, Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions.)

Strategy, another stock rumored to be in the running for inclusion in the benchmark US stock index that has been passed over, sank 2.5% in postmarket trading.

It’s been a shortened week, but still a rough one for Lucid. Investor blowback to the luxury EV maker’s 1-for-10 reverse stock split has sent shares to all time lows this week.

After six straight days of closing lower, Wall Street appears to have decided enough is enough and is loading up on Lucid shares on Friday, sending them up 13% in recent trading. As of 2:10pm eastern, Lucid trading volumes were at more than 240% of their 30 day average.

Some of the move could be attributed to traders reading headlines that don’t take into consideration Lucid’s reverse split. Cantor Fitzgerald on Friday slapped a new price target on Lucid of $20, compared to its previous target of $3. Some news outlets (not us!) presented that as an increase. The problem: With the 1-for-10 reverse split in effect, a comparable price target would have been $30. The new $20 target is actually... a cut.

Momentum stocks dragged the market lower Friday, with stocks like Palantir Technologies, SoundHound AI, Rocket Lab, Robinhood Markets, and GE Vernova continuing a recent slide.

(Robinhood Markets, Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company.)

The iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF opened 1% higher and built on those gains before reversing hard early in the session to trade 1% lower as of 11 a.m. ET.

If it closes at these levels, this fund that holds US stocks with the best risk-adjusted trailing returns will have completed a so-called “bearish engulfing candle pattern.” As the name suggests is, this is considered to be a negative technical signal that occurs when, the day after a security rises, it ends up opening above the previous day’s closing price and closes below the previous day’s opening price.

ETFs that track major US stock indexes are higher and short-term yields are falling after the August jobs report continued to confirm the trend of labor market cooling, calcifying bets on a Federal Reserve rate cut this month.

Non-farm payrolls rose by just 22,000 in August, while economists had expected an addition of 75,000. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, in line with estimates. Revisions to the past two months were also negative, but not as severe as in the July report.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF was up 0.3% to session highs in the minutes following the release, while two-year US Treasury yields fell below 3.5%.

A report and market reaction like this suggests traders are embracing the idea that the softening in the US labor market is primarily driven by supply-side factors in light of major changes to net immigration, as recently argued by economists at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, and isn’t a worrying sign that the US economy is on the verge of a recession.

With revisions, June’s non-farm payroll growth is now -13,000. That’s the first month of net job losses since December 2020. And the underemployment rate (or U6, which includes the unemployed, those employed part time who want a full-time job, and those who want a job but aren’t looking for one currently) rose to 8.1%, its highest level since October 2021.

Some see this data as much more concerning than the market reaction implies.

“Since a month or two ago, policy hawks, growth bulls (I call them wrong), have been arguing two things. First, sequential growth should perk up because the weakness in the summer was all a function of uncertainty around Liberation Day. Second, focus on the ratios because the unemployment rate is still low,” Neil Dutta, head of US economics at Renaissance Macro Research, wrote. “Both of these views were wrong as we now know. Employment growth is still cooling (there is no uptick in hours either) and the unemployment rate is rising. Bye Felicia!”

For the stock market, AI has been the rising tide that lifts any boat that can loosely be seen as flying its colors.

But in the genesis of the AI trade this morning — the powerful chip designers of the picks and shovels for this gold rush — there’s a little bit of a zero-sum element at play:

Broadcom is flying up double digits on the reported addition of OpenAI as the major customer that’s ordered $10 billion in custom chips, significantly improving its 2026 revenue outlook in the process.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is down 3% and No. 3 US chip player Advanced Micro Devices is faring even worse, as this news comes one day after analysts at Seaport cut that stock to neutral, saying that its AI accelerator business hasn’t gained much traction yet. The Street had been very optimistic about the prospects for its new line of chips.

AMD and Nvidia both reported quarterly sales that exceeded expectations, with guidance for revenues in the current quarter that were also ahead of estimates. Nevertheless, both stocks fell after reporting results. To get a positive reaction as a major AI chip designer this earnings season, it seems you need to have done something so good for your company that it actually hurts your competitors’ outlooks.

As we’ve noted, Nvidia’s data center revenues are extremely concentrated, with just three customers (one of which is suspected to be OpenAI) making up over half of direct hardware sales. And despite the chip designer’s protestations to the contrary, the AI boom is more supply-constrained than demand-constrained. So it makes sense that hyperscalers aiming to equip themselves with state-of-the-art technology are looking to do so from a variety of major suppliers.

