Welcome to Markets Desk, here's where things stand heading into the weekend.
Stocks finished the week on a soft note, with the broad tape essentially flat but the tech-heavy Nasdaq one hundred sliding more than one percent as chipmakers led the selloff. The S&P five hundred and the Dow both closed fractionally lower, with semiconductor names weighing on sentiment and futures pointing to modest follow-through pressure heading into the new week.
Pivoting to software, there was a notable divergence in the sector. ServiceNow, Salesforce, and a broad basket of enterprise software names surged on growing conviction that OpenAI's direct competitive threat to that space may be overstated. Oracle was the notable exception, sitting out the rally given its deep cloud infrastructure ties to OpenAI's fortunes.
And in a story that blends corporate governance with casual dining, Red Lobster shareholders are now in court alleging the chain's infamous twenty-dollar endless shrimp promotion was no marketing miscalculation at all. The lawsuit targets Thai Union Group, formerly the majority shareholder, claiming the promotion was a deliberate scheme to extract value from the business before its collapse into bankruptcy.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
