Good morning investors!

If this is your first time reading, welcome to The Investor’s Edge — a thriving community of over 26,000 subscribers striving to be better investors with an edge in the market.

Every weekend we publish “The Weekly 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.

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

It was a great start to the year as all 3 major indexes finished the week in the green, with new all-time highs for both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones.

These are some of the biggest stories from the second half of the week that had an influence on market action.

Trump policy headlines drove volatility across housing, defense, and energy sectors this week as markets digested multiple high-impact announcements. Mortgage stimulus talk lit up housing-linked stocks, defense names whipsawed across two separate announcements, and energy caught a bid early on Venezuela developments, then saw mixed follow-through. Price action reflected headline sensitivity, repositioning activity, and cautious investor behavior across several policy-exposed industries.

🔑 Key Points

👀 What You Need to Know

None of the announcements this week have been implemented through executive orders, agency rules, or legislation. Details such as funding sources, enforcement mechanisms, and effective dates remain undefined across housing, defense, and energy. Until these items move from statements to formal actions, their impact remains conditional and not yet operational, meaning sector moves are likely to stay volatile and reversible. The environment favors patience and selective exposure over aggressive positioning.

This week’s labor reports collectively reinforced a clear deceleration in U.S. employment momentum without signaling outright stress. Hiring activity slowed meaningfully, labor demand continued to cool, and job churn remained contained. The picture that emerges is a labor market transitioning away from post pandemic strength into a more balanced, slower growth regime.

🔑 Key Points

👀 What You Need to Know

The latest labor data shows hiring momentum is slowing, but not weakening fast enough to force immediate policy action. Payroll growth and job openings continue to ease, pointing to reduced labor demand, while jobless claims remain stable and do not signal broad layoffs. Markets continue to price aggressive rate cuts, but the data does not require urgency. Labor conditions are cooling without cracking. This leaves the Federal Reserve room to remain patient despite investor expectations running ahead of the evidence.

This week’s AI news tied demand to tangible infrastructure, hardware, and policy realities. Meta announced long-term nuclear power agreements for AI data centers, Nvidia outlined progress across autonomy and addressed China-related shipment questions, and CES added concrete product updates from AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm.

🔑 Key Points

👀 What You Need to Know

AI spending is continuing at scale while becoming more constrained by power, policy, and execution. Nvidia remained the center of the trade, expanding exposure across autonomy and robotics while China policy reintroduced headline-driven volatility risk. Meta’s power agreements signaled that AI capacity planning is beginning to face real-world limits, influencing timelines more than demand. CES added competitive context across chips and AI PCs, keeping the focus on margins, capacity, and delivery as the cycle progresses.

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.

We continue to push out more and more content every week to give investors that edge. Here are the posts Investor’s Edge+ subscribers received this week.

Mondays are for the investors. Every Monday morning we share exactly what we’re watching in the week ahead, how we’re positioning, and even share a sneak peek into our systems and models. This week we discussed the upcoming nonfarm payroll report and shared some insights into what we expect in the new year. See the latest full report here:

This report is a breakdown of every options trade we made last month—what we opened, what we closed, and how our open trades are performing. Each edition gives you full transparency on our strategy, including entry points, premiums collected or paid, trade rationale, and risk/reward setups. See this month’s recap:

Every month we break down 5 stocks that we believe are attractive from a valuation perspective right now. Here’s a look at the 5 stocks we are buying in Janaury:

Earnings season begins while inflation reports will set the tone of the week.

Banks kick off earnings season next week and overall, 6 of the names we cover are set to report. Here is the full calendar of scheduled earnings releases:

Overall, 6 of the names we cover are set to report:

Next week is all about inflation as we get both the CPI and PPI reports. We also get retail sales, initial jobless claims, new home sales, and manufacturing data.

Here is the full calendar of events we will be watching:

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🗨️ Chat rooms: Investors discussed the the huge moves from mega cap tech. Members also dove into the number of jobs reports and shared their views on the overall economy.

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Thank you for reading this edition of the Weekly Wrap-Up. Have a great weekend!

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.