📈 Apple’s Next CEO?

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Good Morning & Happy Monday.

A busy week ahead, markets are eyeing a potential December rate cut, China’s AI race is heating up, and Thursday’s wild market reversal still has investors rattled. Plus, big moves in Apple, Google, Revolut, and beehiiv round out a packed tech section.

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Market News

📈 Futures rise, sparking hopes of rebound from November losses
US stock futures ticked higher to start the shortened Thanksgiving week, lifted by renewed hopes for a December Fed rate cut after dovish comments from NY Fed President John Williams. Despite Monday’s optimism, the AI-fueled rally has cooled sharply, with the S&P 500 down 3.5% in November and the Nasdaq off more than 6%.
Markets are still digesting the fallout from the extended government shutdown as key data, including PPI and retail sales, finally trickles out Tuesday.

💰️ Fed’s December Cut Debate Heats Up
Markets are whipsawing as Fed officials split sharply on whether to cut rates in December. Doves point to cooling labor data and rising unemployment, while hawks warn inflation stuck near 3% leaves little room to ease. Freshly restored economic data is only hardening each camp’s stance ahead of the Dec. 9–10 meeting, creating a policy “Rorschach test.” With rate-cut odds swinging from 39% to 70%+ in two days, investors face elevated volatility as a dovish hold becomes the emerging base case.

🤖 Alibaba’s Main AI App Debuts Strongly in Effort to Rival ChatGPT
Alibaba’s newly revamped Qwen app has surged past 10 million downloads in a week, sending shares up more than 5% in Hong Kong. The rapid adoption puts Qwen among the fastest-growing AI apps, especially in China where ChatGPT isn’t available.
Investors see Qwen as key to Alibaba’s AI-first strategy and future valuation, with agentic features and deep integrations across shopping, maps, travel, and more on the way.

🖼️ Visualizing why Thursday’s stock market reversal was so weird and unnerving
Thursday’s dramatic market reversal felt far worse than the numbers suggest, even though the S&P 500 is still only ~5% off all-time highs. As Sherwood News noted, investors expected a full-blown celebration after Nvidia crushed earnings, but the rally collapsed almost instantly, and violently. The intraday swing was one of the most extreme in 32 years, turning euphoria into panic within hours. A decade of S&P 500 data shows just how rare and unnerving Thursday’s whiplash truly was.

This week in Tech

🍎 Apple’s future CEO has a tough act to follow
Apple is reportedly preparing for Tim Cook, now 65, to step down as CEO as early as next year, prompting a search for his successor. The leading candidate is John Ternus, Apple’s SVP of Hardware Engineering, a 23-year veteran seen as the top internal choice after COO Jeff Williams’ retirement. Ternus would inherit a strong but challenged Apple, facing DOJ antitrust pressure and criticism over its AI lag. Experts say he’s uniquely positioned to lead, the “only pick” with the depth to run Apple from day one.

🔥 How Google Finally Leapfrogged Rivals With New Gemini Rollout
Google’s new Gemini 3 model is being widely viewed as a major step forward in the AI race, outperforming rivals on industry-standard benchmarks and surprising early testers with its jump in capability. The release also marks Google’s most significant lead in years, with Gemini 3 now powering tools like Nano Banana and boosting confidence among analysts. While ChatGPT remains the most widely used chatbot, Gemini’s latest gains position it as a serious contender across a broad range of applications.

👀 Revolut completes shares sale valuing it at $75bn
Revolut has completed a major share sale valuing the company at $75bn, with heavyweight investors including Coatue, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, Fidelity, and Nvidia’s venture arm NVentures joining the round. The fintech now serves 65m customers globally and gave employees another chance to sell shares as part of its long-standing liquidity program. Revolut says momentum continues into 2025 as it pushes toward becoming the world’s first truly global bank, with launches planned in India, Mexico, and Colombia.

🐝 Beehiiv’s CEO isn’t worried about newsletter saturation
Beehiiv is expanding beyond newsletters with an AI website builder, podcast tools, and digital product support to power the full creator stack. CEO Tyler Denk says user demand is driving the shift and expects major consolidation across creator platforms. He argues there’s no “newsletter saturation”, quality and niche depth still win.
Read the full interview to hear his take on the future of the media + creator economy.

Invest & Strategies

🧠 How to Use ChatGPT Without Brain-Rot
An MIT study finds that relying on ChatGPT too early can lead to weaker learning, poorer recall, and more homogenized writing, as students using the tool couldn’t remember their own essays and showed reduced brain connectivity. But when students thought first, then used ChatGPT, their writing improved, they retained more, and their brains stayed more engaged. The key insight: AI becomes helpful only after you’ve done your own cognitive work. The paper frames early AI use as creating “cognitive debt”, an ease that feels good now but costs you later.

🐻 Do We Need a Long Bear Market?
Spencer Jakab argues that today’s investors may be unprepared for a truly long bear market, noting that past recoveries, especially without recessions, have been unusually fast. Many younger investors have never lived through a prolonged downturn, leaving their “memory banks” empty compared with previous generations.
Recent decades have seen volatility but few deep, drawn-out crashes, creating a sense of complacency even as portfolio sizes have grown. A future 40%+ drawdown would hit both new and seasoned investors hard, making diversification and risk management essential for surviving the next real bear market.

👓️ Advisers and clients see the world differently
A new study using eye-tracking technology shows striking differences in how experts, clients, and novice investors process fund performance reports. While all groups react similarly to gains, experts are far less likely to sell after losses and even show a mild buy-the-dip tendency. Eye-movement data reveals that clients fixate heavily on recent performance, especially when a benchmark is shown, making them more prone to chase returns. Experts, meanwhile, scan more broadly and rely less on short-term results. The takeaway: investors literally see information differently, and experts must guide clients toward what actually matters.

🫠 The Case for a Year-End Melt-Up
The latest Compound and Friends episode breaks down the case for a potential year-end market “melt-up,” with Michael Batnick, Josh Brown, and guest Warren Pies digging into sentiment, positioning, and what could fuel a late-year rally.