In its latest conference call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang downplayed the threat of custom chips (or ASICs) muscling in on his turf, and highlighted several of the perceived advantages of choosing his company’s products:

“One of the advantages that we have is that NVIDIA is available in every cloud. We're available from every computer company. We're available from the cloud to on-prem to edge to robotics on the same programming model. And so it's sensible that every framework in the world supports NVIDIA. When you're building a new model architecture, releasing it on NVIDIA is most sensible.

And so the diversity of our platform, both in the ability to evolve into any architecture, the fact that we're everywhere, and also we accelerate the entire pipeline. Everything from data processing, to pre-training, to post-training with reinforcement learning, all the way out to inference. And so, when you build a data center with NVIDIA platform in it, the utility of it is best. The lifetime usefulness is much, much longer.”

“Because our performance per dollar is so incredible, you also have extremely great margins. So, the growth opportunity with NVIDIA's architecture and the gross margins opportunity with NVIDIA's architecture is absolutely the best. And so there's a lot of reasons why NVIDIA is chosen by every cloud and every startup and every computer company. We're really a holistic, full-stack solution for AI factories.”

Broadcom shares were as much as ~9% higher in early trading on Friday after the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is set to produce its first AI chips in partnership with Broadcom — seemingly confirming the ChatGPT trailblazer as the customer that Broadcom’s CEO Hock Tan had alluded to on yesterday’s earnings call.

After a modest Q2 earnings beat, shares of Broadcom were doing little of note in postmarket trading until CEO Hock Tan revealed the addition of a new big buyer that has recently added over $10 billion of orders for its AI business. He added that the outlook for 2026 AI revenues would "improve significantly" based on this hefty demand, which quickly sent shares up 3%. The semiconductor giant did not disclose the name of this customer, but people familiar with the matter contacted by the FT confirmed OpenAI as the new client.

Lululemon shares sank 13% in after-hours trading Thursday after the yoga-wear retailer massively slashed its full-year outlook.

Adjusted earnings per share came in at $3.10 for the second quarter, versus Wall Street’s forecast of $2.86. Revenue landed at $2.5 billion, compared with analyst estimates of $2.54 billion.

The real problem: Lululemon heavily cut its full-year guidance, and is now projecting earnings of $12.77 to $12.97 per share, a steep drop from its prior forecast of $14.58 to $14.78, and well shy of Wall Street’s $14.40 estimate.

The retailer faced more margin pressure during the quarter, citing higher markdowns, tariffs, and other costs, though some of that was partially offset by higher pricing and lower product costs.

Lulu shares were down 45% year-to-date before the report.

Broadcom is booming. The chip designer posted a small top and bottom line beat in its fiscal Q3, and the details and its guidance are even more encouraging.

Revenues: $15.95 billion (estimate $15.84 billion)

Adjusted diluted earnings per share: $1.69 (estimate $1.67)

Shares initially whipsawed in reaction to these numbers, but then rallied strongly after CEO Hock Tan said the outlook was for AI revenues to improve “significantly” in fiscal 2026 during the conference call with analysts thanks to the addition of a new big buyer.

“Last quarter, one of these prospects released production orders to Broadcom, and we have accordingly characterized them as a qualified customer for XPUs, and in fact, have secured over $10 billion of orders,” he said. “And reflecting this, we now expect the outlook for fiscal 2026 AI revenue to improve significantly from what we had indicated last quarter.”

Unlike Nvidia, whose data center business came in slightly shy of estimates in its most recent quarter, Broadcom’s AI sales managed to come in ahead of expectations, with $5.2 billion in revenues versus the anticipated $5.1 billion.

For the current quarter, management expects sales of $17.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $11.67 billion. That compares to the Street’s view of $17.05 billion and adjusted EBITDA of $11.3 billion.

And again, its AI business is besting the sell side’s view, with an outlook for $6.2 billion in AI semiconductor revenues versus an expected $5.84 billion.

Shares were up more than 30% year to date heading into this report, slightly trailing Advanced Micro Devices but ahead of industry leader Nvidia.

HP Enterprise shares jumped nearly 4% Thursday afternoon as the market digested the company’s Q3 earnings beat late Wednesday.

The enterprise tech company posted adjusted earnings of $0.44 per share, ahead of the Street’s $0.42 estimate. Revenue came in at $9.1 billion, above analysts’ forecast of $8.8 billion. HPE highlighted strong demand for its AI systems and the company’s recent Juniper Networks acquisition.

For the current quarter, HPE forecast revenue of $9.7 billion to $10.1 billion, bracketing just below the $9.9 billion Street midpoint. The company also guided EPS of $0.56 to $0.60, effectively in line with analyst expectations of $0.58. Margin pressure added to the caution, but optimism is still strong.

