Livestream Menu Make It select USA INTL Livestream Search quotes, news & videos Livestream Watchlist SIGN IN Create free account Markets Business Investing Tech Politics & Policy Video Watchlist Investing Club PRO Livestream Menu
AI funding fears rattle Wall Street. Here's how we're adjusting our portfolio Published Sat, Oct 24 2026 12:11 PM EDT Alexa LoMonaco @in/alexa-lomonaco/ Wall Street struggled to find its footing last week as renewed concerns about financing the artificial intelligence boom overshadowed strong earnings. An early rebound in AI-related names ran into a brick wall Thursday after Meta Platforms reported negative free cash flow for the first time since its 2012 initial public offering. The sell-off spread to more defensive areas of the market Friday, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 1% as oil prices surged on fears of renewed U.S. strikes against Iran. The Nasdaq only posted a slight loss as investors returned to beaten-down chip stocks and bought up cyber stocks. The S & P 500 on Friday was modestly lower. For the week, the Dow was the big winner, rising 0.4%. The S & P 500 was down 0.5%, while the Nasdaq slipped 0.7%. Here's a closer look at the three developments that drove last week's market action. AI funding fears deepen The AI trade remained volatile last week as investors weighed strong demand against growing concerns about how companies will finance the massive infrastructure buildout. AI stocks rallied early in the week, especially on SpaceX 's surging revenue numbers reported Tuesday evening . Thursday was terrible. In addition to cash flow concerns, Meta's strong earnings from Wednesday evening were overshadowed by its disclosure that its long-term plans could require hundreds of billions of dollars in additional financing. CoreWeave , which has become a focal point for concerns about debt-fueled AI spending, fell 10% Thursday as investors continued to scrutinize its borrowing costs. It was down more than 10% for the week after the neocloud ended the prior week down more than 25%. Even Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged the funding challenge, saying Thursday that the "demand of the capital is much greater than the availability of the capital." The issue isn't AI demand, but whether companies can secure enough financing to meet it as borrowing becomes more expensive. Nvidia was down roughly 1.5% last week. We took advantage of Thursday's sell-off to buy 10 shares of GE Vernova , our first AI-related purchase in five weeks, and upgraded the stock to our buy-equivalent 1 rating on confidence in long-term power demand. But we also reduced our exposure to the broader AI trade. "The collapse of the data center requires us to circle the wagons," Jim Cramer said. "We can't have too much of the ones we have. We can pick as we did with GEV, but nothing aggressive. And all tag ends should go like Broadcom." He continued: "Circling means we want to be bigger in the better ones." To that end, we exited Broadcom on Friday, locking in an average gain of roughly 128%. We also trimmed CrowdStrike , realizing a gain of about 187%, to right-size the position rather than because of concerns about its fundamentals. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks were our two biggest winners last week — both up more than 11% as news of the security flaws in the PHP programming language touched off a global security scramble. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz told CNBC Friday…