You know that scene in Batman Begins where Wayne crawls out of the bat-filled pit, completely wrecked, and Alfred asks "Why do we fall, sir?" — "So we can learn to pick ourselves up"?
Yeah. Wall Street fell, took a beating, and last week decided to get back up. But don't kid yourself: the ground is still covered in broken glass.
The Supreme Court's Slap in Trump's Face
Friday. U.S. Supreme Court. 6 to 3. Struck down most of Trump's tariff agenda.
Read that again: six to three. It wasn't close. It was a legal beatdown.
The majority essentially wrote: "No president in history has used this statute to impose tariffs, much less tariffs of this magnitude and scope." And they capped it off with a line that should be printed on a poster: "He cannot."
The S&P 500 climbed 0.7% on Friday alone. But before you go out buying everything with a ticker symbol, pay attention to the detail the mainstream market loves to hide: Trump didn't back down. Hours after the ruling, he threatened 10% global tariffs. On Saturday, he posted more about tariffs on Truth Social. The guy is the Joker — you think you've got him cornered, and he pulls another card out of his sleeve.
Nike is the perfect example. The company had already projected $1.5 billion in negative tariff impact for this fiscal year. It popped on the Supreme Court news and... closed down 0.3%. The market quickly figured out that Trump will find alternative routes to ram those tariffs down everyone's throat. Costco, Procter & Gamble, TJX, Amazon — all in the crosshairs.
Tuesday is the State of the Union address. Get your popcorn ready. And your hedge.
Big Tech Woke Up — and Came Hungry
If you sold big tech in the panic of the last few weeks, my condolences. The crew came back swinging.
Meta announced on Tuesday that it will use millions of Nvidia chips in its data centers. Millions. Not thousands. The narrative of insatiable AI demand didn't die — it took a nap and woke up pissed off.
Meta rose 2.5% for the week. Nvidia, 3.8%.
But the real star was Amazon: +5.6%. The reason? A regulatory filing showed that Bill Ackman's Pershing Square significantly increased its position in the fourth quarter. When a guy with Ackman's track record puts chips on the table, the market listens. Skin in the game, as Taleb would say.
Alphabet had been getting roughed up post-earnings, dragged down in an annoying downtrend. But the Investing Club crew took advantage of the dip to buy more — arguing the pullback was unjustified. Next session? Rally. Closed the week +3%. Sometimes the simplest play is the hardest one: buying when it hurts.
And then there's Corning, which isn't a megacap but rides the AI wave thanks to fiber optic cables for data centers. Up 4.5% for the week. AI infrastructure isn't just fancy chips — it's cables, it's energy, it's digital bricks. If you understand that, you're a few steps ahead.
The Canary in the Private Credit Mine
Now for the part nobody wants to discuss at happy hour on Wall Street (or São Paulo's Faria Lima, for that matter).
Blue Owl Capital. Never heard of it? You should have. The asset manager permanently restricted redemptions from its private credit fund for retail investors. Permanently. The stock dropped nearly 6% on Thursday.
Some on Wall Street are already calling Blue Owl the "canary in the coal mine" — that signal that something rotten is happening beneath the surface of the private credit market, which has attracted billions in recent years.
Damn, pay attention to this. Private credit became the darling of allocators because it promised superior returns with "low volatility." You know what else promised low volatility? Subprime in 2006. Synthetic CDOs in 2007. Volatility doesn't disappear — it hides until the moment it doesn't anymore.
The big banks in the Investing Club portfolio — Wells Fargo (+2%), Goldman Sachs (+1.9%), Capital One (+0.5%) — held firm. But if the private credit crisis escalates, it'll splash on everyone. There's no quarantine in the financial system.
So What Now?
The Nasdaq snapped five straight weeks of losses. The S&P broke a two-week losing streak. Looks nice on paper.
But the week only had four trading sessions (holiday), and the three forces that drove it — the court ruling, AI hype, and credit stress — are all still unresolved.
Trump isn't going to take his Supreme Court loss quietly. AI demand might be real, but valuations are already pricing in perfection. And private credit... well, when a fund locks the door, it's usually not because everything's fine inside.
The question remains: are you positioned for what's coming, or are you just rooting for the market to keep going up?
Because the market doesn't give a damn about your rooting.
