2026-11-14

S&P 500 Closes Down 0.4% Friday, Yet Still Logs Its First Winning Week Since Early October - Nvidia Down Another 13% for the Week

Written & reviewed by the TradeSmrt editorial team · 2026-11-14

In this article

What Happened
Why the Day and the Week Told Opposite Stories - and Why Nvidia Still Can't Find a Floor
What to Take Away From This
FAQ
Sources

What Happened

On the surface, Friday, November 13 looked like an ordinary down day on Wall Street. The S&P 500 closed at 7,561.67, down 30.73 points, or 0.40%. The Nasdaq Composite fell harder, losing 229.82 points, or 0.91%, to finish at 25,136.27. The Dow Jones Industrial Average held up better, ending the session little changed. Decliners outpaced advancers across the market - a fairly typical "soft" session on its own.

But look at the week as a whole, and the picture flips. Despite Friday's drop, the S&P 500 finished the week up roughly 2.5% - its first winning week since early October. One down day and one up week, happening at the same time, is the kind of divergence that's easy to miss if you only check the closing bell headline.

The day actually started on a strong note. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released October's Producer Price Index before the open, and it came in cooler than expected - up just 0.3% month over month versus a 0.4% forecast. Dow futures jumped as much as 226 points on the news, and Nvidia, which had been hammered the day before, rose roughly 2% in premarket trading. But as the regular session wore on, that optimism faded. The 10-year Treasury yield stayed stubbornly above the symbolic 5% level, and renewed selling in Nvidia and the broader chip complex dragged the Nasdaq from its premarket gains into a loss by the close - a classic "good morning, bad afternoon" pattern that tends to show up when an oversold bounce doesn't attract follow-through buying.

Nvidia sat at the center of all of it. Measured against its November 6 close, the stock finished the week down roughly 13% - a stretch that began with the shock announcement that CEO Jensen Huang had resigned and CFO Colette Kress had stepped in as interim CEO on November 12, followed by news that the board had opened its own internal investigation. Several Wall Street analysts, Bernstein among them, slashed their price targets in response. On Thursday, November 12 alone, Nvidia's 4.34% drop was the single biggest drag behind that day's S&P 500 close of 7,592.40 (-0.35%) and Nasdaq close of 25,366.09 (-0.39%). Friday's modest premarket bounce wasn't nearly enough to offset the week's cumulative damage.

Why the Day and the Week Told Opposite Stories - and Why Nvidia Still Can't Find a Floor

The daily-versus-weekly divergence has a simple mechanical explanation. Midweek, on Wednesday, November 11, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq each jumped sharply - 1.3% and 1.6%, respectively. The two down days that followed, Thursday and Friday, never fully erased that midweek surge. In other words, the week unfolded as "sell-off, sharp rebound, partial give-back" - and the sharp rebound in the middle is what decided the weekly scorecard. It's a useful reminder that judging market sentiment off any single day's headline, especially during a stretch when both a macro data point (PPI) and a company-specific crisis (Nvidia's leadership vacuum) are moving the tape at once, can be misleading. The weekly or even monthly flow of money tells you more about direction than any one day's print.

Nvidia's inability to stabilize despite Friday's friendlier macro backdrop comes down to the nature of what's actually wrong with the stock. Macro tailwinds like cooling inflation lower the discount rate applied to growth stocks broadly, which is generally good news for high-multiple names. But Nvidia's problem isn't a demand or margin issue - it's a governance and leadership vacuum, an entirely different layer of risk that a friendly CPI or PPI print simply doesn't touch. When a company loses its CEO and moves to an interim structure, the market tends to demand clarity on "who's actually running this company" before it fully re-engages, no matter how favorable the broader rate environment becomes. Bernstein's and other analysts' sharp price-target cuts this week look less like a reassessment of GPU demand and more like a discount being applied specifically for that unresolved uncertainty - one that likely won't fully clear until Nvidia's third-quarter earnings report on November 17 and any further clarity on a permanent CEO.

It's also worth separating "the index" from "the stock driving the index." The fact that the Dow barely moved on Friday tells you that the mega-cap tech weakness didn't spill over broadly into financials, healthcare, or industrials. That supports reading this episode as a concentrated, stock-specific risk rather than a market-wide flight from risk. At the same time, because Nvidia and the broader semiconductor complex carry an outsized weight in both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, their swings can make the headline index numbers look worse than the breadth of the actual sell-off would suggest.

What to Take Away From This

The first lesson is to read weekly and monthly trends alongside daily moves, not instead of them. Friday looked like a bad day in isolation, but a sharp midweek rally meant the week as a whole still closed higher. Judging a trend from a single day's headline risks missing the larger pattern.

The second lesson is that favorable macro data doesn't automatically resolve company-specific risk. A cooler PPI print lowers the market's broad discount rate, but a leadership vacuum like Nvidia's requires its own resolution path - a new CEO, an earnings report, or both - regardless of how the macro backdrop shifts.

The third lesson is that an index decline isn't the same thing as broad market risk-aversion. When a handful of mega-cap names carry heavy index weight, their stock-specific troubles can make the S&P 500 or Nasdaq look worse than the underlying breadth of the market actually is. Comparing against a more evenly weighted gauge, like the Dow, helps calibrate how concentrated a sell-off really is.

The fourth lesson is that when a known catalyst is on the calendar - in this case, Nvidia's November 17 earnings report - expect volatility to persist until that date. Price action ahead of a scheduled catalyst is often better read as positioning around uncertainty than as a directional conviction trade.

FAQ

How can the S&P 500 be "up for the week" if it fell on Friday?

Daily and weekly returns are calculated differently. The S&P 500 jumped 1.3% on Wednesday, November 11, and the declines on Thursday and Friday didn't fully erase that gain. The net result was a weekly gain of roughly 2.5% - the index's first winning week since early October - even though the final day of the week was a loss.

When might Nvidia stock stabilize?

There's no guaranteed timeline, but the next major catalyst the market is watching is Nvidia's third-quarter earnings report, scheduled for November 17. News about a permanent CEO successor could also emerge around that time. Keep in mind that governance-related uncertainty doesn't always resolve immediately even if the earnings numbers themselves come in strong.

Why did the Dow hold up better than the Nasdaq and S&P 500?

The Dow has comparatively less weight in mega-cap tech names like Nvidia and is more evenly spread across sectors such as financials, industrials, and healthcare. Because this week's sell-off was concentrated in chip and AI-related stocks - a stock-specific risk rather than a broad market one - the Nasdaq and S&P 500, which carry heavier tech weighting, felt more of the impact than the Dow did.

Sources

This article is an independent synthesis and analysis based on the reporting below, not a reproduction of the original coverage. Please check the original sources directly for the latest figures and developments.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Market conditions change constantly, so please verify the latest data before making any investment decisions.