The Fed's Whiplash Week: How Williams Saved Markets (For Now)

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🧠 Corporate Overview

The market just survived one of its most hectic weeks in recent memory. Thursday's brutal sell-off (sparked by AI valuation fears and Fed hawkishness) gave way to Friday's relief rally after New York Fed President John Williams signaled a December rate cut wasn't off the table.

The damage was real:

• The S&P 500 ended Friday up 0.1%, masking a week-to-date decline of more than 2%

• The Dow dropped almost 3% for the week

• The Nasdaq shed around 3% despite Friday's attempted recovery

This is what happens when consensus gets too comfortable. The AI trade, which had been bulletproof for 18 months, finally cracked under its own weight. Nvidia crushed earnings, yet the stock gave up a 5% gain and fell 3.2% to $180.64. Bitcoin plunged from $126,000 to around $82,000–$83,000. Meanwhile, oil collapsed to $57.77 on hopes of a Russia-Ukraine peace deal, and gold retreated to $4,043.61 as the dollar flexed.

We're witnessing the first real repricing of AI infrastructure since ChatGPT launched. Not a bubble pop — a reality check. The question now is whether defensive rotation has legs, or if this is just another dip-buying opportunity for the tech faithful.

💡 Stock of the Week: Eli Lilly (LLY)

Ticker: NYSE:LLY | Sector: Healthcare / Pharmaceuticals | Market Cap: $1 trillion (first healthcare company to reach this milestone) | Dividend Yield: ~0.6%

While tech melts down and macro uncertainty reigns, Eli Lilly hit the $1 trillion mark on Friday, becoming the first healthcare company ever to join the club. This isn't a meme stock rally — it's structural dominance in the fastest-growing pharmaceutical category of the decade: GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes drugs.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• Mounjaro revenue: $6.52 billion in Q3, up 109% year-over-year

• Zepbound sales: $3.59 billion during the period, a 184% spike

• Market dominance: Zepbound prescriptions tripled year-over-year, capturing 63% share of branded weight loss drug prescriptions

• Raised guidance: Full-year revenue now $63-65 billion, up from $60-62 billion

This is defensive with offensive upside. Healthcare is rotating into favor as investors flee overvalued tech, yet Lilly is growing like a mid-cap biotech. The obesity drug market is projected to hit $100 billion by 2030, and Lilly has opened a commanding lead over Novo Nordisk. Blackwell might be sold out, but so is Zepbound.

Risks to watch:

• Pricing pressure from Medicare negotiations

• Supply chain constraints limiting distribution

• Competitive threats from Viking Therapeutics' pipeline

But given Lilly's manufacturing scale and brand moat, these are manageable headwinds.

Verdict: We're long because it's essential. In a market where defensive positioning meets secular growth, Lilly checks every box. It trades at 29x forward earnings — hardly cheap, but justified given triple-digit revenue growth in its core franchise.

📉 Market Snapshot (Week of November 17-21, 2025)

** Approximate EOW close.

The breadth was ugly. On Thursday, declining stocks outpaced advancers 2,157 to 621 on the NYSE, accounting for almost 76% of all issues traded. New NYSE 52-week lows swamped new highs, 174 to 50. This is capitulation-lite — not a full flush, but enough pain to reset sentiment. The fact that yields dropped Friday suggests bond markets are pricing in slower growth, not just a Fed pivot.

📊 Market Commentary

The Nvidia Paradox: Great Earnings, Terrible Price Action

Nvidia delivered a monster quarter:

• Revenue: $57 billion in Q3, up 62% year-over-year

• Beat estimates: Ahead of the $54.9 billion Wall Street projected

• CEO Jensen Huang declared: "Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out"

So why did the stock crater? Because the market finally woke up to what skeptics have been screaming about for months: circular AI spending.

The red flags are mounting:

• Concerns regarding vendor financing loops are increasing

• Questions about financial sustainability of several key AI players persist

• Recent supply side issues have increased

Hyperscalers are spending $300 billion annually on AI infrastructure, much of it financed through debt, with no clear path to profitability for most AI applications. This isn't a tech bubble in the 2000 sense — there's real revenue and real demand. But valuations assumed infinite runway, and now investors are demanding proof that AI capex translates to AI cash flow. That's a harder sell.

Fed Whiplash: From "Maybe No December Cut" to "Definitely Maybe"

The week started with FOMC minutes signaling hawkishness. Several officials "indicated that they did not necessarily view another 0.25% reduction as likely to be appropriate at the December meeting". By Thursday, markets had priced in just a 33% chance of a December cut.

Then came Williams. "I still see room for a further adjustment in the near term to the target range for the federal funds rate to move the stance of policy closer to the range of neutral", he said. Traders now see a better than 72% probability of another quarter percentage point reduction at the Dec. 9-10 meeting.

