Sunday Money: Monolithic Power Systems Shares Soar 19.59%
Monolithic Power Systems shares surged 19.59% this week as chip and cable names rallied, while crypto majors and AI darlings took a hit.
In this article 4 sections
Grab a coffee – here’s the week that was. The headline act belongs to Monolithic Power Systems shares, which jumped 19.59% to close at 1,380.94, the single biggest move on either side of the ledger this week. Monolithic Power makes the small, unglamorous chips – power management silicon – that regulate electricity flow inside everything from laptops to data-centre servers and electric vehicles. It is precisely the kind of component supplier that benefits when the industry it serves is building flat out, and this week the market decided it liked what it saw enough to send the stock up by nearly a fifth in five trading days. For context, the broader Nasdaq 100 (tracked via the QQQ ETF) rose a far more modest 2.56% over the same stretch, so this was not a rising tide lifting all boats – it was Monolithic Power’s boat getting a particularly strong shove.
Monolithic Power Systems shares lead, but it had company
The rest of the gainers’ board read like a greatest-hits of this year’s two big market stories – chips and cable. Charter Communications added 16.29% to reach 138.39, Coreworks-adjacent names kept climbing, and Advanced Micro Devices rose 14.62% to 525.17, riding the same AI-hardware enthusiasm that has defined much of the autumn. Arista Networks, which sells the networking kit that ties data centres together, gained 14.73% to 195.50. It was a week where anything plugged into the AI build-out story found buyers, and MPWR’s chip-supplier status put it squarely in that current.
Four more movers worth knowing about
Coreweave (NASDAQ: CRWV), the cloud-computing firm that rents out GPU capacity for AI workloads, climbed 15.21% to 51.90, extending a bounce that followed its recent quarterly earnings beat. It was one of the few AI-adjacent names to finish the week in the green rather than the red.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) went the other way, falling 9.57% to 161.38, a reminder that even the bellwether of the AI trade isn’t immune to a rough week – this one complicated further by reports of a probe touching its chief executive.
Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), the business-intelligence firm that has made itself famous for its enormous bitcoin holdings, dropped 11.30% to 110.00 as the crypto market it is so heavily exposed to sold off hard, with the stock also facing the prospect of removal from the MSCI index over that very bitcoin hoard.
Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) slid 10.38% to 112.96, continuing a pattern where decent underlying numbers haven’t been enough to stop the shares falling – its own quarterly results beat forecasts and the stock still dropped close to the same amount a fortnight ago.
Crypto corner
If you’re holding digital assets, you’ll have had a rougher week than most equity investors. Bitcoin (BTC) fell 15.77% to $63,956.35, ether (ETH) dropped a steeper 20.35% to $1,781.95, and solana (SOL) was the hardest hit of the three majors, down 21.70% to $69.91, according to Binance spot market data. The scale of the move helps explain why Strategy, whose balance sheet is built around bitcoin, had such a difficult week alongside it.
The week in numbers
- The 10-year US Treasury yield climbed to 5.10% from 4.98% a week earlier, according to FRED data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – a notable move for government borrowing costs in a single week.
- The 2-year yield rose in step, to 4.86% from 4.73%, per the same St. Louis Fed series, while the gap between the two – the 10y-2y spread that investors watch as a signal on the economic outlook – widened slightly to 0.27 percentage points from 0.24.
- WTI crude oil held dead flat at $89.62 a barrel, unchanged from the prior reading, according to FRED – rare stillness in a week when almost everything else moved.
Put the broad market numbers alongside that: the S&P 500 (via the SPY ETF) rose 1.54% to 749.60, the Dow (via DIA) added 1.06% to 521.21, and the Nasdaq 100 (via QQQ) led the pack at 2.56% to 674.25. None of those headline index moves comes close to capturing what happened underneath – a 19.59% surge in one chipmaker’s shares, a near-20% drawdown in the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, and bond yields climbing meaningfully all inside the same five trading days. That’s the real story of the week: calm on the surface, plenty of turbulence underneath.
That’s your lot for this week. Settle in, and we’ll see you back here next Sunday for whatever the markets throw up next.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Markets move quickly; figures are correct as sourced at the time of writing. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.
