Welcome to Weekly Notes. This is the first one, so a quick word on what it is. Once a week — Saturdays — I’ll pull together a couple of things that caught my eye in money and markets, and try to do more than just repeat the headline. You can read the news anywhere. What I want to add is the why underneath it: what actually happened, what folks new to investing might misread or not understand, and what a regular person can take from it. Usually two items from the week, and a third that’s a little more personal — because money was never really the point, it’s what money is for.
One honest note to start. I’m writing this in the middle of radiation treatment for skin cancer, and some days the tank runs lower than others. I mention it because this is meant to be a real space written by a real person, not a polished feed. The lessons this week, as it turns out, are all about patience. Maybe that’s not a coincidence.
Here’s what caught my eye.
1. NVIDIA had a great quarter — and the stock dropped anyway
NVIDIA reported earnings on Wednesday. By any normal measure they were excellent: record revenue, up sharply from a year ago, and guidance for next quarter that came in above what Wall Street was looking for. Great news.
The stock fell. And it’s down for the week.
If that sounds backwards, here’s the thing every new investor eventually has to learn: the market prices things in. By the time NVIDIA actually reported, the price already assumed strong results. The good news wasn’t news — everybody already expected it. The stock had run up sharply in the two weeks heading into the report, so a beat just confirmed what was baked in.
This is now the fourth time in a row the stock has slipped after their earnings release, even as the company has been spectacular. The lesson isn’t “NVIDIA is in trouble.” It’s that a stock doesn’t move on good news. It moves on news that’s better or worse than expected.
And here’s the part the panic headlines leave out. The stock is down for the week — about 4.4%, closing Friday at $215.33 — but it’s still up roughly 15.5% for the year. That gap is the lesson: a bad week and a bad investment are not the same thing. Confusing the two is exactly how people talk themselves into selling something good at the worst possible moment.
I saw this exact thing for years as a loan officer, just wearing different clothes. Mortgage rates roughly track the 10-year Treasury yield — when the 10-year rises or falls, mortgage rates generally follow.
So I’d get the call from clients in the middle of buying a home every time the Fed cut rates: “The Fed just dropped rates a quarter point — why didn’t mortgage rates move?” And the answer was always the same. The 10-year had already moved weeks earlier, the moment the market decided the cut was coming. By the time the Fed made it official, the bond market had long since priced it in. The announcement was old news to everyone except the borrower watching the headline.
Same machine. Different dashboard. Markets trade on expectations, not events.
2. The Cerebras IPO: the $185 you read about was never yours
The other big story was Cerebras, an AI chip company, going public in the biggest IPO of the year. You might have seen the number: priced at $185 a share. What you may not have seen is that almost no regular person could buy it there.
That $185 was the insider price — what big institutions and early backers paid before it ever hit the open market. By the time shares opened to the public, they were trading around $350, and they spiked as high as $386 before the day was over. A few brokers (SoFi runs a program like this) do try to let everyday investors into IPOs, but the honest truth is you’ll get a tiny handful of shares at best — never enough to matter. So the headline price is real, but it’s not a price you and I were ever going to get.
Here’s the part worth sitting with. Millionaires really were made that first day. But plenty of people also lost money — the ones who saw the rocket, felt the excitement, and jumped in near the top. By Friday’s close it had fallen to $256.78, down 8.9% on the day — well below its first-day close of $311, and a long way from the $386 high it hit when the hype was loudest. Same stock, same week, two completely opposite outcomes. The only difference was whether someone chased the excitement or waited for the dust to settle.
Now, a pullback like this isn’t only a cautionary tale. If you’d genuinely studied a company and wanted to own it for the long haul, a drop can hand you a better entry point than the hype ever would. That’s a decision only you can make — I’m not telling anyone to buy anything. But it’s why I personally never buy my whole position in one shot. If I want 100 shares of something, I’ll usually build that up in pieces over time, precisely because prices swing like this. And when something runs up hard and fast, I’ll sometimes take a little off the table, knowing I can always buy back in later. None of that is a prediction about Cerebras — it’s just how I try to keep emotion out of the driver’s seat.
And almost nobody who chased stopped to look under the hood. Roughly 86% of Cerebras’s revenue last year came from just two customers. That’s enormous concentration risk — if even one of them walks away, the whole story changes. The hype crowd never checked. The disciplined crowd would have.
3. The real lesson: build your rules before the hype shows up
Strip away the tickers and both stories are about the same thing — FOMO. The fear of missing out is one of the most expensive emotions in investing, because it makes you act at exactly the wrong moment: when something has already run, when everyone’s talking about it, when the excitement is loudest and the margin of safety is thinnest.
You can’t eliminate the urge. But you can build rules before the hype arrives, when you’re calm and thinking clearly — and then stick to them when you’re not. A simple one that works: cap the speculative stuff. Maybe you allow yourself 5% of your portfolio for high-flyers and risky bets. Have fun there. Chase a little. But the other 95% stays disciplined. That way the gambler in you gets a sandbox, and a single hyped-up decision can’t blow up your future.
The moment you feel the FOMO is the worst possible moment to be deciding anything. The decision should already be made. That’s true of stocks. Honestly, it’s true of most things in life worth protecting.
See you next Saturday.
Nothing here is personalized financial advice — just one person’s notes. Always do your own homework before you invest.
Weekly Notes — June 6, 2026