By John Stewart, chief investment officer at Farmers Trust Co.

Week in Review: Government Shutdown Ends

The longest government shutdown in history has finally ended.

If you’re looking at it from a market perspective, shutdowns usually cause some near-term market volatility, but they always end – that’s a 100% probability. And that’s obviously what happened this time.

The market tried to rally on the news Monday, but the volatility returned as the week wore on, and there seems to be some concern about the stability of the AI arms race that has dominated markets for the past couple of years.

Some analysts have talked about a bubble; others believe this is only the beginning of the most world-changing technology that humanity has ever seen.

Our feeling is that the truth lies somewhere in between – many of the fringe players in AI will likely get wiped out, and the biggest beneficiaries of the technology may be companies that no one is even thinking about right now.

Going forward, it’s going to be extremely important to do the deep work to find the next big winners rather than just buying every stock that calls itself an AI company.

We live in an era of instant gratification. TikTok videos and Facebook Reels, tweets, leveraged stock ETFs and plenty of other examples trend toward extreme short-term bias.

This short-termism has been the trend in investing as well. In the 1960s, the average holding period for a stock was eight years; today it is less than 90 days.

The real power of the stock market is in patience. It’s very difficult to know when the next big upswing will occur, but a lot of the returns are made over just a handful of trading days.

In fact, over the past 20 years, if you missed the top 10 trading days, your return would have dropped from over 9% to just 5%.

So stay invested and let long-term compounding work for you. Patience is key.

Looking Ahead: NVIDIA Earnings on Deck

Earnings season is winding down, but there’s still at least one more big name to report – AI chip darling NVIDIA.

The stock has certainly done well yet again in 2025, but there’s been some near-term weakness in the name as some of the bloom has started to come off of the AI rose.

Shares peaked at $212 in late October and are currently trading around $184, a drop of nearly 15%.

So will the report reignite the shares along with the broader AI investment theme or are investors’ recent jitters justified? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.