Wall Street Ends a Turbulent Week Mixed: S&P 500 and Nasdaq Slip Friday, but All Three Indexes Post Strong Weekly Gains

US stocks closed mixed on Friday, November 13, 2026, as a second day of selling in artificial intelligence shares dragged the technology-heavy Nasdaq lower, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average managed a small gain. The S&P 500 fell 0.4 percent, but all three major indexes still finished the week more than 2 percent higher, capping one of the most turbulent weeks on Wall Street this year.

The session closed a week dominated by Nvidia. The chipmaker's co-founder and chief executive, Jensen Huang, resigned on Thursday after his affair with a Chinese tech executive raised US national security concerns, and the fallout has cost Nvidia more than $600 billion in market value this week, according to the Associated Press. Nvidia's longtime chief financial officer, Colette Kress, has taken over as interim chief executive.

How the major indexes finished

The S&P 500 fell 30.73 points to 7,561.67, the Dow gained 50.46 points to 52,347.55, and the Nasdaq gave up 229.82 points to close at 25,136.27. The weekly gains were the S&P 500's first winning week since October and its biggest since August, while the Nasdaq posted its first weekly gain in five weeks. The S&P 500 is up 10.5 percent so far this year.

The selling was narrow. More than 60 percent of the stocks inside the S&P 500 rose on Friday, according to the Associated Press, which shows how concentrated the damage was in a handful of giant AI names. Healthcare and financial stocks were among the gainers: Eli Lilly rose 1.3 percent, and payment processors Visa and Mastercard each closed 1.3 percent higher. Microsoft edged up 0.2 percent despite a global outage that disrupted its web services during the week.

Chip stocks give back Thursday's rally

The trade that defined Thursday ran in reverse on Friday. A day earlier, investors had treated Huang's resignation as a redistribution of the AI trade toward Nvidia's rivals, sending their shares sharply higher. On Friday, those same stocks gave the gains back.

Advanced Micro Devices fell 8.8 percent to $534.06, erasing its 5.9 percent gain from Thursday. Broadcom lost 4.8 percent to $347.01, Dell dropped 7.2 percent, Cisco fell 6.2 percent, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index slid 3.4 percent. Nvidia itself fell 2.0 percent to $162.85, down from $166.19 at Thursday's close, and its market value slipped below $4 trillion at the close.

The slide followed a downgrade from HSBC, which cut Nvidia to hold from buy and lowered its price target to $170 from $365, arguing the stock will struggle until a permanent chief executive is named. Nvidia has now fallen for six straight weeks, its longest weekly losing streak since October 2012, according to Reuters, and it is down about 12.8 percent for the week. As Angelo Kourkafas, senior global strategist at Edward Jones, put it in a research note, Nvidia's pullback "serves as a reminder of the concentration risk embedded in a market where a small number of mega-cap technology stocks have driven an outsized share of returns."

The wider worry behind the selling has been building for weeks: whether AI will produce enough profit to justify the costly investments and the big stock values attached to the companies building it. That question now hangs over the neocloud and AI infrastructure stocks that slid again on Friday, and over Nvidia's earnings report due on Tuesday, November 17, the first under interim chief executive Colette Kress.

Inflation cools on the month, stays hot on the year

Friday's inflation report gave investors a mixed message. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics said the Producer Price Index, which measures wholesale prices, rose 0.3 percent in October from September, below the 0.4 percent economists had expected. But the annual rate climbed to 6.5 percent, up from 6.3 percent in September and the largest 12-month increase since November 2022. Core producer prices, which exclude food and energy, rose 0.3 percent on the month and 5.0 percent on the year. The Labor Department also revised September's monthly gain up to 1.4 percent.

Goods prices rose 0.5 percent during the month, while services prices rose 0.2 percent for a fifth consecutive month. The report landed a day after consumer inflation also came in hotter than expected, and it did little to change expectations for the Federal Reserve. The central bank held its benchmark rate at 3.75 percent to 4.00 percent on October 28, and economists now overwhelmingly expect a rate rise at its December meeting, with another rise likely to follow in January. After the report, traders raised the odds of a quarter-point December hike to about 90 percent, according to CME Group's FedWatch tool.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 5.15 percent from 5.10 percent late Thursday, while the yield on the two-year Treasury, which closely tracks expectations for Fed action, rose to 4.87 percent from 4.86 percent. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, settled at $95.84 a barrel after swinging during the day.

FAA grounds flights minutes before the close

The session's most dramatic moment came away from the markets. At about 3:54 p.m. ET, minutes before the closing bell, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a nationwide ground stop of all departing flights after a communications failure hit the air route traffic control centers that guide planes between airports. Departures stayed frozen for more than four hours, until about 8:15 p.m. ET, while technicians rebooted and tested the systems.

More than 1,000 flights were cancelled and nearly 10,000 delayed, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. The Department of Homeland Security said there was no sign the outage was caused by a cyberattack. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said switches and routers in the air traffic control network had become overloaded with data, producing inconsistent radar and communications readings, and blamed ageing legacy infrastructure. Earlier on Friday, the White House and the Department of Transportation had urged Congress to approve a further $30.1 billion to upgrade the country's airports and air traffic control system.

What to watch next week

Nvidia's earnings on Tuesday are now the test for the whole AI trade: the first results since Huang's resignation, and the first call under Kress as interim chief executive. Investors will also watch whether the chip rotation that followed the resignation keeps unwinding, and whether the Federal Reserve's December meeting comes into sharper focus as more inflation data arrives. Wall Street closed the week higher despite the turmoil, but Friday showed how quickly the market's biggest names can still pull it down.

Sources

• Associated Press, "Stocks fall but Wall Street notches a winning week after several turbulent days," via Channel NewsAsia, November 14, 2026
• Reuters, "S&P 500, Nasdaq end lower as Nvidia uncertainty weighs on tech shares," November 13, 2026
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 2026 Producer Price Index release, November 13, 2026
• CME Group FedWatch Tool, December meeting rate probabilities, November 13, 2026
• FlightAware flight disruption data, via Reuters, November 13, 2026