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. Stocks are lower across the board Tuesday afternoon, as key members of the AI buildout trade continue to struggle. Club name Micron , as well as SK Hynix and other memory stocks are down sharply for a second straight day, after Chinese rival CXMT touted progress this weekend on a more efficient way of making memory chips. The AI trade was wobbling even before being confronted by these headlines. Stretching back to last week, the iShares Semiconductor ETF and VanEck Semiconductor ETF are each on pace for a sixth negative day in a row. It is both ETFs’ longest losing streaks since May 2025, when they dropped for seven straight sessions. Not all tech stocks were in the red. Meta Platforms is up nearly 3% (more on the company shortly), while Salesforce and Microsoft are up 2% and 1%, respectively. Apple is clinging to modest gains (and trying for a record close) after the iPhone maker unveiled its biggest push yet into connected home devices. Johnson & Johnson is the biggest laggard in our portfolio, down about 6%. While not thrilled with the problems facing its MedTech segment, we’re upbeat on its pharmaceutical business and look at Tuesday’s pullback as a buying opportunity. The market wasn’t getting any help from the banks, which ushered in the unofficial start to third-quarter earnings season Tuesday morning. The results from JPMorgan , Citigroup , Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs were mostly healthy, with credit metrics pointing to a resilient economy and investment banking activity still robust, just not as robust as in the blistering second quarter. The stock reaction wasn’t great. JPMorgan is slightly lower, Citigroup fell 4%, and Wells Fargo dropped 2%. Goldman was the outlier, up about 0.5%. In our earnings analysis earlier Tuesday, we upgraded Goldman , which had been battered into the print. Veteran bank analyst Gerard Cassidy of RBC Capital Markets said he thinks a couple of factors explain the stock moves, including less powerful estimate revisions versus the second quarter and expectations for less stock buybacks going forward. Meta has gained roughly 6% over the past two sessions, fueled by enthusiasm around its latest artificial intelligence model family, Muse Wonder. There are two versions: Muse Wonder and a more advanced version dubbed Muse Wonder Full. Released Monday afternoon, the model family marks a “big step forward” in Meta’s AI efforts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the Cheeky Pint podcast , which also published Monday. “Now that we are kind of at the frontier, now everything that we do going forward will just kind of be pushing the frontier,” Zuckerberg said. Analysts on Wall Street concur with Zuckerberg’s assessment. Wells Fargo declared that Meta has reached the “AI frontier” with Muse Wonder Full. Based on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Wells wrote that Muse Wonder Full ranks among the industry’s most advanced offerings, behind only Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5. To start, Muse Wonder is available to developers through Meta’s Model API and its Muse Code agent for writing software. Muse Wonder Full is available to paying subscribers of Muse Code. The company said that Muse Wonder will soon come to its Muse personal agent app, beginning first with paid subscribers. The releases could help Meta attract more paying users and strengthen its consumer-facing AI offerings, creating new revenue opportunities beyond advertising. The Facebook and Instagram parent also received a wave of bullish analyst notes and price target hikes following the launch. Baird called it “another example of tangible product progress” from Meta’s heavy AI investments, while KeyBanc said it “reinforces Meta has the right mix of talent, data, distribution, and compute capacity to compete in AI.” Although Wonder is an incremental development rather than a major catalyst on its own, we’re encouraged by Meta’s steady pace of AI releases following Muse Spark in April. On the podcast, Zuckerberg also said development should accelerate, saying, “the time between each subsequently bigger class of models, I think, will now start to kind of compress.” It’s still unclear how meaningful the resulting subscription revenue could become, but the progress offers growing evidence that Meta’s substantial AI investments are producing competitive products with monetization potential, easing earlier concerns about spending without a clear payoff. There are no major earnings reports after the bell. However, Wednesday morning brings results from semiconductor equipment giant ASML and more influential financials Bank of America , BlackRock , Morgan Stanley , and State Street , which is the closest competitor to Club name Bank of New York . We’ll hear from BNY on Thursday morning. On the economic data side Wednesday, the big report is the consumer price index for September at 8:30 a.m. ET, which figures to influence expectations around future Federal Reserve interest rate decisions. The Fed’s Beige Book — the central bank’s periodic update on current economic conditions in the country, gathered by the 12 regional Fed arms — is due out at 2 p.m. ET. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
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