Here are 4 major moments that drove the stock market last week

CNBC Finance

Dec 13, 2025

4 min read

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The S & P 500 ran into a brick wall Friday and finished the week lower, just one day after closing at a record high. The rotation out of tech stocks, which supported the Dow , was on full display. The across-the-board rally on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the third time this year was long forgotten. .SPX .IXIC,.DJI 5D mountain S & P 500, Nasdaq and Dow last week For the week, the broad-market S & P 500 lost roughly 0.6%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 1.6%, breaking a two-week win streak. The sector shuffle that made materials, financials, and industrials weekly winners â and communications services and information technology weekly losers â pushed the Dow 1% higher last week, its third consecutive weekly gain. Despite December historically being a strong month, the S & P 500 and Nasdaq are down 0.3% and 0.7%, respectively. The Dow is up nearly 1.6%. Perhaps the big man will bail out Wall Street. The so-called Santa Claus rally , a seasonal pattern that occurs in the final five trading days of the year and the first two of the new year, would begin on Dec. 19. Until then, here are four significant moments that drove the market last week. 1. Broad(com) worries Friday's market was slammed by tech selling, led by Broadcom 's 11.5% plunge. The chipmaker's quarterly beat and raise on Thursday were overshadowed by misinterpreted remarks from management during the earnings call. The Broadcom hit stoked AI-stock valuation worries that have been simmering. During the sell-off on Friday morning, Jim Cramer said the custom chipmaker's business was "on fire," and that the decline could be a buying opportunity. Broadcom was our worst performer of the week, followed by Meta Platforms and Nvidia . 2. Tarnished Oracle The second session sell-off of Oracle on Friday didn't help. The stock was crushed nearly 11% on Thursday following a quarterly sales miss, a disappointing guidance update, and an increased spending outlook. The magnitude of the stock decline was compounded by what management did not address on Wednesday evening's conference call: OpenAI's ability to fulfill its massive commitments to purchase AI computing power from Oracle. On Friday, shares sank another 4.5% after Bloomberg reported that Oracle was pushing back the completion dates for some data centers it is completing for OpenAI. Oracle pushed back , asserting "all milestones remain on track." 3. Nvidia gets China OK While Nvidia caught shrapnel from AI trade worries, the all-purpose artificial intelligence chip king received long-awaited good news last week. After Monday's close, President Donald Trump said on social media that Nvidia will be allowed to ship its second-best H200 chips to "approved customers in China," and the U.S. government would take a 25% cut. Nvidia reached a deal in August with the U.S. government to provide 15% of made-for-China, throttled-down H20 sales in exchange for export licenses. It turns out China did not want the H20s. The question of whether China will want H200s was debated all week. 4. Powerful guidance On the industrial side of the AI trade, GE Vernova was our top performer despite Friday's 4.6% decline. The energy equipment company, whose products and services help power AI data centers, closed at a record high Wednesday on incredibly positive guidance all the way out to fiscal 2028. CEO Scott Strazik, on CNBC, amplified the compelling near- and long-term growth story that management outlined at Tuesday evening's investor meeting. On Wednesday, we raised our GE Vernova price target to $800 per share from $700, and reiterated our buy-equivalent 1 rating. The Honeywell spinoff, Solstice Advanced Materials , and Dover were also weekly winners. (Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long AVOG, META, NVDA, GEV, SOLS, DOV. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.

Source: CNBC Finance

Published

December 13, 2025

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