Every weekday, the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer releases the Homestretch — an actionable afternoon update, just in time for the last hour of trading on Wall Street. Markets: The S & P 500 was near session highs in afternoon trading, as Wall Street took solace in the fact President Donald Trump softened his rhetoric toward China over the weekend. It was Trump’s threats of higher tariffs and retaliation for China’s crackdown on rare earth elements that sent stocks tumbling on Friday. With its 1.7% advance, as of this writing, the S & P 500 had clawed back more than half of Friday’s losses. Also helping sentiment on Monday was the OpenAI- Broadcom computing deal, lifting stocks across the broader AI trade, including Club names GE Vernova and Eaton . Leading AI chip provider Nvidia also added around 2.5% — an interesting move considering that the market often treats good news for custom chipmaker Broadcom as bad news for Nvidia. However, with Nvidia dropping almost 5% on Friday, given its geopolitical football status, the stock’s advance Monday may have more to do with the cooling China tensions than anything else. Earlier in the afternoon, we took an in-depth look at the Broadcom news. The bond market is closed Monday for the Columbus Day holiday. Good start: A pivotal week for Salesforce and longtime shareholders like us is beginning on a high note. The beaten-up software stock was up nearly 3% on Monday — ahead of software peers like Workday , Adobe and Intuit — before its influential Dreamforce conference begins Tuesday. Ahead of the three-day event, Salesforce announced that voice capabilities are coming to Agentforce, its suite of agentic AI tools that investors are counting on to revive topline growth and quiet concerns about
