Hi! Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-down... After a buzzy market debut this week, Pinkfong, the entertainment company behind the viral “Baby Shark Dance,” declined 14% from its IPO price this morning — down 47% from Tuesday’s intraday high. Today we’re exploring:

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Visualizing why yesterday’s stock market reversal was so unnerving

Thursday’s stock market tape was one for the history books — and not in a good way.

While America’s flagship stock market index is technically only ~5% away from all-time highs, there’s a reason that yesterday’s price action felt so unnerving.

Mostly, it’s down to the fact that what many people expected to feel like a party that raged long into the night — Nvidia did everything right, blowing the lights out on earnings and answering its harshest critics — was shut down at 8 p.m. Then the house caught on fire.

We analyzed every single day of the S&P 500 Index since 2015 to see how many times the market has opened up more than 1%, before turning sharply red. It turns out only on 61 occasions out of 2,739 sessions did the market open up >1%.

Most of the time, stocks held onto their strong starts throughout the day to finish up, hence the majority of the dots in the chart above being blue. There are, however, two notable outliers, both of which landed this year. The first was on April 8th, when stocks endured a tariff-induced meltdown, and the other was yesterday, when stocks shed ~3% intraday.

In short, we’ve certainly had worse days, but very few sessions start so positively and end so negatively. Indeed, although Nvidia passed a pretty major test that was meant to see the AI trade come roaring back, at about 11 a.m. ET yesterday, the market decided it simply didn’t care.

Scroll through the interactive version of this chart here

As Harvard addresses grade inflation, there’s still no easy fix for easy A’s

It seems like almost every milestone has become more difficult to achieve lately, from buying a house, to getting a job, to securing a place at America’s most esteemed universities.

But while it’s become harder to get into colleges like Harvard — having reported a 3.63% admission rate for the Class of 2029, marking the fourth straight year the figure has dipped below 4% — it now appears to be easier to succeed once you’re actually there.

A’s of glory

Though the Ivy League has long wrestled with “grade inflation,” a recent report from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education has outlined just how extreme the issue has become at the 389-year-old institution.

According to the report, more than 60% of grades that Harvard undergraduates received in the 2024-25 academic year were A’s — compared with 40% a decade ago, and almost 25% in 2005. The rise corresponds with the median grade-point average at graduation hitting 3.83 for 2025, up from 3.05 in 1975, per figures from Harvard’s student newspaper and Gradeinflation.com.

While abnormally high grades could be interpreted as a reflection of serially high-performing cohorts, the acceleration in the share of A’s given despite a minimal change in hours spent studying, per the report, underscores the idea that Harvard’s evaluation system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading.”

Naturally, students were less than thrilled, decrying the report as “soul-crushing” in an article published in The Harvard Crimson last month. Indeed, stricter testing standards are often a tricky topic at top colleges, where students are already overachievers by any regular measure. 

As Harvard itself grapples with an uncertain future both politically and financially, anxious students may push back against harsher scoring as they too look ahead nervously across a landscape of higher career stakes and dimmer prospects.

Read the full story on the web instead

Institutions are increasing digital asset integration — and enterprise solutions are making it happen

A 2025 Institutional Investor Digital Assets Survey of 352 decision-makers at various firms reveals growing confidence towards cryptocurrencies and digital assets in 2025, with the majority planning to increase their digital asset allocations.¹

There are a few reasons for this momentum. A progressive regulatory environment. Growing institutional adoption. Also — importantly — a more developed infrastructure.

Widespread blockchain adoption relies on easy implementation and solutions for technical challenges, like managing keys and maintaining robust security and compliance. Ripple Custody, a software technology solution, allows complex institutions to manage these considerations without developing in-house infrastructure, meaning there’s less friction and lower costs associated with integrating blockchain.

Interested in how infrastructure is making it easy to adopt blockchain? Check out Ripple’s commuter-friendly Block Stars podcast, with industry expert David Schwartz. 

Clean energy investment hit a new record last quarter, mostly driven by EVs

The expiry of electric vehicle tax credits didn’t just do wonders for the sales figures of automakers like Tesla; it also contributed to the best quarter of clean energy investment ever in Q3 this year, per a new report.

According to new data from the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project from MIT and the Rhodium Group, clean energy investment across the US reached a record-breaking $75 billion last quarter, up 8% from the same period last year, as efforts to curb emissions continue.

Cleaning up

The monitor endeavors to track the entire supply chain, from industrial clean energy projects and zero-emissions factories, to consumers buying electric cars and solar panels to charge them. While there has been a growing wave of new investment in solar and wind projects, as well as a burgeoning manufacturing footprint focused on making batteries, solar equipment, and other clean tech products, the reality is that much of the boom was fueled simply by people buying EVs.

Indeed, retail made up the bulk of the spending tracked, with consumers alone investing $31.2 billion into zero-emission vehicles in the US in Q3, as people rushed to snap up EVs before Biden-era tax relief credits expired at the end of September. That means that zero-emission vehicles accounted for more than 40% of the record-breaking clean energy investment.

However promising the latest results, the third-quarter overall figure might be a record that’s unlikely to be broken any time soon, as Axios pointed out, given that other signals on how the clean energy industry is faring seem to suggest things are going in the other direction.

Read this on the web instead

An enormous 86% of institutional investors reported either current exposure to digital assets or plans to initiate allocations during 2025, according to Coinbase.² Get your global blockchain update from the Block Stars podcast.

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Off the charts: Which IT company was behind the biggest internet outage (at least since the one last month) earlier this week? [Answer below]. 

Answer here.

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