TOP STORY
📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

☀️ Happy Sunday everyone!

🚀 It was another big week in the markets, with the Nasdaq-100 climbing for the 2nd week in a row, now up 32% in the past 6 months. Across the indexes:

• The S&P 500 rose +1.21%

• The Nasdaq 100 rose +3.25%

• The TSX fell -0.02%

🏆 The biggest gains were on Monday, with the Nasdaq soaring 2.3% to a new record high (its first record since June 2nd) as Chip stocks soared, with AMD jumping 10% to join the $1 trillion market cap club for the first time, while Intel ($INTC) surged 12% and Arm rocketed 17%.

🤔 So, what sparked Monday’s Big Rally?

1) 🤑 The AI Money Train Keeps Chugging

🤖 The biggest driver was fresh signs that AI spending is still accelerating, with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon projecting AI infrastructure spending will grow from ~$300 billion in 2025 to ~$700 billion this year and hit $1 trillion in 2027.

🎯 Dimon also said that this spending is showing real returns, noting top cloud providers grew cloud revenue ~48% year-over-year last quarter, backed by a ~$1.7 trillion backlog of signed orders.

✨ Meta ($META) contributed to the Nasdaq gains, jumping 11% on Monday after a flurry of analysts hiked price targets following major new product announcements at its Meta Connect conference (one of our feature stories for today).

2) 🇨🇳 Progress on US-China Relations

🤝 Another driver was progress on US-China relations, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calling talks on trade and AI "very successful" after Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House this week (his first state visit in 11 years).

🕊️ The two sides extended their trade truce by 2 months, with Xi calling on both nations to ensure AI remains "under human control" and to "lengthen the list of cooperation, and shorten the list of issues"… though Trump rejected the idea of formal AI rules, with the topic punted to an AI summit in Shenzhen this November.

3) 💸 Falling Oil Prices and Bond Yields

🛢️ Finally, oil and bond yields both fell on Monday, with Brent Crude briefly dipping below $100/barrel and the 10-year Treasury yield slipping back under 5% (lower yields make borrowing cheaper and make stocks more attractive compared to 'safe' bonds, which is why falling yields usually give stocks a boost).

💬 As Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, put it:

😬 The good news on the Treasury Yield didn’t last long though. By midweek, the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield surged back, topping 5.23%, its highest level since 2007, as comments from Fed officials had investors pricing in a ~65% chance of another rate hike next month.

🛢️ Oil also jumped back up to $107/barrel on Thursday amid the endless geopolitical tensions in Iran.

📈 But despite it all, the market proved remarkably resilient, jumping again on Friday to cap off a winning week for all three major US indexes.

😰 But while the market overall has continued to fly, one stock has been having an incredibly tough year… which brings us to today's main story: Nike's fall from grace and whether the new CEO can still turn things around…

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TOP STORY
📉 Nike Just Hit Its Lowest Price In 12 Years. Can It Bounce Back?

👟 Going as far back as Dec 2025, we’ve been covering Nike’s ($NKE) turnaround efforts and whether its “Win Now” strategy by new CEO Elliott Hill would be the fix for the company.

📉 Well… since then, shares have fallen over 40%, and are now down 76% over the past 5 years, hitting their lowest price since 2014 after a wave of analyst downgrades.

🇳🇿 Nike’s market cap has fallen from a 2021 peak of roughly $264 billion to around $53 billion today (a loss equivalent to New Zealand's annual GDP). And as of this week, it is no longer part of the S&P 100 (a position it held for nearly 18 years).

🤔 So what’s the story behind the company’s fall from grace? And is there any chance of a turnaround from here after 5 years of disappointment?

👟 Why Nike’s Empire Has Been Crumbling

📉 As you can see from the stock price, Nike’s “Win Now” strategy has been looking rough…

🇨🇳 Q1 earnings are scheduled for this coming week, but as of the company’s last earnings (which we covered here), a few specific rough patches were very evident:

• ❌ Overall revenue fell 1%, and management guided to a low- to mid-single-digit sales decline in the upcoming quarter

• ❌ Greater China revenue fell roughly 12% (the 8th-straight quarterly decline)

• ❌ Converse sales collapsed more than 30% year over year.

