Four earnings reports did more for this market than four days of macro news. Nvidia, Salesforce, CrowdStrike and Okta between them rewrote a week that had been drifting on Iran sanctions and a sticky inflation print, and they did it in a single session. That is why we built Winvesta Crisps, to cut through the noise and tell you what actually moved markets and why. 60,000+ investors from all over India are already in. What about you?
🔔 Don't miss out!
Add winvestacrisps@substack.com to your email list so our updates never land in spam.
Going into Friday, the S&P 500 is up roughly 0.7% on the week, and almost all of it arrived in one session. On Thursday, technology was the only one of the S&P 500's sectors to finish higher, per TheStreet, while the index itself rose 0.72%. A week that spent three days worrying about Iran sanctions and a 3.3% inflation reading was bailed out by a chip company and three software firms.
And the week is not finished. Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote as Fed chair at 10am New York time on Friday, after this piece lands in your inbox.
📊 Market recap
The week told a story in three acts: a geopolitical threat that landed soft, an inflation print that stuck, and an earnings night that outvoted both.
Start with where things stand. The S&P 500 closed Thursday at 7,730.99, up 0.72% on the day, per CNBC. The Nasdaq Composite added 1.57% to 26,541.35 and the Dow rose about 105 points, or 0.2%, to 53,569.44. Measured against last Friday's close, that leaves the S&P in the low-7,700s and up under a per cent for the week, the Nasdaq in the mid-26,000s and up closer to 1.4%, and the Dow in the mid-53,000s with a gain of about half a per cent.
Monday was a chip problem. Treasury Secretary Bessent used an afternoon press conference to detail expanded sanctions on Iran and on any country doing business with it, warning that such countries would be "removed from the US dollar system," per Reuters. Semiconductors took it worst. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index fell 2.64% to a three-week low, with Micron down 5.76%, AMD off 3.49%, Nvidia down 2.03% and Broadcom lower by roughly 2%, per Reuters and Yahoo Finance. The S&P 500 slipped about 0.3%. What is telling is the second-order reaction: oil fell more than 3%, because traders read the sanctions package as sparing Iran's actual trading partners, per Benzinga. The threat was maximal in language and modest in substance.
Tuesday brought relief in bonds and carnage in retail. Treasury yields fell for a second straight session as crude kept sliding, per CNBC, and the S&P 500 edged up 0.32% to 7,677.28 while the Dow logged a third consecutive advance. Underneath that calm, Dick's Sporting Goods collapsed. The retailer cut full-year adjusted earnings guidance to $11 to $12 per share from $13.50 to $14.50, blaming fewer and weaker athletic footwear launches and a reversal at Foot Locker, which it now owns. The stock fell roughly 25% on the session, its worst day on record, per Benzinga and Fox Business. The damage spread by association: Nike fell about 3.3%, with Lululemon and On Holding lower on no news of their own, per Reuters.
Wednesday was the waiting room. July core PCE, the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, rose 0.2% on the month and 3.3% on the year, per CNBC. Nobody could call that a relief. The S&P 500 finished all but unchanged at 7,675.70, the Nasdaq slipped 0.08% to 26,130.20, and the Dow lost about 114 points to 53,463.88. Meta provided the day's other headline, agreeing in principle to settle the child safety case brought by a coalition of state attorneys general. Reported figures vary across outlets, running from roughly $12 billion upfront to a total in the tens of billions once contingent payments are counted. The stock popped around 4% and then gave most of it back once an expected multi-billion dollar charge was in the frame. Everything else was positioning for one number, due after the bell.
Thursday delivered it. Nvidia reported second-quarter revenue of about $96.2 billion and adjusted earnings of $2.22 per share, ahead of consensus on both, and guided third-quarter revenue to roughly $108 billion, above the Street, per CNBC and Investing.com. Jensen Huang's framing, per prepared remarks, was that the AI infrastructure buildout is running at full steam. The stock rose about 8.7%. Then the software names landed on top of it: Okta up nearly 29%, CrowdStrike up 20.5% for its best day on record, Salesforce up 10.4% on a beat, raised guidance and an expanded partnership with Anthropic, per CNBC. Marvell and Synopsys came along for the ride.
That is the whole week's gain, concentrated in a handful of tickers on a single afternoon. The market did not resolve anything this week. It found something else to buy.