For most of this week, the narrative was still the same one that's dominated 2026: AI is working, earnings are real, stocks go up. The S&P 500 hit a new high. The Nasdaq touched record territory Thursday. NVIDIA traded near its all-time high — briefly above $235 — with its market cap crossing $5.5 trillion and earnings just days away. Easy enough to declare it another good week.

Then Friday hit, and two things landed at the same time. Long-term bond yields spiked, and Trump's two-day trip to Beijing wrapped up without the chip deal the market had been quietly expecting. NVDA fell 4.42%. AMD dropped more than 4%. ARM fell over 8%. The iShares Semiconductor ETF was down nearly 3%. Same AI trade, same companies — just with a different variable in the equation.

The Part Nobody Wanted to Talk About

The 10-year Treasury yield closed the week at 4.597%. The 30-year — the "long bond" that sets the discount rate the market implicitly uses to value future profits — hit 5.122%. That's worth sitting with for a moment. When you hear that a stock is trading at "25 times forward earnings," what that really means is that you're betting today's money on profits that show up in 2026, 2027, 2028. The higher long-term interest rates go, the less those future dollars are worth in today's terms. It doesn't mean the business is worse. It means the math behind the valuation changes — sometimes significantly.

Jerome Powell stepped down this week and was elected Fed Chair Pro Tempore while Kevin Warsh's confirmation moves forward. Warsh, who is known for favoring tighter monetary conditions, isn't walking into an environment where cuts are on the table. The Fed's last meeting ended in an 8-4 vote to hold, with three dissenters — the most divided outcome in decades. The rate-cut story that backstopped a lot of optimism through late 2025 has quietly disappeared. What's replaced it is a 5% 30-year Treasury and a question about whether SPY's forward P/E of 21.87x still looks reasonable in that context. Based on how Friday traded, the market is starting to ask.

NVIDIA Hit an All-Time High, Then Gave Some Back — and Reports Wednesday

NVIDIA's week was genuinely strange. The stock set a new all-time high earlier in the week, supported by Jensen Huang's presence at the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing and rising speculation that the trip would unlock sales of H200 chips to Chinese buyers. H200s aren't NVIDIA's latest generation, but they have massive latent demand in China for "inference" workloads — that's running AI models in production, as opposed to training them. That market is real, it's large, and it's currently cut off.

The trip ended Thursday. No deal was announced. Beijing, per one analyst's summary, was "playing a little hard to get." NVIDIA fell 4.4% on Friday. Shares closed around $225, still up significantly year-to-date, but well off the highs that made headlines three days earlier.

Earnings are Wednesday, May 20. The business itself hasn't changed: our site shows NVIDIA's forward P/E at 27.64x, PEG ratio at 0.60 (a PEG below 1 means you're paying less per unit of growth than the growth rate itself, which is rare at this size), ROIC — how many dollars of profit the company generates per dollar of invested capital — at 138.21%, and analyst consensus upside of 37.84%. FY2026 revenue came in at $215.94 billion, up 65.47% year-over-year. Goldman Sachs has called for a "major re-rating" after earnings. The question is what guidance says about China, and whether a 27x forward multiple holds up if that revenue window stays closed.

Berkshire Bets on an Airline in a $105 Oil World

The week's most contrarian move came from an unexpected corner. Berkshire Hathaway's Q1 portfolio filing — Greg Abel's first as CEO — showed a brand-new $2.6 billion stake in Delta Air Lines. This is Berkshire returning to airlines for the first time since Warren Buffett sold every airline position he owned in 2020 during COVID, saying the industry had fundamentally changed. Abel bought back in at roughly $70–73 per share.

The backdrop makes it interesting. Crude oil is back at $105 a barrel. U.S. airlines spent $1.8 billion more on jet fuel in March alone than in February — a direct result of the Iran war keeping the Strait of Hormuz disrupted. Airlines globally have cut around 13,000 flights from May schedules. Delta has trimmed capacity and, in a detail that tells you something about the squeeze, eliminated snack service on short routes. And yet here's Berkshire, with its record $400 billion cash pile and its very unhurried track record, buying DAL.

Delta's numbers on our site don't hide the pressure, but they don't panic either: forward P/E at 12.84x, a PEG ratio of 1.02 — essentially priced at exactly its growth rate — and analyst consensus pointing to about 16% upside from here. Bernstein raised its price target this week to $88, citing "better fuel insulation" than peers. The counterargument came from Appaloosa Management, which dumped all three major airline stocks in the same quarter citing surging fuel costs. Two serious investors, same environment, opposite positions. What Abel seems to be saying is that premium carriers like Delta can absorb fuel costs better than budget operators — and that when oil eventually comes down, this is where you want to have been buying. That's a reasonable thesis. It's also the kind of thesis that can take eighteen months to prove right.

Also worth noting from the same Berkshire filing: Abel tripled the firm's Alphabet stake to nearly 58 million shares — GOOGL is now Berkshire's seventh-largest holding. And it exited Amazon, Visa, and Mastercard entirely. The new leadership has a different set of convictions than the one it replaced.

The AI Stock With the Most Unusual Number on the Board

Palantir had a quieter week in the headlines, but its metrics are worth a look when you're thinking about how AI is actually being valued. Our site shows PLTR at a forward P/E of 88.97x — expensive by any standard — but paired with revenue growth of 84.71% and an ROIC of 229%. That return on invested capital figure is not a typo. It means the company generates roughly $2.29 for every dollar it has deployed, which is higher than NVIDIA's already-extraordinary 138%. The difference is that NVIDIA has hardware and supply chain as a moat; Palantir has government and enterprise software contracts. Those are durable in different ways.

The PEG ratio — forward P/E divided by earnings growth, where below 1.0 means you're paying less than the growth rate — sits at 1.59 for PLTR versus 0.60 for NVDA. NVDA is the cheaper growth stock by that measure, even though it looks more expensive in raw P/E terms. If you want to see both profiles side by side, the NVDA vs. PLTR comparison on this site lays out every metric. They're both AI. They're built completely differently.

What the Next Few Days Decide

Wednesday's NVIDIA earnings report is the biggest single data point on the calendar for the next month. If revenue and guidance come in strong — and if there's any hint of movement on China chip sales — the bond yield pressure probably gets shrugged off for another few weeks and the AI trade resumes. If guidance disappoints, or if the China question goes unanswered, then 27x forward multiples on a 5.1% 30-year become a harder argument to make.

The honest summary is that this week the market ran into two ceilings at once: the ceiling of what the bond market is willing to tolerate on valuation, and the ceiling of what geopolitics will permit on NVIDIA's addressable market. Both are real. Neither is resolved. The good news is that one of them — NVDA earnings — has a known answer date. The other one tends to move slower, and usually with less warning.

Sources: Stock Analysis: NVIDIA (NVDA) financials · Stock Analysis: Delta Air Lines (DAL) financials · CNBC: Berkshire returns to airlines with $2.6B stake in Delta · CNBC: Nvidia's trillion-dollar run puts pressure on the bulls · Investopedia: The AI Trade Takes a Breather to End the Week · Business Insider: How much airlines pay to fuel jets as oil tops $100 · CNBC: Airlines spent 56.4% more on jet fuel after Iran war started · Business Insider: Berkshire triples Alphabet stake, bets on Delta · MarketWatch: This hedge fund dumped the big three airline stocks · CNBC: Jerome Powell elected Fed Chair Pro Tempore · Market data as of May 15–16, 2026. Metric data sourced from etf-metrics.com. This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice.