S&P 500 manages to extend weekly win streak despite anticlimactic Trump-Xi summit
It was lucky No. 7 for the S & P 500 — barely. The S & P 500 rose 0.13% for the week — extending its run of weekly gains to seven in a row. It was the longest such winning streak since December 2023. Record highs on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday were enough to offset Friday’s awful 1.24% decline. Stocks limped into the weekend after the high-stakes Beijing summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping produced few tangible wins for the United States. Soaring oil prices and rising bond yields also pressured the market. It was not all bad news, as strength in tech stocks supported last week’s record-high sessions. Information technology was one of four S & P 500 sectors higher for the week. It’s unclear whether the market can continue its weekly gains next time around. Until then, here were three driving forces on Wall Street over the past five sessions. Trump-Xi summit At the conclusion of last week’s meetings between Trump and Xi, Wall Street was left with more questions than answers. Boeing was our worst performer of the week, down 7%. Trump on Friday provided new details on what he described as a commitment from China to buy Boeing jets. He told reporters aboard Air Force One that China agreed to order “approximately 400, 450 engines, 200 planes, and a promise of up to 750 if they do a good job.” The president revealed the 200 number in a Fox News interview Thursday. Wall Street estimates were looking for more like 500 aircraft. Neither China nor Boeing has made any announcements. While not thrilled with the developments, we still see a turnaround taking place under Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who was among the many CEOs on the China trip with the president. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was also there. The summit did not lead to a deal on semiconductors, which took down Nvidia and other chip stocks on Friday. Trump said AI guardrails and Nvidia’s H200 chips approved for China sales were discussed. He said he “thinks something could happen,” but noted that China “wants to try and develop their own.” Nvidia shares were able to gain 4.7% for the week. One bright spot, Xi told American CEOs traveling with Trump the door to business in China will “open wider,” state-backed newspaper Xinhua reported. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook were also part of the delegation. Club name Apple gained more than 2% for the week. The U.S.-Iran war was discussed at the Trump-Xi summit. But like many of the other issues, nothing concrete transpired. Trump discussed the Iran war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz with Xi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News . Rubio added that Trump did not ask Xi for help in ending the monthslong war. (Trump said he ripped up the latest peace proposal from Iran.) On Taiwan, Xi told Trump that if the issue is not handled “properly,” it could put the “entire relationship [with the U.S.] in great jeopardy,” Chinese state news outlet Xinhua reported . Trump said he told Xi, “I don’t talk about” whether the U.S. would defend Taiwan from China. What’s next for rates? New Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh has been dealt a tough hand, with prices seemingly going up at every turn. Crude jumped last week on persistent Iran war uncertainty. Bond yields rose on worries about whether Warsh will be able to fulfill Trump’s desire for lower interest rates. A pair of hot inflation reports cast further doubt on immediate Fed cuts. On Tuesday, the April consumer price index came in above expectations , driven largely by war-related energy increases. On Wednesday, investors got an even hotter wholesale inflation report . The producer price index last month experienced its biggest annual jump since 2022. The economic releases came as Warsh won Senate confirmation to be the next Fed chair. Jerome Powell ‘s term as Fed chair expired on Friday, but he plans to stay at the central bank . Powell has two years left in his term as governor. The new data complicates Warsh’s mission to lower rates. If the central bank cuts too fast, it could reignite inflation. Jim Cramer said things can get bumpier from here with stocks near all-time highs and monetary policy still stringent. “This stock market won’t be able to rally for long without the oxygen of lower interest rates,” Jim said Tuesday night . AI trade With all the bumps in the road last week, the AI trade was not one of them. Investors found out once again that investor appetite for AI stocks remains strong, with the blockbuster debut of Cerebras. Cerebras, an AI hardware company that claims its flagship product runs faster than Nvidia’s GPUs, went public on Thursday. It was the largest IPO by a U.S. tech firm in years as Cerebras sold 30 million shares and raised $5.5 billion in total. The chip name had a fantastic first session, jumping 68% by Thursday’s closing bell. Shares tumbled 10% on Friday, but a lot of tech stocks were falling at the same time. We wouldn’t chalk it up to something systemic. We don’t see Cerebras as a threat to Nvidia. Sure, they are competitors, but Cerebras is mostly focused on the ultra-fast processing of daily AI workloads referred to as inference. The IPO wasn’t the only positive sign of strength in the AI trade. Cisco Systems, a former Club stock, had a blowout earnings report on Wednesday evening. Investors cheered the networking company’s surging AI orders. Management hiked its expected AI infrastructure and hyperscaler orders for the 2026 fiscal year to $9 billion, up from $5 billion. We saw this as a positive for Club holding Broadcom , which also has a robust networking business that should benefit from this wave of AI spending. Broadcom shares jumped Thursday to a record high close on the Cisco earnings release. But Broadcom declined modestly for the week after seeing pressure on Friday. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . 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