Futures Trading Outage, November Volatility, Black Friday Bonanza 11/28/25

David Faber (0:00)

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Jim Cramer (0:45)

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Carl Quintanilla (0:53)

Good Friday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with David Faber and Sara Eisen at Post 9th of the New York Stock Exchange. Cramer has the morning off. Final trading day of November. S&P goes for its seventh straight monthly gain. If some of these gains hold, it's an early close for stocks and bonds. We are still recovering from this trading halt at the CME due to a data center cooling issue, which did knock out futures and options across markets. Our roadmap begins with the markets as we wrap up this final day of the month. S&P goes for its best Thanksgiving week in over a decade.

David Faber (1:23)

Plus, the AI trade going into year end as Alphabet of course, continues that historic run. NVIDIA shares, they're deep into correction territory right now.

Sara Eisen (1:33)

And Black Friday kicking off the crucial holiday shopping season. We'll get the early read and discuss which retailers are best positioned right now.

Carl Quintanilla (1:41)

Let's begin with futures which are resuming after being halted by the CME overnight, due to this data center cooling issue. We're still learning more about it, talking about the vendor here, which I think David is a KKR property, but sort of draws attention to the cooling issue, which is just getting started if this AI demand keeps up.

David Faber (2:02)

That's a good point. And just overall reminds you of the vulnerabilities in the system of companies few have perhaps heard of. You're right, Cyrus One was briefly a public company taken private by KKR sometime back. But, you know what, these kinds of things, yes.

Given the rapid construction of data centers across the country, of course, and how often we talk about power, the power is key to cooling these given how hot GPUs can run. And so it is an interesting point, Carl, to sort of think about. I'm not sure what exactly was at issue here or why they had the issue. I'm not sure we've learned that much about it at this point.

Sara Eisen (2:42)

Yeah, you hear data centers and cooling and think, oh, I guess the last time something like this happened was back in 2019, so six years ago and didn't last quite as long as this. On one hand, it's not bad that it, not awful that it came today. There's no economic data today. It's a shortened holiday trading day.

Although, it is month end. And so it is important for settlements and rollovers, but it does appear to be back on track. Also didn't affect individual stocks, right? So the individual stock futures traded. Google, I saw Apple that was trading higher in the in the pre-market. So not necessarily a tell on what's going to happen with the resumption of the AI trade, which is sort of back on and why this week looks a lot better. It's so interesting that in the month end, you know, for November, yes, it's a down month for the NASDAQ, but at one point, the S&P was down almost 5% and it looks like it's going to close closer to the flat line. I mean, down for the month, but not as bad as it was. Things have really picked up in the last week or so.

Carl Quintanilla (3:42)

Yeah. No, we were at one point, David, on track for the worst November since 08, and we managed to claw back quite a bit.

David Faber (3:48)

Yeah. A lot of that due to just the performance of Alphabet alone, the likes of which we've discussed every day. Now, it was, you know, it did give back a bit. Of course, it sort of approached that $4 trillion market cap and then backed off ever so slightly. You do have sort of these opposing camps almost now that have been formed in investors' eyes, namely the ecosystem sort of around Alphabet, that certainly includes names such as Broadcom, AVGO or Celestica and to a lesser extent or others as well sort of in that. And then you've got the OpenAI ecosystem and we certainly think about Oracle there. We've talked often about the decline in those shares of late or certainly over the last month as well. CoreWeave, any number of other companies. But that, I don't know, Sara, if you've seen these two charts that sort of have been making the rounds with all the different names.