“We have grown enterprise AI orders year over year every quarter since the beginning of fiscal 2024,” CEO Antonio Neri said. “From an innovation perspective, we continue to keep pace with new accelerators, technology, and time to market customer demands.”

HPE shares are up over 10% year to date.

It’s no surprise to find a dominant player in a crucial technology is atop the S&P 500 leaderboards this year.

But it is slightly surprising that the technology in question is the disk drive.

Seagate Technology Holdings, a maker of ubiquitous data storage devices known as hard disk drives, has ridden a nearly 50% gain over the last three months to the top of the list of best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year.

Investors have good reason to be impressed. Seagate’s last five quarterly results have beat expectations on both the top and bottom lines, as the company has increasingly tilted its business to provide higher-capacity — and more profitable — disk drives designed for use in AI and cloud computing data centers.

But Seagate’s rise to the top was also aided by recent sputtering in performance from the previous market leader, Palantir, which is down almost 20% since it notched a high on August 12.

Shares of meme stock/online real estate company Opendoor Technologies are up 7% as of 10:15 a.m. ET after President Shrisha Radhakrishna outlined after the close on Wednesday the launch of a community hub to “provide consistent and transparent updates about Opendoor’s business, leadership, and strategy” as well as source questions from its passionate investor base.

Last week, we discussed how Opendoor had a new strategy: embrace and interact with its retail shareholders, who self-affiliate as being part of the “$OPEN Army” and often share their strong feelings on social media about how the company can do better.

This “community hub” is the latest in a series of moves in that direction.

Eric Jackson, head of EMJ Capital and the architect of the rally in the online real estate company, said he met with members of the company earlier this week during a trip to San Francisco at their request.

Board member Adam Bain went on to quote-tweet Jackson’s post, writing, “Grateful for what the retail community has done for @Opendoor and very thankful for @ericjackson’s efforts. The relentless hive mind of ideas and suggestions from him and the OpenArmy are focused from a place of thinking about how to win.”

If there’s a signal in how much traders seem to value the new approach compared to the old leadership, former CEO (and current adviser) Carrie Wheeler has filed notice of her intent to sell 7 million shares (or a little less than half her position) in the company, and it hasn’t even made a dent in the stock price this week.

Texas Instruments is tumbling after its chief financial officer reiterated that strength in the chipmaker’s sales through April included a rush to beat potential tariffs, and that its momentum has slowed since then.

At Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference on Thursday, CFO Rafael Lizardi said:

“The aging orders inside the quarter, which are a good leading indicator, those were pretty strong January through April. And April in particular were really strong and we think some of that was due to the Liberation Day and some of the dynamics that happened there. But then things did slow down after April, or at least didn’t grow as they normally would have month-on-month, and month-on-month again, some of that was the Liberation Day potential pull-ins, and we talked about that at some length at our July earnings release call.”

The comments are adding to investors’ fears that Texas Instruments’ nascent turnaround may be somewhat of a mirage.

CEO Haviv Ilan wasn’t especially definitive in that July conference call on how much demand may have been pulled forward because of customer fears they’d soon face much higher costs due to tariffs:

“We don’t know. I just want to repeat that point. We just have to make assumptions. Customers don’t tell us why they order. We just go through the data and try to decipher it, right? So we just can’t rule out the possibility. And we say there likely could have been some. When you see such a strong behavior in Q2 versus Q1, you have to attribute some of it to the tariff environment.”

Back in June, we flagged that Texas Instruments was one of a handful of companies seemingly very susceptible to having seen a somewhat one-off boost to orders because of changing consumer demand in light of the changing rules of cross-border commerce.

In fact, the main complaint about Texas Instruments’ latest quarterly report from the sell-side community was simply that the vibes were off. Three separate analysts on the conference call noted that, despite financials that were better than expected and relatively solid guidance, Ilan’s “tone” was not too upbeat.

And, speaking of the tone being off...

When asked about inventory management and avoiding any write-offs, Lizardi was willing to countenance the idea that Texas Instruments’ sales in its next fiscal year may be on the softer side of what the chipmaker has penciled in.

“We have a framework for next year’s revenue, $20 billion to $26 billion; we put that out there. If we’re at the lower end of that framework for next year, and you’ll hear more about that in October and January... then we’ll have to adjust our wafer starts down to manage our inventory better,” he said during today’s Q&A.

This is a qualified statement, not a formal tweak to the company’s outlook, but certainly not a particularly encouraging tone to be striking. The Street is already seemingly bracing for a cut to that guidance, as 2026 revenue forecasts currently stand at $19.5 billion, per Bloomberg.