After months of relentless momentum, gold finally hit the brakes.
Just yesterday, spot gold prices saw their sharpest single-day decline in over a decade—falling more than 6% after reaching a record high of $4,381 per ounce. For investors who’ve watched gold climb steadily throughout 2025, the sudden drop felt like a jolt. The question now is: was this just a breather, or the beginning of a broader retracement?
At GatherStocks, we tend to stick to traditional markets — stocks, commodities, macro trends. But every now and then, something in the crypto world makes enough noise that we can’t help but take a closer look.
This week, that something is Humanity Protocol.
What is Humanity Protocol?
Humanity Protocol is a Web3 identity project built around the idea of Proof of Humanity — a decentralized way to verify that users are real people, not bots or fake accounts. It’s part of a growing movement to bring trust and accountability to blockchain-based systems, especially in social platforms and financial apps.
Lately, I’ve been watching Navitas Semiconductor with growing curiosity. It’s not one of the flashy names dominating headlines, but something about its trajectory feels… different. The company specializes in gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) power chips—technologies that are quietly becoming essential to the backbone of AI infrastructure.
What caught my attention is Navitas’s involvement in next-gen server architecture. These chips aren’t just about making devices smaller or more efficient—they’re about enabling the kind of high-voltage, ultra-fast power delivery that modern AI data centers demand. As AI models grow more complex, the hardware supporting them needs to evolve too. Navitas seems to be right at that intersection.
The Momentum Behind the Stock
So here’s something you don’t see every day: Oracle — yes, the “steady, reliable, blue-chip” Oracle — just had its biggest one-day stock surge since 1992. The stock rocketed more than 40% in a single session, briefly topping $341 and pushing the company’s market cap close to a trillion dollars.
This is the same Oracle most people think of as a slow-and-steady enterprise software giant — suddenly acting like a Silicon Valley rocket ship.
UiPath ($PATH) trades on the NASDAQ and sits at the crossroads of automation and AI. It is an enterprise software company known for robotic process automation (RPA)—software “robots” that perform repetitive digital tasks across apps and systems. In plain English, it builds digital helpers that free humans from mundane, repetitive clicks.
But behind the buzzwords, how does this business actually perform? And is its stock showing signs of life—or just another false dawn?
The U.S. Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) report is one of the most influential economic indicators in global finance. A strong NFP print typically signals economic strength, often sparking a short-term rally in stocks. Investors interpret robust job growth as a sign of healthy consumer demand, business expansion, and overall resilience.
But the reaction isn’t always straightforward.
Stocks: A Mixed Reaction
While equities may initially spike on strong NFP data, those gains can quickly reverse if investors fear the Federal Reserve will respond with rate hikes to cool off inflation. This dynamic especially impacts growth stocks, which are sensitive to rising interest rates due to their reliance on future earnings.
For over three decades, the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) has served as the financial world’s emotional thermometer. Introduced in 1993 by the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the VIX was designed to measure the market’s expectations of volatility over the next 30 days, based on S&P 100 index options. In 2003, it was recalibrated to reflect broader market sentiment using S&P 500 options, making it more representative of overall market volatility.
Looking back at past cycles, gold’s historical rallies often signal deeper undercurrents in the macroeconomic landscape. What tends to spark interest in gold is when it stops feeling expensive to hold—especially compared to other assets. Since gold doesn’t yield interest or dividends, it becomes more attractive when interest rates are low—there’s simply less to lose by holding a non-yielding asset. But what really moves the needle isn’t just the rates—it’s what people think is coming next.
When it comes to seasonality in the stock market, September consistently stands out—and not in a good way. It’s historically the weakest month for equities, both in the U.S. and across global indices. Since 1926, the S&P 500 has averaged losses in September, making it the only month with a long-term negative return. That’s not coincidence—it’s a recurring pattern that investors have learned to respect.
IREN Ltd, formerly known as Iris Energy, was founded in Australia with a bold vision: to power Bitcoin mining using 100% renewable energy. The company built data centers optimized for high-performance computing, leveraging hydroelectric and wind power to reduce operational costs and environmental impact.
Initially focused on crypto mining, IREN mined over 728 BTC in July 2025 alone, maintaining profitability even during volatile market cycles.
