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Market Data Table

Breakfast News: Shopify Just Became AI's Checkout

September 22, 2026

Monday's Markets
S&P 500 7,765 (+1.49%)
Nasdaq 27,122 (+2.26%)
Dow 52,049 (+0.71%)
Bitcoin $86,769 (+7.23%)

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1. AI Agents Are Filling Shopify's Cart

Chart comparing the market performance of Shopify, Meta, and the S&P 500 over the past decade, with Shopify up 3,000%, Meta up 470%, and the S&P 500 up 257% in mid-2026.

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Meta (NASDAQ:META) built an artificial intelligence (AI) shopping agent but skipped the checkout. Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP) CEO Tobi Lütke offered his. Shopify runs storefronts and payments for millions of merchants. It will now let Meta's Muse assistant buy things through Shop Pay for every store it hosts. Shopify shares jumped 7% on the news, while Meta rose 11%. Muse is already the No. 1 app in the U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT, with 700,000+ downloads in five days.

Muse is the latest to plug in: More AI platforms are routing purchases through Shopify rather than building their own merchant networks. Critics argue that AI agents are a threat to Shopify. More agents, instead, are plugging into Shopify's infrastructure. That's a network effect and great news for Shopify, the 80-time Team Hidden Gems recommendation, with no share sold across any Foolish service in a decade.
Every new agent adds to the same flywheel: Shopify has a lot to offer to agents, from product data, merchants, and checkout to order processing. Agents may not want to cut out the commerce platform so quickly. As for Shop Pay, it collects its fee whether the buyer is human or an AI agent acting on its behalf. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) may have blocked Muse, but each agent it turns away could send more along Shopify's way. Team Hidden Gems has a 5-year price prediction of $266.74.

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2. AMD: Welcome to the $1 Trillion Club

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) crossed $1 trillion in market value Monday. Its stock jumped 9.4% to $612, adding $200 billion in a week. The Stock Advisor recommendation by Team Rule Breakers is outperforming the S&P 500 by 178% since the January 2024 note. The AI build-out and a second-quarter report last month that beat Wall Street's estimates fueled the run.

Firing on all cylinders: AMD's revenue jumped 50% last quarter. Its Data Center division logged 107% revenue growth year over year. There's no slowdown in sight. "We now expect data center segment revenue to more than double year-over-year in 2027," CEO Lisa Su told analysts on the August earnings call.
AMD led the tech stock rally: Other tech stocks also rallied on Monday, mainly on the Shopify-Muse development. Marvell (NASDAQ:MRVL) added more than 5%. AMD led the pack, though, and the $1 trillion milestone puts it in a rare league. Given its solid core business and first-mover advantage in hybrid quantum infrastructure, we see a lot more runway ahead.

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3. Moderna Jumps on Cancer Data, Novo Slides on Guidance

Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) rose 8% Monday after Merck (NYSE:MRK) got three intismeran autogene abstracts accepted for October's ESMO conference. The new data, which covers lung and pancreatic cancer, come on top of the melanoma results that have sent Moderna stock 3 times higher since August.

On the other side, Stock Advisor rec Novo Nordisk (NYSE:NVO) fell 7% Monday. It told investors growth through 2030 will match its peers, not beat them, although CEO Mike Doustdar said on Tuesday morning that it would look to M&A (mergers and acquisitions) to strengthen the drug pipeline.

Durability matters more than the pop: Moderna's rally already prices in blockbuster melanoma sales. The real test is whether the other nine trials, in lung, bladder, and kidney cancer, replicate that result. As for Novo, growth will match the industry average until one of the new drugs (or potential acquisitions) proves itself.
More potential on the horizon: Fool contributing analyst Rachel Warren discussed how the personalized mRNA cancer vaccine was a "historic win" for the Stock Advisor rec by Team Rule Breakers and Team Hidden Gems. From here, she notes, "if this therapy receives accelerated FDA approval, the next debate for the healthcare industry won't be just the science but the scaling and pricing," and that "this could move Moderna from a simple vaccine manufacturer to a key player in the world of precision oncology."

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4. Alibaba Unveils AI Chip to Rival Nvidia

Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) unveiled a new AI chip Tuesday, the Zhenwu V900. It links in clusters of up to 500,000 units and delivers triple the performance of its predecessor. Alibaba said it's training Qwen 4 now. Future versions will scale to 5 trillion to 10 trillion parameters, more than 4 times today's flagship model. CEO Eddie Wu also set a target of 20 gigawatts of data center capacity by 2032.

Homegrown silicon cuts Nvidia dependence: If Alibaba can credibly supply its own AI chips at scale, it reduces both its Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) dependence and its export-control exposure. It could also open a second profit pool in chips, alongside cloud.
Demand is the constraint, not supply: Wu said industry demand "far outpaces" Alibaba Cloud's capacity, the good kind of bottleneck for a company selling AI infrastructure. Alibaba's thesis: A bigger model plus homegrown chips lets it keep growing cloud revenue even if Nvidia hardware stays constrained.

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5. Rocket Lab: Escape Velocity

Team Hidden Gems hunts for good businesses the market overlooks, while Team Rule Breakers backs proven winners it already prizes. The two rarely agree on a stock the way they do on Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB). Our average cost basis across all Rocket Lab recommendations in Fooldom is near $68, a touch above where shares trade today. Rocket Lab now sits in eight portfolios across both teams.

A founder still at the helm: Sir Peter Beck started Rocket Lab in 2006 and turned it into one of the space economy's defining companies. He still runs it, and the results continue to pile up. New launch contracts last quarter pushed the company's order backlog to a record $2.36 billion.
Everything built in-house: Rocket Lab designs, builds, launches, and operates its own spacecraft under one roof. Both teams credit vertical integration for Rocket Lab's run of commercial and government wins. Neutron, the larger rocket that hasn't flown yet, should carry that production edge into bigger and more lucrative launches.

Rocket Lab remains an active buy across both Hidden Gems and Rule Breakers teams, with Hidden Gems recommending it twice in September alone. We believe the best decades are still ahead.

Team Hidden Gems has a five-year price prediction of $163.21.

Team Rule Breakers has a five-year price prediction of $123.

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6. Today's Question

Which two stocks do you think will outperform Shopify over the next five years, and why?

Discuss with friends and family, or become a member to hear what your fellow Fools are saying!