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Weekly Roundup

Returns this week were brought to you by early-week record highs powered by AI and rate-cut hopes—and a late-week trade-war shock that flipped it all red.

Oh how we haven’t learned…. does no one remember all of the trade war antics that happened earlier this year? Does no one remember how they tanked the market just for it to recover weeks later? Nothing burgers. We know how this story goesBig threat → Big Market Drop → Nothing Major Happens → Stocks Returns

Remember that “Trade Wars” sell great in the news, but the news doesn’t make its money investing. The media makes its money selling fear or greed. When the sell fear, buy. When they sell greed, sell.

The Nasdaq and S&P 500 notched fresh intraday records as investors leaned into Big Tech and semis. Treasury yields hovered a little above 4.1% on the 10-year and drifted lower midweek, which usually helps growth stocks. Oil spent most of the week around $61–62 a barrel—cheap versus the past couple of years—which eases costs for shippers, airlines, and consumers but can pressure energy company profits. Gold stayed near an all-time high (around $4,000/oz), which tells you some money is still buying insurance against political and economic shocks even while indexes are near highs.

Then Friday hit. A fresh threat of “massive” U.S. tariffs on China sent risk assets into reverse: the Nasdaq dropped about 3.5% on the day, the S&P 500 fell nearly 3%, and the Dow slid close to 2%. When investors fear slower global trade and higher costs, they dump cyclical and mega-cap winners first, buy safer assets, and mark down anything tariff-exposed. You saw what happened: the 10-year yield slipped toward ~4.06% (a safety bid into Treasuries), gold popped, oil sank below $60 as growth worries rose, the dollar eased, and crypto struggled to maintain values.

Now remember what I called out last week! The shift in institutional money to defensives (specifically healthcare). We saw tons of retail investors selling CNC, UNH, MOH, etc… No surprise that they shift to defensives just in time for growth/cyclicals to tumble.

Big Company Moves

Banking got bigger. Fifth Third agreed to buy Comerica in an all-stock deal valuing Comerica at roughly a 20% premium, creating the 9th-largest U.S. bank by assets if regulators sign off. Divestitures are common in big deals like this, and we will likely see the same here.

Chips and AI stayed center stage. AMD ripped higher after OpenAI committed to deploy roughly six gigawatts of AMD GPUs—a huge signal that AI spending is shifting from demos to data-center build-outs. Nvidia grabbed its own headline later in the week with U.S. approval to ship certain AI chips to the UAE as part of a broader investment pact. Taiwan Semi’s September sales jumped more than 30% year over year, another sign the AI parts pipeline is still humming—right up until tariff worries sparked a broad semi sell-off on Friday.

Tesla teased a cheaper Model Y configuration after posting record quarterly deliveries; an attempt to keep volume growing now that a key $7,500 EV incentive has expired. Ford faced a potential material squeeze after a major aluminum supplier’s plant fire—important because modern pickups are aluminum-heavy. Boeing, meanwhile, is preparing to lift 737 MAX production (subject to FAA sign-off), a needed step to refill airline fleets and repair margins.

Deal and policy tape bombs kept coming. HSBC floated a plan to take Hang Seng Bank private, simplifying its Asia structure. Novo Nordisk moved to buy Akero to deepen its metabolic disease pipeline. Microsoft is baking Harvard Health content into Copilot so health answers are sourced and safer. Those same late-day Friday, tariff headlines led the entire market lower: megacap tech, semis, retailers and import-heavy names fell the most; classic “defensives” like consumer staples held up better (Pepsi kept rallying after an earnings beat and a CFO change).

Lot’s of things mentioned above — but a few things really stand out as opportunities to me: NVO’s purchase of Akero, and Pepsi’s movement.

Starting with Novo — their acquisition of AKRO is interesting to me, but could have large potential payoffs. AKRO, while not profitable, holds nearly no debt relative to their cash (36M in debt to 743M in cash). NVO stock is down 52% YoY but revenue growth still looks solid. Things slowed in Q1 of 2025, but seem to be pick up a bit of steam.

Pepsi’s recent moves should come as no surprise. The company owns around 11% of Celsius stock (which has been growing unreasonably quick), and still has very stable revenues, and margins. In fact, net margin even looks to be increasing! I think as/if things continue to shift defensive, PEP will be seen as an undervalued defensive play and will outperform in a bear market.

The End of The Road

Two forces are pulling in opposite directions. On one side, falling—or even just stable—rates and real AI orders are good for profits and valuations. On the other, new tariffs would raise input costs, risk retaliation from China, and could re-ignite inflation just as the Fed inches toward cutting.

That mix explains why gold is elevated (hedge demand), oil is soft (growth worries plus ample supply), and the VIX perked up into the weekend (investors paying for protection).

In the near term, price movements will be driven by 3 things:

* Trade headlines: tariff size, timing (Nov. 1 was floated), and any talk of carve-outs. Bigger, sooner, and broader equals more earnings risk for import-heavy sectors and semis with China exposure.

* Earnings season: banks first (a quick read on loan demand, credit quality, and deposit costs), then megacap tech and chipmakers where guidance will matter more than backward-looking beats.

* Yields: if the 10-year drifts lower, long-duration assets (software, semis, select biotech) can find their footing again; if tariffs push inflation fears up and yields back higher, expect another rotation into defensives and cash-flow compounders.

Like always, the actual path forward is anyone’s guess. I would assume the following going into the end of the year:

* China tariffs = nothing burger

* Rates probably cut this month & yields likely decreasing

Insider Trade Updates

As a side note, I try to stay away from insiders buying up their penny stock company. While these can still be great signals, the risk-to-reward ratio isn’t one I find favorable.

