Shares in Meta slumped 15% when Wall Street opened on Thursday, wiping about 190bn off the value of the Facebook and Instagram parent company, as investors reacted to a pledge to ramp up spending on artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder and chief executive, said on a conference call on Wednesday that spending on the technology would have to grow "meaningfully" before the company could make "much revenue" from new AI products. Shares in Meta had been boosted in 2023 by Zuckerberg's tough action on costs in what he described as a "year of efficiency". A relaxation of that restraint has rattled investors after Meta raised the upper bound of its capital expenditure guidance on Wednesday, from 37bn to 40bn. Last week, Meta released Llama 3, the latest version of its AI model, alongside an image generator that updates pictures in real time while users type prompts.

This week's economic calendar is pretty light. Market participants will be looking to an early getaway for the long weekend. While there will be plenty of entertaining FedSpeak, I expect a different topic to be at the fore. The news was pretty good, but the stock market was not. In my last WTWA, I predicted that the punditry would be asking whether it was "springtime for housing". That was the recurring topic as housing news was reported on several different days and garnered plenty of discussion. Competition came from the Fed Minutes, some dramatic earnings reports, and the election race. I always start my personal review of the week by looking at this great chart from Doug Short.