✂️ The company also cut more than $2 billion worth of classic footwear franchises in 2026, shrinking its own Sportswear and Jordan Streetwear lines to clear out oversupply, all while On ($ONON), Hoka ($DECK), and other “disruptor” brands have kept gaining shelf space and market share.

⚠️ To understand how bad that truly is, those two categories (Sportswear and Jordan Streetwear) together make up roughly 50% of Nike’s total revenue, and management expects both to stay negative through fiscal 2027.

🗣️ Even Nike’s own CEO has stopped pretending things are going smoothly, reportedly telling employees after its disappointing earnings back in April: ”I’m so tired, and I know you are too, of talking about fixing this business.”

🗓️ And if it couldn’t get worse, one analyst now says a full recovery of revenue might take all the way up until 2028:

✨ Specks of Hope: Nike’s “Sports Offense”

🧭 Despite the brutal numbers, some believe Nike's turnaround strategy shows promise (including the 3,800 holders on Blossom who are still holding on). Most notably with “Sport Offense.”

🏀 Sport Offense is Hill’s company-wide restructuring that scrapped the old setup where teams were organized by product type (shoes, apparel, etc.), and instead rebuilt them around individual sports (basketball, running, etc.), with Hill saying:

✅ And this mindset may be working. At the 2026 World Cup, Nike’s “Rip the Script” campaign passed 1.5 billion views, and its Global Football division in particular delivered positive year-over-year comps, with double-digit growth across all continents.

🏃‍♂️ Running specifically (a category Nike historically dominated and has been losing share in) is actually showing the clearest turnaround signal, with new redesigned lines driving the running division to surge more than 20% last quarter.

🥾 Product innovation is also picking up, with Nike’s new Aero-FIT material debuting globally at the World Cup and the Mercurial “Built for Speed” launch becoming the fastest-selling 24-hour cleated footwear release in Nike Direct history.

🗣️ All this even led to a change of tone for Hill, who reflected on all of this at Nike’s annual shareholder meeting a couple of weeks ago, saying:

⚖️ But do the positives outweigh the negatives?

😬 Analysts Aren’t Optimistic

🔀 Well, analysts are split, leaning negative, and in the past 2 weeks alone a wave of Wall Street cuts has hurt the stock a lot:

• 🐻 Sept 10: Morgan Stanley reinstated Underweight with a $31 target

• ⬇️ Sept 14: Baird downgraded Nike from Outperform to Neutral, slashing its target from $70 to $44

• ✂️ Sept 14: Citi cut its target from $45 to $39

• ✂️ Sept 17: UBS cut its target from $48 to $42

• 😬 Sept 23: Barclays, one of the last bulls left, kept its Overweight rating but trimmed its target from $52 to $48

• 🚨 Sept 25: Bank of America downgraded Nike to Underperform, slashing its target from $47 all the way to $30

• ✂️ Sept 26: Goldman Sachs cut its target from $42 to $38

✨ But not everyone has thrown in the towel. On the optimistic side, Bernstein's Aneesha Sherman and Nick Anderson say the worst of the China and Converse drag is already priced in, while Morningstar's David Swartz was even more dismissive of the bad news, calling the S&P 100 exit "a bit embarrassing, but otherwise irrelevant, in my opinion."

🌼 Blossom Continues To Beleive

📊 While Wall Street was busy cutting price targets, Blossom investors were doing the exact opposite:

• 🛒 Since mid-August, buyers have outnumbered sellers 2-to-1, and through the downgrade wave itself, roughly 70% of everyone trading Nike on Blossom was buying

• 🧘 Weekly seller counts have actually fallen since the downgrades started.

• 🆕 Nike is finding new fans on the way down: 39% of last week's buyers were buying Nike for the first time, up from ~20–25% all summer

• ⚖️ What’s most interesting is Blossom net sold Nike for five straight weeks back in January when the stock broke $55, so this dip-buying conviction is new.

🤔 So who’s right, the Blossom community or the analysts?

👀 Luckily, we won’t have to wait long for the next chapter here, as Nike reports earnings on Thursday… and I’ll be sure to give you the update next week 🫡

🔄 But on the note of turnarounds, let’s shift our attention to the turnaround king: Meta, which has soared an incredible 32% in the past month, shaking off worries about its AI spending with the launch of Muse, its AI assistant.

