Good morning investors!

If this is your first time reading, welcome to The Investor’s Edge — a thriving community of over 25,000 subscribers striving to be better investors with an edge in the market.

Every Wednesday we publish “The Mid-Week Wrap-Up” — your ticket to being well informed and staying ahead in the investment game!

This report is designed to help investors of all skill levels break down important stories/topics within the stock market. And best of all, we cut through all of the BS and give you exactly what you need to know in easy to digest, bite sized pieces of content.

This article is designed to truly give you that EDGE in the day ahead!

Grab your afternoon pick me up and let’s dive in.

After a sluggish start to the week, all three major indexes are higher and the Santa rally looks to be gaining steam.

These are some of the biggest stories so far this week that are having an influence on market action.

This week brought a flood of high-impact AI and semiconductor developments across cloud platforms, chipmakers, and infrastructure suppliers. New products, massive spending plans, major acquisitions, and leadership changes reveal an industry pushing forward aggressively despite rising economic pressure. Together, these updates highlight intensifying competition, accelerating hardware roadmaps, and growing scrutiny of AI’s long-term profitability.

🔑 Key Points

👀 What You Need to Know

This week highlighted how aggressively the AI landscape is tightening as hyperscalers race to differentiate their core models. OpenAI’s “code red” shift toward day-to-day product quality shows how quickly competitive pressure from Google and others is forcing immediate prioritization. IBM’s capex warning adds another layer of scrutiny to the economics behind this acceleration. With Apple reshuffling AI leadership and Anthropic preparing for public markets, strategic urgency across the ecosystem is clearly rising into 2026.

A record 202.9 million Americans shopped between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, far exceeding NRF’s forecast and topping last year’s turnout. The surge came despite cautious consumer sentiment and a cooling labor market, underscoring how emotionally anchored and budget-priority holiday spending has become. With heavy discounting online and in stores, early data signals a strong start to a season on track to exceed $1 trillion in total spending.

🔑 Key Points

👀 What You Need to Know

The early-season spending data shows consumers are still prioritizing holiday purchases even as wages flatten and job-market anxiety increases. Deep discounts, especially in electronics and home goods, are encouraging larger baskets and pulling spending forward into November. The acceleration in online and BNPL usage highlights shifting shopping behavior driven by convenience, flexibility, and deal sensitivity. Together, these trends suggest retailers enter December with strong momentum and consumers still willing to spend despite broader macro headwinds.

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CrowdStrike $CRWD ( ▼ 2.11% ) delivered a clean top and bottom line beat with accelerating ARR growth and record cash flow. The stock is +0.9% this week.

In this section we'll be curating a selection of news headlines we think you'll find interesting. If a topic catches your eye, click the provided links to read more about it.

With earnings season mostly in the rear-view, the focus for the rest of the week is inflation, with the all-important PCE report expected to be released on Friday.

We get a major report from a beaten down SaaS stock in Salesforce tonight, with two key retail names reporting tomorrow which will give us further insights into the consumer. Here are the list of names we will be watching:

Here is the calendar of earnings releases scheduled for the rest of the week:

Friday’s PCE report is the major catalyst investors have been waiting for all week, though we also get initial jobless claims and consumer sentiment to end the week.

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Thank you for reading this edition of the Mid-Week Wrap-Up.

Until next time investors!

Mark & Chris

The Investor’s Edge

This is not investing advice. It is very important that you do your own research and make investments based on your own personal circumstances, preferences, goals and risk tolerance.