Week of November 2 to 6, 2026 · Markets North Weekly Recap
This was the week the market remembered that politics moves prices in both directions. Wednesday brought one of the biggest rally days in months. Thursday took back the part of it that belonged to AI stocks, and left the rest standing. Underneath both days, a quieter story kept building: the AI supply chain now has a gate on each end of the Pacific, and this week Beijing showed it intends to use its side of it.
Wednesday: the midterm rally
The United States voted on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the result was clear: the Democratic Party took both chambers of Congress. Markets hate uncertainty more than they hate almost any outcome, and the end of it was worth a party. The Dow rose 3.03 percent to 53,356.12, its best day in about eighteen months. The S&P 500 gained 1.58 percent to 7,688.62, and the Nasdaq added 1.44 percent to 25,736.51. The VIX, the market's fear gauge, fell about 20 percent to 16.61.
Oil went the other way, hard. Brent crude fell about 9 percent to under 95 dollars a barrel, on hopes that a changed Washington would push toward a settlement with Iran and reopen supply. Cheaper oil and a settled election are the classic recipe for a broad rally, and for one day, that is exactly what happened.
Thursday: the rotation
Thursday was the same story read from the other end. The Dow opened higher again and the S&P 500 finished roughly flat, but the Nasdaq 100 fell about 1.2 percent, and the selling had an address: chips and data centers.
Three things landed on the same names at once. In Seoul, the KOSPI fell about 4.6 percent and triggered a trading sidecar after regulators moved to cool a frantic AI-linked rally; Samsung Electronics dropped about 7.5 percent and SK Hynix about 9.5 percent. In the United States, Qualcomm reported smartphone chip sales below expectations and fell roughly 10 percent, and one weak print became a reason to sell the whole complex. And over everything hung the new Congress: strategists spent the day pricing tighter scrutiny of AI and slower data center build-outs, which is the part of the map where the Vertiv, CoreWeave and Bloom Energy names live.
Our read, for what it is worth: a violent rotation inside a flat market is not the same animal as a crash. Money moved from the AI trade into defensives, miners and old economy stocks. It did not leave the building. The week's own earnings underlined the split: AMD and Super Micro both reported on Tuesday, both beat expectations and guided up, and the stocks still spent Thursday getting sold with the group. The business news and the price action told two different stories, and the recap's job is to say so plainly.
The wall in Hong Kong
Two China stories this week deserve more attention than the daily noise, because both are about the same thing: who controls the physical side of AI.
Reuters reported on Thursday that roughly 600,000 of Nvidia's H200 processors are sitting in Hong Kong, waiting for Beijing to approve large-scale imports into mainland China. Washington changed its rules in January to review H200 exports case by case, and a small number of chips, about 10,000 each to several large Chinese internet companies, has reportedly arrived in recent months. The large shipments have not been approved. The figure comes from Reuters' sources and has not been confirmed by Nvidia or by the Chinese agencies, which did not comment; Nvidia's own filings had already disclosed a 400 million dollar H200 charge and said Chinese restrictions kept it from selling everything its American licenses allowed. The lesson is structural: an export license from one government is only half a delivery. The other half is an import decision from the other.
The second story arrived the same day. ABB confirmed that China's foreign investment security review has prohibited SoftBank from acquiring ABB's robotics business in China, the largest market for that division at about 30 percent of its business. The wider 5.4 billion dollar sale of ABB Robotics to SoftBank is not formally dead; both companies say they are in close dialogue and working on the transaction. The Financial Times, which reported the decision first, says the concern was robotics data leaving the country to train AI models. That reasoning comes from the FT's sources, not from an official Chinese statement. Either way, the pattern matches the H200 story: Beijing is treating AI-adjacent assets, chips and factory data alike, as things whose movement it will decide.
For a site that mostly follows the names behind AI, this is the thread to keep hold of. The build-out is physical, and physical things cross borders, where governments get a vote.
Friday Close: the crowd's week
The first week of the Friday Close polls is graded, and the crowd went 1 for 4. Four of the six polls drew votes; the two that did not are recorded as no-votes and do not count either way.
The hit was gold. The crowd called it up big, and gold rose 4.50 percent on the week, from a reference of 3,898.90 to a close of 4,074.90. The misses tell the week's story in miniature: the crowd called the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq up small, and both fell instead (down 2.68 percent to 7,376.86 and down 3.37 percent to 24,579.42) as Friday extended Thursday's rotation; and the crowd called the TSX flat, which rose 0.47 percent to 35,789.09, just outside the flat band. Silver rose 5.80 percent to 51.95 and the USD/CAD rate rose about 1 percent to 1.4126, both without votes. Bull or Bear finished the week at 100 percent bull, on a single vote, which we record with a straight face and no conclusions.
Season record after week one: 1 hit, 3 misses. Next week's polls are open now, against these Friday closes.
The week ahead
Two dates carry the next two weeks. On Tuesday, November 10, TSMC publishes its monthly revenue, the fastest health check the chip supply chain gets. On Tuesday, November 17, Nvidia reports. After a week in which the AI trade was sold on politics and positioning, Nvidia's numbers are the first hard evidence either way, and our question of the week poll on the report is open until then.
We will be watching both, and arguing about them, the way we do every day.
Markets North is a personal publication by Joe and André. This recap is education, not advice. We are not financial advisors. Sources: Reuters market coverage, Reuters on the H200 stockpile, Reuters on the ABB robotics decision.