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BIG TECH
🚀 Meta Surges 11% After Betting Big On Muse At Meta Connect

🤖 This week, Meta ($META) held Meta Connect, the company's annual two-day developer conference, where Zuckerberg made Muse (the viral AI assistant Meta launched 3 weeks ago, which we covered last week) the centerpiece of nearly everything they announced.

🥊 The Zuck came out swinging, announcing major products and partnerships that sent the stock soaring, including:

• 🥽 Meta VR Glasses: a new, ultra-thin VR headset starting at $1,299 USD, arriving spring 2027, with Disney+, Prime Video, and IMAX Enhanced content support

• 🔑 Muse Charm: a small, pocket/keychain-sized device with a fingerprint sensor that lets you talk to Muse without pulling out your phone, shipping “in time for the holidays” (price unannounced)

• 👓 Ray-Ban Meta Audio: Meta’s first camera-free smart glasses, $349 USD, shipping October 13

• 🛍️ Plus more announcements of Muse expanding into shopping, adding Walmart, Instacart, Best Buy, Gap, Wayfair, and Sephora as retail partners, plus payment support via Shop Pay and PayPal

• 📺 Watch the full conference here!

🚀 Meta shares jumped 10% in a single day following the conference, with shares now up roughly 32% over the past month, sitting near a 52-week high - a remarkable turnaround considering it was negative on the year just a month ago, when investors were punishing Meta for its massive AI spending with no clear return in sight.

🌎 Racing Towards a “Post-Smartphone” World

🕶️ Meta’s AI models are generally seen as behind OpenAI's and Anthropic’s, but the story has now shifted to distribution (aka actually getting AI into people’s daily lives through hardware).

📊 Meta and manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica (parent of Ray-Ban) reportedly sold 7-7.5 million pairs of AI-enabled glasses in 2025 alone, with targets to produce 10 million for 2026.

💃 Meta’s VP of wearables Alex Himel says the strategy has been deliberate to prioritize fashion first so people want to wear the hardware regardless of features.

💡 And even though customers of Meta’s AI glasses use the smart features only about 10% of the time, the real value is that Meta’s hardware is being sold at all.

🍩 Compared to the competition: OpenAI's first hardware device (reportedly a screen-free, "doughnut-shaped" object) hasn't shipped yet, Google's ($GOOG) AI glasses are only expected to go on sale soon, and Apple ($AAPL) and Amazon ($AMZN) are still in development.

💬 What Analysts Are Saying

🤔 So what do analysts have to say about all this? Will these announcements turn around the narrative for Meta?

🎯 Judging by Wall Street's reaction, the answer is yes, with a wave of price target hikes following the Connect conference:

• 🟢 JPMorgan raised its target from $820 to $920

• 🟢 KeyBanc raised to $900 (flagging Muse as a genuine revenue driver)

• 🟢 Cantor Fitzgerald and Raymond James both moved to $860

• 🟢 Tigress Financial went as high as $995

• 🟢 Wells Fargo called Muse "the new metric to watch."

✅ Across the board, analysts have rated Meta as a strong buy, with an average ~$800 price target, above even the $752 price the stock is sitting at after this month’s surge.

🔥 Jefferies (which hiked its target from $710 to $875) went the furthest, calling Muse a "killer product" that "flips the narrative" on Meta's AI spending. And as William Blair's Ralph Schackart put it:

🧐 But not everyone’s convinced the new hardware actually solves anything.

🗣️ Anthony Ferry, CEO of e-commerce company Wayvia, put it bluntly:

🛒 There's also a business model question. Zuckerberg says he expects Meta will eventually "profit by taking a small fee from transactions Muse completes, but Amazon has already blocked Muse from shopping on its site (the same move it made against Perplexity, OpenAI, and Google), which cuts off a huge chunk of e-commerce.

⏳ As of today, the actual test that remains is whether Muse usage holds up once the novelty fades, and whether Meta can find a business model that survives Amazon-style blockades. It also hinges on whether people actually want an AI agent living on their face or in their pocket long-term.

🤷‍♂️ But debate aside, it’s undeniable that Zuck has completely shifted the narrative on Meta in the past month from an AI money pit to one of the most exciting AI hardware and distribution plays in the market…

🙏 But anyways, that’s enough for one Sunday! Thanks for reading to the end - let’s wrap up with some of the best posts on Blossom this week!

FROM THE BLOSSOM COMMUNITY
⭐️ Featured Posts of the Week

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