📈Microsoft Hit Hard by Earnings Season: Microsoft shares saw their largest single day decline since 2020 on the back of poor growth for Azure cloud services and AI jitters. While earnings blew past analysts’ expectations, reaching $5.16/share, the 11% pull back in stock could reflect the market paring back some of the AI hype. Meta meanwhile saw a 10% boost in stock price the day prior.

📈Medicare Mayhem: US health insurers lost a combined $96 billion in market cap this Tuesday, with UnitedHealth plunging nearly 20%. Why? The US government proposed increasing Medicare payment rates by only 0.09%, falling far short of the expected 5%. With lower rates increases insurers are likely to see a significant drop in earnings.

📈Warsh Washes Out the Pessimists: The record-breaking rally in precious metals collapsed on Friday, with silver crashing 31% and gold plunging 11% in the largest single-day decline ever. The decline has been associated with the appointment of Kevin Warsh as chair of the central bank who has notouriously been more concerned with higher inflation than slower growth, injecting more confidence into the US dollar.

📈Rate Bait: The Fed. Reserve voted 10-2 to pause interest cuts and maintain the benchmark at 3.5% to 3.75% despite intense White House pressure for lower rates, with Chair (not for long) Jerome Poweel citing a stabilizing labor market as justification.

🌎JPow’s Time Has Come: Trump has officially announced his next pick for Fed Reserve Chair: Kevin Warsh. Warsh is a former Federal Reserve governor who previously advocated for a higher interest rate environment. However, over the past few years Warsh has been increasingly dovish, aligning more with Trump’s ideal monetary policy — giving him the moniker of “the chameleon”.

🌎The IRS Bandit: On Monday, the US Treasury cut ties and $21 million in contracts with consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton. The souring of relationship came after a former Booz employee, while contracted out to the IRS, stole Trump and 400,000 others’ tax returns. It was subsequently reported that Trump paid $0 income taxes over the past few years.

🌎A Tariff Free Future: Tariffs haven't changed American appetites: the US just recorded its largest trade deficit in 34 years. But while the US maintains barriers, the EU and India are tearing theirs down. A new Free Trade Agreement between the two represents a market of 2 billion people moving toward a tariff-free future. The deal slashes costs significantly, removing European duties of up to 26% and eliminating India’s massive 110% tax on European vehicles.

🌎Nurse Fatally Shot by ICE.: On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse was fatally shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis during a confrontation. Pretti was pinned to the ground by multiple agents when the shots were fired. Bystander video appeared to show an agent removing a gun and moving away from Pretti before another agent shot and killed him, Alex was a legally licensed to carry.

👔Search and Destroy: Google executed a kill order of Ipidea, a Chinese-based “residential proxy” service, by seizing domains and scrubbing apps that had silently conscripted over nine million Android devices into a hidden network that rents out user bandwidth to anonymous clients.

👔Love from Big Bro: Nvidia is investing an additional USD$2Bn in an effort to help CoreWeave add >5 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by 2030. As part of the collaboration, CoreWeave will debut Nvidia’s first attempt at a standalone CPU, as the company foward integrates beyond GPU’s. Nvdia investing in what is essentially a customer has sparked concerns of circular investments, which some see as another way to inflate the already overvalued AI companies.

👔Amazon Trims the Fat: It’s been a busy week for Amazon, replacing its Amazon retail stores with Whole Foods and plans for 16,000 layoffs. Amazon expanded its workforce by over 100,000 employees in 2019-22 and has since aimed to cut costs as pandemic-era online shopping has fallen. Amazon has also pivoted away from it’s grocery line, citing it failed to resonate with customers.

👔Waabi is Coming for Waymo: Autonomous trucking startup Waabi saw a massive influx of investors in it’s latest funding round, raising $750 million from venture funds and Uber. Waabi’s funding round marks the largest ever seen in Canada and is a promising start as they move into the competitive robotaxi industry.

🤪The Big Long: Michael Burry, the fund manager famed for being one of the first to recognize the 2008 financial crisis, disclosed a new long position in GameStop, citing his confidence on CEO Ryan Cohen’s ability to tranform the company using its cash reserves. This marks a shift for $GME ( ▼ 1.97% ) which has historically been seen as a meme stock.

🤪”Let’s Just Make it Through the Holidays”: Is the attitude of many married couples in December according to divorce lawyers. “Divorce January” often sees a 30% spike in family law enquiries compared to other months of the year. Lawyers most common piece of advice to disenfranchised couples? You can’t get ChatGPT to write divorce papers.

🤪Too Effective: Eyebrow transplants are becoming more popular among those who “overplucked in the 2000s, and want the full, fluffy look popular today”. The procedure involves taking hair follicles from the back of your scalp and implanting them into your brow line. An important caveat is that the transplanted grafts are still genetically scalp hair, and so they continue to grow long and must be trimmed regularly.

🤪Algorithm of the State: A wave of users have been alleging that TikTok, under its new U.S. ownership, is systematically censoring content critical of Border Patrol, especially those about the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minnesota. While TikTok USDS execs. attributed the suppression to a temporary power outage, the explanation combined with a 150% increase in deletion rate in the last 5 days did not quell fears, according to CNBC.