The Blue Chair Market Minute

Mark’s blue chair idea — borrowed loosely from a certain beach-loving troubadour, that the right seat doesn’t need to move just because the view keeps changing — got tested from a direction nobody expected this week. It wasn’t tariffs, or a Fed meeting, or a jobs report that moved markets most. It was boardroom drama at the single most important company in the artificial-intelligence boom. Through Thursday’s close, a week that opened with one of the best single days of the year gave way to a genuine corporate crisis at Nvidia, a noticeably more hawkish Federal Reserve, and a late jump in oil and bond yields — and yet the S&P 500 still enters Friday up solidly for the week. Friday’s own session was still underway as this edition went to press, so the numbers below run through Thursday. Our blue-chair approach, borrowed from Kenny Chesney: the chair doesn’t move just because the conditions change.

What Actually Happened This Week

Monday was a big, broad rally. Oil prices fell sharply, easing one worry investors had been carrying, and that helped spark a sharp rebound in technology and chip stocks — the Dow jumped 2.15% (about 1,104 points), the S&P 500 gained 2.35%, and the Nasdaq surged 2.74%, with chipmakers AMD and Broadcom among the biggest winners. The one exception was Nvidia itself, which slipped more than 4% after its own board confirmed it had opened an internal investigation into reports that CEO Jensen Huang had become entangled with a foreign intelligence effort — an early, and as it turned out, significant crack in an otherwise strong day.

Tuesday brought the week’s low point. October’s inflation report came in hotter than expected — consumer prices rose 0.4% for the month, above the 0.3% economists had forecast, with the core measure (which strips out food and energy) also running a touch hot. Fed Governor Christopher Waller responded by saying he’d support at least a quarter-point interest-rate increase at the Fed’s December meeting, and left the door open to a larger half-point move if inflation keeps running hot — a notable shift in tone for a Fed that had spent much of the year leaning the other way. The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all fell (down 0.30%, 0.38%, and 0.74% respectively), and the 10-year Treasury yield jumped to 5.00%. Nvidia fell further still, down more than 6%, as additional allegations about Huang’s conduct surfaced and a member of Congress called for a formal investigation.

Wednesday — Veterans Day, with stock markets open but bond markets closed — brought a sharp bounce back. Nasdaq led the way as AI-related shares rebounded (the S&P 500 rose 1.31%, the Nasdaq 1.60%, and the Dow 0.49%), as if the worst of Tuesday’s worries had passed. It hadn’t: Nvidia shares, which had actually risen in the regular session, fell more than 8% after the closing bell on reports that its board was preparing to remove Huang as CEO entirely.

That report became reality on Thursday. Nvidia confirmed that Jensen Huang had resigned as president, CEO, and director, effective immediately — CFO Colette Kress stepped in as interim chief executive, and longtime director Harvey Jones became the company’s first-ever board chair. Markets took the news in stride but not happily: the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq each slipped roughly 0.4%, while, separately, attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and renewed worry over shipping through the Strait of Hormuz pushed oil prices up more than 2.5% and the 10-year Treasury yield to 5.10% — its highest level in weeks. Market volatility, as measured by the VIX, jumped nearly 7%.

Zooming Out: Where This Week Fits

Zoom out past this week’s headlines and 2026 is still a genuinely good year for stocks. The S&P 500 ended 2025 at 6,845.50. It hit its low point for the year on March 30, dropping to 6,343.72 amid an earlier bout of AI and tariff-related worry, then climbed steadily to a record close of 7,818.93 on October 6 — its 28th record-setting close of the year. As of Thursday, November 12’s close, the index sits at 7,592.40: up roughly 11% for the year, and about 3% below that October record, even after this week’s whipsaw.

Under the Hood

Look just beneath Thursday’s headline index numbers and the market’s nerves showed up more clearly elsewhere. Small-cap stocks, as measured by the Russell 2000, fell nearly 1.7% — a noticeably harder hit than the large-cap indexes took, and a sign that investors were trimming risk broadly rather than shrugging the Nvidia news off. Gold, often a safe-haven trade in uncertain weeks, actually fell nearly 3% the same day, which suggests investors were raising cash rather than piling into any one traditional hiding spot. Taken together with the jump in both oil and the 10-year Treasury yield, Thursday had the feel of a market genuinely unsettled by a pileup of separate worries — a boardroom crisis at its most important technology company, a newly hawkish Fed, and fresh geopolitical risk — all landing in the same 24 hours.

What This Means for Your Blue Chair Plan

• One company’s crisis is not your portfolio’s crisis. Nvidia’s leadership upheaval shows exactly why we don’t build portfolios around concentrated bets on a handful of popular names — diversification is what let this week’s drama stay a headline rather than a setback to your plan.
• The week nets out well, even with two rough days in it. Monday’s rally and Wednesday’s rebound did more for the index than Tuesday’s and Thursday’s pullbacks took away — a useful reminder that a bad day, or even two, rarely tells the whole story.
• A newly hawkish Fed doesn’t call for a new plan. This week’s hotter inflation report and the Fed’s new openness to a December rate increase is exactly the kind of shift our Income Bucket is built to absorb without forcing a change to your distribution schedule.
• Headlines you can’t predict are precisely why the chair doesn’t move. Oil’s late-week jump on Middle East tension is a reminder that markets respond to news nobody saw coming — which is the whole point of a plan built to hold its shape regardless.

Our blue-chair approach, borrowed from Kenny Chesney: the chair doesn’t move just because the conditions change.

Looking Ahead to Next Week

Friday’s session still has to finish before this week is fully in the books, with markets digesting the Nvidia leadership change against a backdrop of higher yields and a jumpier oil market. Wall Street’s own early read on the transition is split. KeyBanc analyst John Vinh called Colette Kress’s move to interim CEO “constructive,” pointing to her tenure as CFO since 2013 and her deep knowledge of the business. Baird analyst Tristan Gerra was more cautious, writing that the episode “hasn’t hit its bottom yet” and flagging further risks, including the possibility of more senior-leadership departures, inventory-related charges, and litigation. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon cut his price target on the stock from $400 to $200 and downgraded it from Outperform to Market Perform, citing “considerable uncertainty around further newsflow” and real doubt about whether any new CEO can “truly fill Jensen’s shoes” — while still calling the shares “extremely cheap” if that uncertainty clears. That split view is likely to keep Nvidia, and quite possibly the broader chip and AI-infrastructure trade around it, more volatile than usual heading into the company’s third-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, November 17 — alongside results from Cisco and Applied Materials, and the first real test of how the market values Nvidia’s business on its own, apart from the man who built it. We’ll also be listening for more Fed speakers as markets digest this week’s more hawkish tone ahead of the central bank’s December 9–10 meeting, plus fresh retail-sales data that will help clarify how the consumer is holding up heading into the holidays.