We keep track of all of these trades on our Google sheet (available to paid subs), and then insider returns are quite astounding… (I have been removing quite a few of the penny stocks/ super risky investments to make the returns more normalized.)

The current insider buy/sell ratio is sitting at 0.21, which is relatively low. Over the past 5 years, I have seen the average go as high as 0.81 in May of 2022 (a strong buying signal), and as low as 0.17 (a sell/hold signal).

Buy the Dip Tracker

* KMX — CarMaxDirector bought 10,816 @ $46.21 after a 22.88% one-month slide.

* FDS — FactSet ResearchCFO bought 370 @ $275.48 after a 25.01% one-month drawdown.

Whales & Standout Size ($1M+)

* SRRK — Scholar RockDirector bought 500,439 @ $37.58 ($18.81M).

* BGC — BGC GroupDirector bought 8,973,721 @ $9.21 ($82.63M). Potential dividend reinvestment/tax-related.

* GWRS — Global Water ResourcesDirectors bought 728,197 @ $10.30 ($7.50M) and 154,026 @ $10.30 ($1.59M).

* ASA — ASA Gold & Precious Metals10% Owner bought 46,649 @ $46.50 ($2.17M) as part of a steady schedule. Slow, relentless accumulation — like gold itself on a treadmill.

Officer Skin-in-the-Game

* ADC — Agree RealtyPresident & CEO bought 3,528 @ $70.63.

* CALM — Cal-Maine FoodsChief Strategy Officer bought 2,800 @ $92.36.

Interesting Trade Ideas & Berkshire Buys

Last week we picked up KVUE at $15.86 on market open Monday and the stock is up about 5% since then (now $16.65/share). I sold some covered call options on the shares I purchased, a few of them at the $16 range that expired today.

Thankfully, none of my shares were assigned, so I get to keep the $10 per contract and the gains from this past week. If, for some reason, my shares were assigned and the transaction hasn’t been processed yet, I will be forced to take about a 1% return on some shares. If that happens, then I hedged this week’s losses with some small KVUE gains!

I would also like to note that anyone who picked up KVUE with me was able to beat the S&P 500 this week by around 8%. Kenvue was one of the few companies that ended in the green this week, only dropping about 1% on Friday.

As always, I am on the lookout for my next “Berkshire Buy” stock. These companies fit Buffett’s criteria for investing (not always perfectly), and are analyzed from that exact viewpoint. Not all of these companies make it into my personal portfolios. Currently, I own OXY and NSSC in my Flagship Fund.

I have been looking at a company to write an article about and you should see that hit your inbox in the next couple of weeks!

Portfolio Performance & Forward-Looking Market Statements

You can copy trade the portoflios by clicking here!

The returns shown are screenshots from Autopilot (the place where you can copy my trades). These represent the average return of all investors who copy my portfolios. That means the returns in the Autopilot app won’t always match 1:1 with your returns, but show The Simple Side shareholder average.

We have over $1M in AUM!

Thank you to everyone who has joined the autopilot and now copies my portoflios! As you can see above, we have surpassed the $1M in AUM mark, and have all three portfolios making outsized returns relative to the market.

Remember that all 3 portfolios have only been on autopilot for about 2 months! We have seen 24% returns on two portoflios in just 2 months, easily outperforming the SPY!

Here are the total portfolio returns, looking at YTD metrics:

Flagship Fund: 32%AI Second Hand Effects: 81% Tech-Focused Growth (I have shuffled these stocks around in different portoflios so finding the exact percentage is hard): about 70%

Future Returns

Looking towards the future and saying “This is what is going to happen!” is a fool’s game. The reality is that we never truly know what exactly the future holds. A great example is what happened this Friday. A quick tweet about potential trade talks ending caused the whole market to fall by nearly 3%.

Of course, I think we are well-positioned across all three portoflios, each for its own respective reason. The Flagship Fund holds large companies with quality business models and strong fundamentals. Sure, a market drop will bring down their market prices, but the fund overall is relatively stable and will fend off a recession better than most portfolios. Overall, the risk assessment for The Flagship Fund is low. I expect stable returns to continue, and outperformance with these names to continue as well. I would be comfortable holding many of these companies through a market crash.

Now, the Second Hand AI Effects and the Tech-Growth portfolios are much more risky. An overall risk assessment would be “High” for both portfolios. This is why I put large amounts of my invested capital into the Flagship Fund (50%) and am currently holding large amounts of capital in cash (50% of total investable dollars).

This is what is referred to as a “barbell” approach to the stock market. I used to build my entire barbell strategy in the Flagship Fund, but started to break things out in 2025 so that people could follow the strategies that fit their risk tolerance.

Okay, enough with the little rant, back to what I see in the future… in the near term, the Trump-China news is just that… nothing more than news, and I would ignore it. That being said, I think this should show you the market’s current instability and that is something to worry about. How you should respond or think about the Friday movement is entirely based on your risk tolerance.

Here are my recommendations:

* High Risk: Buy the dip / hold. Be smart about the dip buying and buy solid companies with good prospects, but buy the dips.

* Medium Risk: Take a few chips off the table (especially with companies in the portfolio that have returns eclipsing 50-100% returns over the past two months)

* Look to rotate into the Flagship Fund if the volatility in the other portfolios scares you.

* Low Risk: Don’t panic sell into bad news. If you have holdings in the two risky portoflios, then start to build a cash pile and look to take some chips off the table at regular intervals over the next few months/ weeks to stop downside risk.

Free subscribers get direct access to all of these portfolios & real-time updates by joining paid here. Or you can directly copy trade by going here: Autopilot.

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