This is classic Fed two-step:

• Leak hawkish notes to cool markets

• Have a dove calm things down before real damage sets in

• Maintain "optionality" to pivot either direction

Williams is part of the "leadership troika" with Powell and Jefferson, so his comments carry weight. But here's the catch: Dallas Fed President Lorie Logan took a sharply different tack, saying she would have opposed the October cut — and possibly September's as well.

The Fed is deeply divided. That means volatility persists.

Commodities Collapse: Peace Premium Evaporates

Oil is getting crushed:

• Brent crude: Trading around $62 per barrel

• WTI crude: In the $57.5–58.0 range

• Down roughly 2% from Thursday's close

The catalyst? Reports from Reuters and Bloomberg say Washington has circulated a draft peace framework to Kyiv and Moscow aimed at ending the three-year war.

If peace materializes, the "war premium" in commodities disappears overnight. Couple that with OPEC+ rumors of output increases, and you have the recipe for $50 oil by Q1 2026. This matters for inflation — lower energy costs give the Fed cover to cut rates. But it also signals weaker global growth expectations.

Crypto's Reality Check: Bitcoin's $40,000 Plunge

The carnage in crypto was spectacular:

• Bitcoin slid from $120K to $82K with barely any relief

• Liquidations: Around $2 billion in crypto positions wiped out

• ETF outflows: U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded about $3.79 billion in net outflows in November, the largest monthly outflow since these funds launched

This is what happens when the "Fed put" evaporates. Bitcoin rallied on rate cut expectations; when those expectations reversed, leveraged longs got liquidated. The repricing isn't over.

Defensive Rotation: Real or Head Fake?

The sector performance tells a clear story:

• In 2025, the S&P 500 has underperformed traditional defensive sectors—healthcare, consumer staples and utilities

• On Tuesday, the only two sectors to close higher were Consumer Staples (XLP) and Utilities (XLU)

Is this the start of a sustained rotation, or just a two-week blip?

The case for defensives:

• Recession odds are rising (J.P. Morgan pegs it at 60%)

• Tariff uncertainty is building

• Tech valuations are stretched

• Rate cuts favor dividend-paying defensive stocks

The case against:

• Historically, defensive outperformance is short-lived in bull markets

• If the Fed cuts in December, risk-on resumes

• AI isn't dead, just repricing

• Small caps and value have struggled despite rotation narrative

Overweight defensives through year-end, but stay nimble. This isn't 2008 — it's a vol spike, not a credit crisis.

🧭 Tactical Map: Where to Lean In

• Healthcare defensive plays: Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and CVS for structural growth + safety

• Utilities with pricing power: NextEra, Duke Energy for 3%+ yields in a lower-rate environment

• Energy shorts or hedges: If peace talks gain traction, oil has another 10-15% downside

• Selective tech on dips: Nvidia, Oracle, and Palantir are oversold but require tight stops

• Gold as insurance: Not a trade, but 5-10% portfolio allocation protects against geopolitical shocks

🔍 Theme to Watch: The End of Free Money for AI

For two years, AI infrastructure spending operated in a fantasy world:

• Hyperscalers borrowed at low rates

• VCs threw cash at anything with "AI" in the pitch deck

• Nvidia couldn't manufacture chips fast enough

That's changing.

While AI compute demand is likely to scale higher, the financing environment is tightening. Corporate bond spreads need to widen, and suddenly investors care about cash-on-cash returns, not just "strategic positioning."

This doesn't kill AI — it makes it real:

• Winners: Companies with actual revenue models (Anthropic, OpenAI enterprise, Salesforce AI) will thrive

• Losers: Zombie startups burning $50M/month on GPUs will die

• Investors: Need to be extremely selective — not all AI exposure is created equal

Why it matters: If AI capex growth slows from 50% annually to 20%, Nvidia's revenue projections get cut in half. That's why the stock sold off despite great earnings. The market is front-running a slowdown that may or may not materialize. Opportunity for contrarians, trap for momentum chasers.

📅 Forward View: November 25-29, 2025

Key Events:

Tuesday (Nov 26):

• Initial jobless claims — watch for shutdown-related distortions

Wednesday (Nov 27):

• Early close for holiday

• Light volume, don't overinterpret moves

Thursday (Nov 28):

• Thanksgiving — markets closed

Friday (Nov 29):

• Markets early close* - U.S.

Key levels:

• S&P 500 support: 6,500 (psychological). Break below and we test 6,400

• 10Y yield resistance: 4.15%. Break above signals Fed pause fears

• Nasdaq support: 22,000. Losing this opens 21,500

💬 Final Words

This was the week the AI trade blinked. Not died — blinked. The repricing from "infinite capex growth" to "show me the ROI" is healthy, even if it hurts. But make no mistake: the Fed is still navigating blind (no October jobs data thanks to the shutdown), oil is collapsing on peace hopes, and crypto just got a reality check.

Our edge at Daly AM? We don't panic-sell into headlines or YOLO into hype. We build systematic, data-driven strategies that adapt when consensus breaks.

— The Daly AM Team

Disclosures: This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always conduct your own due diligence or consult with a financial advisor before making investment decisions.